[MUD-Dev] Re: PDMud, Gamora and Casbah

[Jon Leonard]

On Sat, Oct 24, 1998 at 07:19:46AM +0200, Niklas Elmqvist wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Bruce Mitchener, Jr. wrote:
> > Has anyone looked at Gamora, http://php.indiana.edu/~scgmille/gamora.html or
> > possibly Casbah, http://www.ntlug.org/casbah/ ?  Both of them have some
> > ideas or features that may be interesting for those working on PDMud.
> 
> Took a quick look at it, and at least Gamora looks *very* close to what
> *I* envision for PDMud. It uses a Bus architecture for passing messages
> around and plugin objects which are handled by different threads, one for
> each plugin. Still, what I personally envision for PDMud seems to be
> different from what most people want from it. Fair enough; I am not going
> to play difficult :) 
> 
> (Small voice: I still want to do it O-O. Wanto! Wanto!!! :)

Those look like reasonable architectures, albiet ones that are fairly far
from the design I envisioned.  It may be that we can't all agree on an
architecture (or implementation language, or mudlib, or...) and the
project will have to fragment at some point.

Some amount of fragmentation is good:  We certainly don't want all MUDs to
be identical.  The real question is where does DevMUD development fragment:

Implementation language?
Module format?
Module connection architecture?
Modules used?
In-game language?
Mudlib?
Only in gameworld details after install?

What I'm trying to find is an architecture acceptable to a reasonably large
number of developers (including me!), so that we can more quickly build our
ideal MUDs.  If there are people who don't like that design, and they form 
an alternate development team, that's great.  We'd wind up with more good
examples of MUDs, and it's still less total effort expended than without
collaboration.

I'd be shocked if we all used the same collection of modules, and if we
fragment before that, at least we can still port code back and forth.

So by all means, describe your ideal design.  You may yet convince a design
team, and the rest of us probably want to see it anyway.

Jon Leonard