[MUD-Dev] Re: Bruce Sterling on Virtual Community goals

[Marc Hernandez]

On Wed, 21 Oct 1998, Joel Kelso wrote:

}What specifications are people interested in ?  A personal feature list for a
}MUD, in
}rough order of priority:

}    *    persistent object store and network accessability (obviously)

	Assuming modules can bind C functions network accessability doesnt
necesarily have to be in the VM at all.  (I dont think I said that right) 

}    *    text-based network interface for a "player" class of user (at least)

	Im personally interested in it as a base for a graphical mud.
Thus it would be nice if this type of functionality could be at least
#ifdefed out.  Also 'player' might mean very different things to different
people. 

}    *    programming language and tools for building large, complex and
}        dynamic virtual worlds

	Hmmm.  A default language should be provided but the VM doesnt
need to know about it.  

}    *    dynamic programming and world-building environment (ie ability to
}        add and modify functionality without taking down server)

	For sure. 

}    *    ability to communicate objects between servers
}    *    portable source code
}    *    scalability onto future hardware
}    *    distributed database/processing for multiple-machine servers

	These would be very nice.  Just ... VM code(?) migration would be
nice (the VM might not know or care about 'objects' just sections of code
and sections of data.)
Perhaps also
    *	Remote procedure calls.
    *   Low level security (perhaps by 'process' or something)

	Some of this is beginning to sound like Java.  Im not jumping on
the Java bandwagon (in general) but much of these specifications could fit
in with java.  With a good set of base classes most if not all of this
could be done.  There are at least 2 free Java ByteCode interpreters
available.  I believe they have the beginning of a system to migrate
objects, it is fairly portable, as well as fairly scaleable.  It also has
large sets of tools.  You can dynamically change compile and load in java
classes (this is what my compiler professor said, I havent tried it).  
	There is also the Cold project.  Im not sure about some of its
features but it has or will have many of these.  Im also not sure about
its license.
	That said, personally I would like to create my own, or work on
one from the ground up.  Im currently in a compiler class so all this is
being hashed over.  I just wanted to point out there are other things of
this type out there and looking at what has been done can help out.  
	You can also compile many languages to java byte code then use an
assembler to get the .class file (which is one of our options for the
class,  other options include SunSparc MIPS assembly and possibly
pentium assembly).
	I also dislike Pythons whitespace requirements (and it looked like
such a nice language).  


Marc Hernandez		marc at eisoftware.com
Programmer		www.eisoftware.com