[MUD-Dev] Re: Current Projects

[Holly Sommer]

On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Alex Stewart wrote:

> 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? 

Current project:
Not pushing a technological envelope really, by any stretch of the 
imagination, but we ARE making a move to (for lack of a better word) 
convert what was, for 3.5+ years, a NiMUD (Diku derivitive) into a 
Lima-based MUD.

Specifically, utilities for converting between the Diku-esque "all in one 
area file" and the Lp "each thing has its own file" heirarchy. Nothing 
all that interesting to 95% of the folks here, but it's proven to be an 
enormous (if not, at times, challenging and frustrating) learning 
experience for me. I'm about 1/5th of the way through with the 
conversion, and have 152 lines of tasty perl code to show (*waves to JC*) 
for it.

> In particular:
>  * What kind of software are you working on? (MUD driver, MUD client, etc?)

I guess the answer to this would be "mudlib."

>  * Why?

Well, out of necessity. A hard drive meltdown left us with old area files 
that didn't agree with new code, and we were about to make a paradigm 
shift in some other direction about the time the HDD gave up the ghost, 
so it made sense to just go ahead and do it now.

The biggest challenge will be in training the old builders (accustomed to 
a very easy OLC) to learn LpC. This is a Big Task.

>  * What are its features?

At the risk of drawing snickers from folks, I personally am hoping to 
incorporate what I (at least) regard as the best of both worlds, into one 
game. I took it as a compliment that hardly anyone who had logged into 
the previous server could tell what codebase was running. Some guessed 
Lp, some guessed Smaug, etc. Having a game which is useable without 
screaming of one 'base or another is important to me, and I'm not sure why.

I'll name features later, as we get them implemented.

Hopefully, this isn't too mundane an answer to the question(s) posed :)

-Holly