On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 03:27:03PM -0800, Chris Ward wrote:
[...]
> How many people would love to be able to
> download a fully modded Circlemud with all the bells and whistles ?, don't
> most of us want to have all those nice fancy toys on our mud for our users
> to enjoy and play with ? or am I completely wrong here and everyone likes
> having few features and having to wonder how to add all those cool things u
> see on other muds to your stock mudbase?
Personally, as a player, I like unique. Having been around and
played a variety of MUDs in the past 10+ years, things tend to look
the same after a while. I choose to modify Circle code (as opposed
to other codebases) as much for nostalgia as anything. That good old
DIKU feel. Arglebargle, glop-glyf!?! But when it comes to quirks of
the campaign world, I don't want the same old guilds, color noise,
equipment auctions or other crap (no offense) that seem to permeate.
> Myself I look at the circlemud base as a stable system, but its really
> plain, I often wish it came with a ton of built in features so newbie
> coders wouldn't have to bang their heads against the wall as often as they
> do trying to add simple things to the code that should probably be standard
> now, since every mud out there has them patched in already. Like OLC.&
> Dgscripts, pretty much every circlemud i've ever been on had both, it just
> makes life easier.
I do find OLC and in-game scripting useful, and therefore tend to
include them in whatever I do. Same goes for text-based storage of
most any persistent game data. These, however, are "behind the
scenes" features that aren't directly visible to mortals and
therefore don't contribute to the sort of stagnation I've witnessed
throughout today's MUD scene. If anything, they spur innovation for
non-coder staff and also allow you to move increasing amounts of
your game's featureset outside the more static core code.
> How many people would like to see some of the old snippets patched up to
> work for your 3.1 code ? how many times have newbie coders felt helpless
> when they went searching on the ftp site for documentation on how to add
> races, spells, skills and all that fun stuff and found only outdated or
> extremely vague information.
[...]
Other than big things (OasisOLC, DG Scripts, ASCII PFiles) that I
feel are implemented in a stable manner and don't wanna bother
reinventing the wheel, any other modifications I need I tend to do
on my own. Ocassionally I'll look at someone else's snippet or patch
for inspiration, but usually, with minimal programming skill and
enough imagination, sufficient examples for most anything abound in
stock code. You just have to get used to figuring out what parts of
stock are similar to things you want to implement and copy or expand
the relevant functions/structures.
A "vendor branch" style project could exist to provide a more
feature-rich CircleMUD-based variant which is periodically synced
with official Circle releases. But the extra features you add
(especially those which impact performance or change the "look and
feel" of DIKU/Circle) will probably result in an inverse proportion
for the number of coders willing to use it as a base for their
projects. Just my half-nybble.
--
{ IRL(Jeremy_Stanley); PGP(9E8DFF2E4F5995F8FEADDC5829ABF7441FB84657);
SMTP(fungi@yuggoth.org); IRC(fungi@irc.yuggoth.org#ccl); ICQ(114362511);
AIM(dreadazathoth); YAHOO(crawlingchaoslabs); FINGER(fungi@yuggoth.org);
MUD(Nergel@srmud.net:2325); WWW(http://fungi.yuggoth.org/); }
--
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| 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 : 06/26/03 PDT