[MUD-Dev] Re: mud websites

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 10 Jun 1998 22:57:53 +0000 
Scatter <scatter at thevortex.com> wrote:

> I'm developing an LPmud using the MudOS driver. I worked for a while
> on a mud with what I considered to be a superb supporting website
> (if you're interested, it's at http://eclipse.cs.pdx.edu) and having
> found that website useful, I naturally wanted a similarly good
> supporting site. A chance visit to http://www.imaginary.com/~beek
> introduced me to "WWWlib" - a minimalistic HTTP 0.9 text/html
> webserver written in LPC for MudOS.

> Ding! Idea! Incorporate the webserver into the mud. 

This is, as you've found out, a fairly common idea that several
servers have adapted before you, typically supporting external exits
to generate publicly accessable web pages from the MUD server.

However a possibly more intersting take would be to use a fully
external database such as MySQL for your server, and then use standard 
CGI scripts to generate web pages from the contents of database.

This is actually kind of sexy.  Think about it.  You can play the
game, or you can be a disembodied ghost which is able to tour (almost)
the entire game via the web with very limited interaction abilities
(cf ChibaMOO, WebMOO and the Whimsey MUD engine
(URL:http://monet.uwaterloo.ca/janeli/monetwhimsy/start.htm)).
Additionally standard external scripts (there go them CGI's again) can
run queries across the DB and generate reports (game balance
administration anyone?).

<ponder>

Methinks I'm going to have to do this.  I have to teach myself SQL
anyways for the old career as well as for some bits I want to do with
Kanga.Nu (initially just a user-driven/reviewed library of MUD texts
and resources somewaht ala SlashDot/FreshMeat), so I might as well go
the whole hog.  I guess I'll find out how scalable MySQL really is.

BTW, for those interested in the Web Authoring side of things, a few
useful links:

  URL:http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/collections/design.html?tw=design
  URL:http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/98/24/index0a.html?tw=backend
  URL:http://www.cgi-resources.com/
  URL:http://www.wdvl.com/

> Something I could do is a web-based interface to allow you to even
> play the game - doubtful though. Probably what I would do is to find
> a free Java telnet applet and modify it to connect directly to the
> mud.

See ChibaMOO, WaxWeb, WebMOO, Whimsey, and several others I can't
think of now.

> Writing a HTTP 1.0 compliant webserver was fairly easy - a couple of
> hours work. It's less than 20k of LPC code. Since practically any
> mud server is going to have socket, telnet, network code already,
> would it take much more than that to place a webserver in any
> server. With this in mind and all the possibilities above, why
> wouldn't you want one? :)

I find the idea of making the MUD an expression of a DB which can also 
be expressed as HTML more attractive than having a MUD which can be
expressed as HTML, tho the semantics are similar.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...