[MUD-Dev] Fw: 16K mud server competition !

[Jon Leonard]

On Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 11:21:40PM -0400, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> Chris Gray wrote:
> >
> >Wow, that's not much space! I took a quick look at ToyMUD, to see if there
> >was any chance of doing simple changes to shrink it down. However, it
> >is 80K of code and 26K in the data file. I doubt I could shrink it to
> >16K without losing some major feature or two. The first step would be
> >one of those code obfuscators that removes whitespace and makes all
> >identifiers one or two characters.
> 
> Well spaces, tabs and comments don't count towards the limit.
> Yes, you could also get some mileage out of obfuscating keywords and 
> system functions with macros.  You could move all your locals into global 
> space, drop all static references, and share them very carefully. 
> 
> >16K is enough for a decent MUD, I think, but the result isn't going to
> >be anything you'd want to show to your mother! I think a more reasonable
> >size count would be one of those program complexity measures, so that
> >you could at least read the resulting source code.
> 
> 
> IIRC, DevMud was around 50k.  It might be under the limit sans whitespace 
> and comments.

I do happen to know how big it is:

wc of *.c and *.h files:
DevMUD Proto 5: 48468 bytes (last well-known release?)
DevMUD Proto 6: 75583 bytes (more recent)
DevMUD current dir: 86532 bytes (in transition)
http://slimy.com/~jleonard/src/ipc.html: 11434 bytes (trivial, working MUD)

Only the last is anywhere near the 18K limit, and none of these are
interesting games.  For comparison, the Zork I data file is 92160 bytes,
though gzip can shrink it to 61128.

There's just not enough room there for a really interesting game, maybe if
you cheated by moving some functionality to clients, abused libraries in
some manner, or managed to 'find' just the right interpreter...

It's an interesting challenge, but I don't think the minimum-space coding
styles are really all that useful in MUDs...

Jon Leonard



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