> hmm... not even close to distribution.. the release said it was buggy. > don't mean to be harsh, but mobprogs are just silly, they eat more CPU and > mem the SPEC's. the only thing they are good for is tempory solutions for > your builders until the coders can write the SPEC().... I think the SPEC > handling should be rewritten to take into account the different types of > proc's. > Mobprogs, and similar systems, do serve a good purpose. As you mentioned, they allow builders to write their own special procedures until a coder can get around to it. This might not be important to a mud with a large team of coders, but for one which has limited coding resources, or for one with new coders, this is a big advantage. They are potentially more stable than special procedures. My scripting system was designed with stability in mind... any script given to it should not be able to crash the game, even if it is complete garbage or designed with a malicious intent. Its trivial to prevent infinite recursion, something that can happen easily with C coded special procs which respond to actions. I'm sure there are bugs in my system, but its only one system to search through, not 100 different special procedures. (Mobprogs still have maturing to do to get to this state.) Systems like this also make it extremely easy to reuse code. I have a calculator (which handles add, sub, mult, div for integers) written in four lines, which i threw together in a couple minutes to test it out. (I support mob, room, and object specials). Imagine adding support for mobprogs to your OLC system. How many people write a special procedure for a one time quest, debug it, and reboot to use it? For mobprogs with OLC support, it would be trivial to write and debug one, and use it without rebooting. True, mobprogs do require more memory and eat more CPU than special procedures. But before you discount them as silly and a waste, consider their full potential. For many, they are well worth the little bit of extra system resources they consume. Eric Eric Green | "To Death Gate. 'Prepare ye the way.'" egreen@cypronet.com | Lord Xar
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