On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Phillip Tran wrote: >On a positive side, there have been many helpful people on the list - >much more so now than before, which is surprising considering the amount >of things on the Internet that can lure talented people away from muds. For some people the development of the MUD is an exercise in building art through code. If we ever find the time to release CircleMUD 3.<final> then I'll have time to work on the not-so-mystery project I've been wanting to write all summer. So I don't think I'll be going anywhere for awhile. There's too many ideas that I want to try. Programming isn't just the means to an end; it is an important part all to itself. >This has lead to a proliferation of patches and bundles, to the point >that I think newbies are being spoilt a bit. "Those Linux distributions spoil people who should be building everything on their own from scratch." It's all a matter of opinion and viewpoint. It's one part "I had a tough time so you should too" and another part of not providing what people want in the first place. It has been exactly 8 years (as of yesterday) since the original release of CircleMUD in '93. Computers have changed in power dramatically since then. What was appropriate years ago (binary files) is no longer as desired. A new C standard has been released and new concepts come up. I realize some of the original design isn't so applicable today but the overall goal still applies. The definition of what constitutes a complete codebase has changed quite a bit since the introduction of games like Ultima Online. While we're obviously not going to implement something like that, or chance the existing CircleMUD drastically, we can do some minor modifications to the system to make it work better. Some examples might be using lex/yacc to parse the world files, ASCII files instead of binary, or using something other than an array to store the rooms themselves. None of which you'll see for CircleMUD 3.1 but perhaps for a more featureful, revised release sometime afterward. >We are developing a mud from scratch based on Visual Basic. (Why, when >.NET is coming soon!!) It requires a unique interface, however, it allows >pictures to be attached to each room (No, we are not doing a full blown >Everquest - we dont have time or money). And because we love CircleMUD so >much, it is compatible with existing zon/wld/obj files. When developing a MUD from scratch I don't think even I'd use the CircleMUD format natively. It might be able to read them, but it's not going to use them as the primary format. There are quite a few ways to make a more extensible format. Maybe more people should be helping WorldForge. Maybe something else is desired. I don't know, but I'll be considering it some day. -- George Greer greerga@circlemud.org -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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