[MUD-Dev] Re: Current Projects

[Wilburn]

Alex Stewart wrote:
>  * What kind of software are you working on? (MUD driver, MUD client,
etc?)

Currently I'm working on EmberMUD 0.9.34pre2.
<http://embermud.supernova.org/~embermud>  Ember has been in general
circulation for about three years now.  It's a very heavily modified ROM 2.3
with OLC, color and every other mundane feature every other mud has.  We
recently ported it to Win32 and tacked on a nice administrative GUI.
Progress for the last couple of years has been slow for two main reasons.
First, text muds are slowly dying (IMHO). Second, we realized quite a while
in that modifing a Diku derivative was a waste of our time and if we really
wanted to make a system that would do everything we wanted and do it cleanly
we'd have start off fresh (and preferably in C++).  The funny thing is the
whole project started with one of us just wanting to add color code to the
ROM codebase.  At the time we were amazed that MUDs weren't using ANSI color
hardly anywhere while ANSI color/graphics had been a BBS standard for over
10 years.

I'm also starting work on an online, multi-player space strategy game (in
the vein of Moo2 but with a game life of a few months to a year per game).

>  * Why?

Because coding is addictive.  There's really only one or two other things I
could do for twelve to sixteen hours straight and be surprised that more
than a couple hours have passed when I look at the clock.  Choosing games
was only logical because I'm also a very avid gamer.

>  * What are its features?
>  * What does it do (will it do) differently than other things do?
>  * Any neat concepts involved?

As for Ember the features are all really fairly plain right now.  When the
project first started there were quite a few things we had that no-one else
did but now we're pretty much run of the mill.  The only really interesting
thing in my opinion are room progs, object progs and room affects.  Room
progs and object progs being a direct descendant of mob progs.

>  * Any boring concepts being used in neat ways?

Not really.  We've considered several different things but it always comes
back to, "Why bother, we know we need to start a new base and this would
just be wasted effort".

-E.J. Wilburn
WilburnE at Kochind.com
zane at supernova.org