[MUD-Dev] Current Projects

[Alex Stewart]

Well, after having just said that I don't have any topics to start, I'm going
to go ahead and start one.. :)

I suppose this falls into the "documenting the current state of the field"
aspect of things.. I have noticed in the responses to the two recent "meta"
topics that there seem to be a fair number of people around here who are
actively working (or considering actively working) on developing new MUD or
MUD-related software, and there are at least several others interested in such
topics in general.  While there is some information on projects some of the
older, more active people have been working on in the FAQ that gets mailed out
every so often, I get the distinct impression that there are a lot of other
people (new people?) doing interesting things too who haven't made it into that
document, so, my question to the list:

What are your current projects?  For those of us out here pushing the
technological envelope (or just hacking around), what are we up to, anyway?

In particular:
 * What kind of software are you working on? (MUD driver, MUD client, etc?)
 * Why?
 * What are its features?
 * What does it do (will it do) differently than other things do?
 * Any neat concepts involved?
 * Any boring concepts being used in neat ways?
 (you get the idea.. anything big I'm leaving out?)

This question obvously applies more to the technological side of things, though
that's not to say that world builders shouldn't post too, if they feel so
inclined (particularly if there are neat/new concepts involved).  Obviously,
some people won't be able to answer in great detail for things which may be
under NDAs, but even a general description of what's going on in the field
would be interesting.

As for my answers to the above questions, I'm currently working on developing a
fifth-generation MUD/MUVE driver written in Java (currently codenamed Lithium)
designed to do all the things I've wished MOO and ColdMUD could do but can't,
and to be a testbed for several new concepts I've come up with, including a new
multiple-inheritance model, and a deadlock-free locking model for preemptive
multitasking.

Lithium will support a number of advanced features including preemptive
multitasking, application-neutral design, a role-based internal security model,
high on-disk database integrity and failure recovery, multiple internal
programming language support, and a full object-oriented programming
environment and DB-driver interface.

For a bit more information, as well as the beginnings of some explanations on
some of my design choices so far, you can look at:

  <URL: http://www.crl.com/~riche/lithium.html >

Note, however, that some (most) of this document is just quick sketching done
by me mainly to get my own thoughts in order and also to provide some minimal
basis for discussion with some other people I've been talking to.  It is rather
terse in spots and heavily geared towards those with faimilarity with MOO
and/or ColdMUD already, as that's who I've been dealing with for the most part.
Unfortunately there's not yet much documentation there on either of the most
interesting topics (the locking model or the MI model).. I hope to get some
info up there on those topics when I have time to actually write a decent
description of them.  For now, however, if people are interested, let me know
and I'll try to explain what I'm up to.

Any questions or comments are welcome, of course.  Don't bother asking when
it'll be done (or if it'll be done), tho, as right now I have no idea :)

Anyway, that's my pet project at the moment.  What's yours?

-R
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     Alex Stewart - riche at crl.com - Richelieu @ Diversity University MOO
                         http://www.crl.com/~riche
           "For the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky."