From: "Eamonn A. Sweeney" <eamonnasweeney@EIRCOM.NET> > Forgive me if I seem totally stupid here. But what is the actual point of > circleMud? I think the admins of circlemud are doing a great job. I only want the core code to be as stable as possible. Would you believe I had patch8 that had an uptime of over 2 weeks even though I had 60+ players playing regularly? (I had to reboot because the players were getting upset that the unique objects wont load until a reboot) With a stable base code, any changes I add that causes instability can be tracked down much more easily, especially when I know that others on this list will notify everyone if they found a bug in the base code. > Most muds out in the wild so to speak either have totally rewritten the > areas and have added a few commands, rewritten the load messages etc. Most of those you are talking about are derivatives. I am quite sure someone who has worked on their version of circlemud for a long time has already released their "circlemud" for others to build upon. Shadowdale is a prime example of a Silly (am I correct here?) code derivative. > Ive seen the circle code evolve from bpl11 onwards but where does it stop? > All we have seen recently is more efficient ways of doing things but is the > codebase ever going to evolve? Why should every newbie coder have to > implement color codes, races, abrreviations, and just about every snippet > ever posted to the ftp site? > Why would I want someone else's interpretation of how races should be implemented? There are a thousand and one ways to implement races and other certain features, and imagine if you need to unbundle certain features because it just clashed with what you want to do? (eg. hey, I want to unbundle IE damn it!) Besides, not every snippet works with each other as well as it should. Having a feature packed code base will make it infinitely harder for newbie coders to understand the code - we are hearing alot of silly basic questions even with just the base code now! Why is it so hard to get this message across - You need to learn C to make changes to circlemud??? Buy, borrow, beg for a C book. > I came across a rom codebase once called firstmud and it was feature > packed, yet i doubt it had the stability of circleMud but it had what every > potential implementor wanted so do we settle for a codebase packed with > features or a stable codebase with which we have to work our butts of to > make it playable? And thats my point exactly - firstmud isnt stable. You try to debug that. Lets see if a newbie coder can debug an unstable mud. Did I mention debug - yes, you need to learn how to use some debugging tools too. Why? If you have a proficient player base, I can almost guarantee you that someone will find some bug and they will exploit it, and worse, they may even hold you to ransom (yes, they will crash your mud often, just for the sake of it, and you cant ban their address because they are playing on the uni computers and your player base has alot of players from that same uni. Oh, the memories are flooding back to me hahahahahha) PS: I do not use any snippets. Why? Because its hard enough to debug my own code and trying to understand what the snippets do and where all the additions are made, and THEN debugging it isnt my cup of tea thank you. Think of circlemud as a tool for you to build wonderful and wonderous things. And get a C book (and read it, of course), and learn to debug. -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | | Newbie List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/circle-newbies/ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 06/25/03 PDT