[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[Adam Wiggins]

On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> On 30 Sep 98, Nathan F Yospe wrote:
> > Which is to say, there can't be anything more than case switching without
> > a full scale simulation?
> 
> Even a full scale simulation is nothing more than case switching.
> No?

Always the devil's advocate, eh Jon? :)

This is an interesting take on things, however.  Consider a "simulation"
of my computer. Should be pretty straightforward given that the rules are
well defined and (obviously) easily simulated by another computer.

If you did a switch/case statement for all the possible states my computer
could be in, you'd have a lot of programming to do.  How many discrete
states are there for 128 megs of RAM?

No, I think it works much better the other way - store the value for each
location in RAM, and then operate on those values using fixed rules.  This
allows very open ended behavior with a much more reasonable amount of
code.

Doing a world is no different; if you build it out of simple, atomic parts
with well defined behaviors, switch statements are not necessary.  There
is a huge number of things the higher-level builders (in the case of a
computer, app writers; in the case of the mud, area writers) can do with
those building blocks.

Getting all those building blocks to work together in a logical and
consistent manner, while still giving the high-level builders enough power
to implement most behaviors that they desire, is quite a daunting task
indeed, and maybe (probably?) not worth it for the casual mud creator.
At least not yet, again my hope is that eventually tools like this will
become standard (just the same way they did for computers in general),
thus allowing creators to focus more on customization.

Adam W.