[MUD-Dev] Small scale commercial text MUDs

[John W Pierce]

Frank Crowell

> John, if you are talking about that fact that just about anyone can
> be a programmer.... Both LambdaMOO and Cold can restrict that so
> from a game point-of-view, a user has no access to any
> programming....

My original statement wasn't really fair to either Cold or LambdaMOO,
as that's mostly what I meant. I'm aware that both can restrict it;
it's the fact that it *can* be (easily) allowed that's always made me
nervous. I'm also aware that you can create in-game programming
mechanisms for an LP-based system if you're so inclined (and, in my
opinion, foolish).

> My suggestion is to take one of those two and work from there....

If I actually had to start from scratch, and didn't have a lot of LPC
experience, then Cold would be my choice, unless, perhaps, the price
of DGD was a great deal lower. In my opinion, DGD and Cold are the
best engines I know of, though for a "Tiny-like" MUD, I'd at least
make an effort to use UberMUD - Ranum's work was excellent and it's a
shame it went mostly unused.

However, I'm not starting from scratch, I'm using Pike, so all of the
hard parts of a driver exist (except persistence). Pike is essentially
LPC reimplemented, modified and extended. I've been mucking with LP
since mid-1990, and using Pike allows me to salvage driver and mudlib
experience, ideas, and code (you could probably translate the 2.4.5
mudlib to Pike in a couple of months).

Calling what I'm doing a "driver" is something of a misnomer. It's
really closer to DGD's master object, or the $root/$system stuff in
Cold (I think that's right - it's been two or three years since I
looked at Cold). And I've been down this path before with both DGD and
Pike (and MudOS to a degree). so I'm well beyond second system effect
- to which MUD design is at least as vulnerable as is OS design.

-- John W Pierce, R2 Systems, San Diego
   jwp at r2systems.com


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev