[MUD-Dev] Object and class heirarchies -- are they really necessary?

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2000 10:13:56 +1000 
Kevin Littlejohn <darius at connect.com.au> wrote:

> In the development cycle, it saves a lot of time - being able to
> throw some changes in, get people to comment, tweak them slightly,
> repeat until happy...  without a complete restart cycle.  It's
> nice.

Given a development environment and methodology which allows such
changes to be easily tracked as atomic units, and then easily
propogated between world instances this really isn't that much of a
concern.

  -- Get neat idea.

  -- Log onto test server.

  -- Implement idea.

  -- Play test with (un)willing victims.

  -- Tweak.

  -- Package up the changeset for the feature.

  -- Import changeset for feature into primary game.

  -- Repeat.

I've been rather surprised that none of the user programmable
servers or worlds have implement proper change control for their
internal objects and code.  I'm not talking running
RcS/CVS/BK/whatever on the server sources -- I mean actually
internallt to the game on the code and objects written in the games
softcode, as they are created, edited and programmed inside the game
itself.  It really isn't difficult to do and the potential rewards
are enourmous, especially if you make the logging automatic (cf the
VAX/VMS filesystem).  To do the above you'd need basic
reproducability/timesafe guarantees ala

  http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/docs/SCM.immutability.ps

so that the changesets would import cleanly with all dependencies
met, but that's not an impossible task and there's existent example
code out there (Aegis and (next couple days) BitKeeper) for the
relevent (admittedly non-trivial) graph theory.

FWIW: Larry McVoy (BK author) is keen to see BK used as an embedded
tool FWIW and has been conciously re-writing some of the APIs and
access points to make it easier to embed.  I could easily see having 
an external DB (ala MySQL, SOLID, (g/n/*)dbm, whatever) with the
edit interfaces running thru BK for all object code changes...

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder at kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...


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