[MUD-Dev] Custom Server Roll Call?

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 05:29 PM 5/13/99 +0100, I personally witnessed Ling jumping up to say:
>
>Gosh, what am I doing listed amongst JC, Caliban and Yospe?!?!  

AGH! What am I doing in the middle of that?! Those people are PHYSICISTS!
Run away! Run away! ;)

>The way I see it, I don't want to waste time working
>on the low-level tasks like multiplexing sockets.  I wanna work on the
>game, not the application!

One of the things I'm thinking about doing at this point is taking the
baseline driver I've got so far, which is nothing too fancy but contains
all the very basic elements of a MUD -- monolithic server, handles a stack
of simultaneous sockets, and maintains I/O buffers and time-online for all
connected players -- and cleaning it up with a few more comments so I can
write up a basic "how to write a MUD" web site. 

Basically, my thought process is that I've spent *months* putting
everything together for this... I had some very naive previous designs, and
some efforts which went nowhere, and really it was the major barrier in my
path. It wasn't so much that I couldn't find information on it as being
unable to pick through the voluminous documentation and toss all the excise
out; everything looked important. 

Last night, I spent about six hours working out the "right" way to get the
dynamic IP address from a modem on the local machine. All the UNIX methods
were telling me my IP address was 127.0.0.1 and my hostname was
"localhost". The final method I used came out of the Winsock FAQ, but the
information in the Winsock FAQ was *wrong* and needed to be corrected. This
was a lot of time. (Plus the final solution is Winsock-2-specific and won't
work on UNIX, so I need to put some notes around that area and remind
myself to fix that when I do the UNIX port.)

And like Ling says, I don't want to write network code! I want to write a
GAME! ;)

So what I was figuring was, why not take all of this backwork I've "wasted"
a lot of good development time on, and put it out there so other people who
write games will be able to use it? That way, even though *I* had to spend
all that time figuring out what was important and what wasn't, a bunch of
other people won't have to. That will let them concentrate more on the game
part, and less on the network part. Keeping it ANSI C, in turn, makes it
much more flexible. 

Remember in the DOS programming days, you could get all these
communications libraries? Greenleaf is the only one that I can actually
remember, but what ever happened to all of those? And remember FOSSIL
drivers? Why don't we have a nice simple interface like that, an API that
we can just use and not worry about how it works?

Berkeley sockets? Where's my "getlocaladdr()" function? How hard is that? ;)

>However, I've found myself losing interest in muds, mainly coz it is
>something I don't see myself playing in the future.  

Having just mailed a stack of money to a game author for development
rights, I have a bit more incentive. ;)

>I'll be more likely to have a fiddle with a PBeM game.

One of my "major enhancements" to the game I'm porting is teaching it to
speak SMTP. Trivial -- I've written several mail clients -- but what a leap
in operational capacity. Most MUDs will delete your character if you don't
log on in several days. I'd like to be warned first; like three days prior
to deletion. I'd also like to be informed when the character *is* deleted.
And from a purely selfish like the idea of getting my character's in-game
mail right here at my machine. Maybe I wasn't planning on logging in
tonight, but then someone sends me mail which would get me interested in
showing up -- like "hey, party in sector 143!" -- and I don't see it until
three days later when I finally log in. If I'd gotten that mail when it was
sent, I'd be more likely to log in. There's a lot of potential here. I
think the only server which currently speaks SMTP is PennMUSH, and even
then it only does character registration... so this seems like a great concept.

But where it relates to the PBeM game is, if my MUD speaks SMTP, I could
also theoretically teach it to speak POP3. Then I could allow players to
email scripts to the server, and have the "results" mailed back. While this
would be dangerous (who knows what will happen unexpectedly while your
script is running), it would allow people who are out of the area for a
while to just email a simple script to the game and later retrieve a status
report from their mail account. 

Has anyone else considered such a scheme? Did you pursue it? What were the
results?

-----
| 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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