[MUD-Dev] Re: mud websites

[Scatter]

J C Lawrence <claw at under.engr.sgi.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Jun 1998 22:57:53 +0000
> Scatter <scatter at thevortex.com> wrote:

>> 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.

It is more common than I thought. I think I'm going to have to
drop my original plans to generate the entire website this way
though. I don't want the mud server to wind up spending most of
its CPU and RAM serving web pages - especially since I'm probably 
going to end up paying hard cash for a server and thus have
strict resource usage limits.

>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.

There are interesting possibilities there but it would be no good
for me. I'm on that fully programmable bandwagon that someone else
mentioned - the reason I chose LPMud is to have the ability to
change an object's attributes and methods on the fly.

I prefer a system where instead of just giving builders a set of
predefined blocks to use, I can also allow builders to create their
own blocks.

>Additionally standard external scripts (there go them CGI's again) can
>run queries across the DB and generate reports (game balance
>administration anyone?).

I'm intending some sort of "monitor" daemon to handle this sort of
thing. Relevant game events would be logged by the monitor and
thus helpful reports and stats could be generated from the logged
data. No reason why they couldn't go to the inbuilt website either. :)
Of course there wouldn't be the flexibility you'd have with a DB
where you can dream up weird and wonderful SQL queries to find out
whatever you want.

> 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.

This of course depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to
simulate a detailed world then a database that can be translated
into a mud or translated into web pages or anything else 
might well be very good. My goal is to provide a role-play
oriented mud with an improved interface for those things that 
line-by-line telnet is bad at... 

--
Scatter ///\oo/\\\