[MUD-Dev] Custom Server Roll Call?

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 08:42 PM 5/6/99 +0200, I personally witnessed Emil Eifrem jumping up to say:
>
>Technically, our server design is heavily inspired by general discussions
>here on the MUD-Dev and particularly DevMUD list -- we use a modular
>architecture with separate code entities (modules) that can be dynamically
>attached and detached from a static kernel. 

Hey, cool. That was one of the first causes I championed on MUD-Dev; good
to see someone out there is actually trying it. I still think it's a good
idea. ;)

>Lately I've beginning to doubt this modular approach. It sounds very good
>in concept and on an abstract level, but when you get down to some real
>code it's partly really messy and troublesome.

This is the conclusion I came to when I got deep enough into the design
phase, so I backed off a little and started reexamining my goals. After
several months of soul-searching and writing small bits and pieces of code,
I came to understand that I really didn't *want* a whole new game... I
wanted a game I used to play on my BBS to work over the internet. 

So I tracked down the author, and I sent him the first of a much too long
series of much too large checks last week, and actually got the first part
of the port finished -- the "maintenance" utility now compiles cleanly
*and* works under Windows. 

However, the coding standards are just not... well, not up to *my*
standards. While no coding standard can be said to be specifically "right",
I do think certain heinous crimes of logic can be called WRONG:

	typedef 
	struct begin
	int HANDLE;
	end HANDLE; 
	...
	HANDLE * Handle, handle; 
	...
	handle.HANDLE=NULL; 
	Handle=&handle; 
	somefunc(Handle->HANDLE);

Try making sense of THAT. It's a godawful nightmare. (Can you tell this was
C written by a reluctant Pascal programmer? *shudder*) I traced through
seven thousand lines of it this weekend, cleaning up about 48K of the 1.7MB
of source. I am seriously dreading the rest of this job. Priority one is
reformatting the header files and renaming the variables; priority two is
to get all the damn pollution out of the global namespace; then I can
actually start the *real* porting work.

>You'd all probably laugh anyway. ;)

I'm porting a DOS game to a Windows/Linux codebase. I don't think I have
room to laugh at anyone; this is nothing short of insane. It's worse than
maintaining COBOL. ;)

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
| U L T I M A T E   U N I V E R S E   I S   N O T   D E A D 
| 774577496C6C6E457645727355626D4974H       -=CABAL::3146=- 


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