Hiya, I have been thinking about a design for the OLC I will eventually put into me mud, and I wanted to get some opinions. The two ways I have seen/ heard of doing it are a) a menu driven interface, where the builder is not in the state CON_PLAYING but in a state similar to the ones at the menu, etc. In this case, you are not in the game when building, and I would have to code in a whole slew of CON_states for all the different states you could be in for OLC. This would make for easy OLC, and I could use it to make a separate, offline editor with the exact same interface, that could be run on builders' home computers. (An optional extension to this is to start the process with a question and answer session where the mud prompts the builder for various base stats of the mob, and then they are presented with the menu to fine tune or make adjustments.) Bad points? They are not in the game and can not ask questions, look at objects, or just shoot the shit with the other builders (which is a key aspect of enjoying building a mud!). The second way is to use commands such as medit, oedit, etc. Every facet of building an object would be some subcommand of the oedit command, and the builder is in the game, playing, whatever, and uses the command at his convenience. I kinda like this method a lot more, it seems like it would make building more fun, but less productive. It doesn't seem like it would be as fast as the menu method, and since I couldn't have a series of questions and answers, its possible that they could forget to set something, whatever. (I could probably put in safeguards for that, though.) Does anyone have any suggestions or experience for what makes a successful, appealing OLC? On to the next topic.. since my world will be built from scratch, and since I'm changing so much stuff anyways, I have considered storing the world files in binary format, so that the only way to make/edit them is through a front end program I design (like the menu thing I mentioned above). But if all the world files are in binary, can they be made portable somehow? Can I give my builders a DOS version of the offline editor that will save binaries and then expect to read them in to the mud running on Linux? Or is there a way to convert them? advantages of binary format: faster bootup, perhaps easier to deal with coding for writing them in OLC, keeps them proprietary (if I want all my world files to be used only on my mud...) disadvantages: that portability issue, can only edit them with editing programs, they're proprietary so they can't be used on any other mud... Any other advantages or disadvantages? And for my last topic, (sorry for this lengthy message), there are suspicions among some people that the National Security Agency scans all email in the U.S. on a grand scale for subversive ideas. That sucks. To undermine these efforts, the creator of Emacs (Richard Stallman) has added a command for emacs that you may wish to use. The command is M-x spook and it inserts a list of incendiary words into your messages. The more people who use methods such as this (PGP is another good example), the more difficult it will be for the government to monitor and control us. On that note, I leave you with a sample of the M-x spook feature... have a nice day. Ortega FSF North Korea terrorist Marxist Khaddafi Ft. Bragg PLO CIA cryptographic Waco, Texas Serbian [Hello to all my fans in domestic surveillance] plutonium Honduras
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