[MUD-Dev] Re: PDMud thread summary

[Jon Leonard]

On Thu, Oct 22, 1998 at 09:27:29PM -0600, Chris Gray wrote:
> [Joachim Pileborg (The Arrow):]
> 
>  >However, among all the buzz-words and efficiency talk, there is one word I
>  >miss:  simplicity.  Personally I think this project first of all should be
>  >simple, and efficiency and modularization should come after that.  At leas
>  >it should be so if we want this, I don't know waht to call it, "creation" ;)
>  >to spread outside the little circle this list really is.
> 
> Wise words. A lot of the talk flying around certainly has the smell of
> complexity attached to it. That is often an unfortunate consequence of
> "design by comittee". I too would advise trying very hard to keep things
> simple at the early stages - complexity will creep in all too quickly,
> despite any attempts to stamp it out.

I think modularization is up there with simplicity.  For utter simplicity,
try my example server from http://www.slimy.com/~jleonard/src/ipc.html.
It's not useful for anything but stealing socket code, since the (hardcoded)
only two commands are "say" and "quit".

This weekend I'm going to try to port it to a module-based design, to
see how simple a working module protocol I can make.  If DevMUD uses a
different protocol, that's fine -- I'll understand better for having tried.

My secondary reason for wanting modules is simplicity, in that it allows
someone to pick out a few small modules and have a working MUD.  Complexity
will happen with some of the modules, but I do want some code suitable for
starting to learn about MUD coding.

(The primary reason is that otherwise we'd never agree on what to build.)

Jon Leonard