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                          ANNOUNCEMENT OF GO WOLFMUD

This is the announcement I made to the WolfMUD discussion group on Sunday, 6th
May 2012 at 4:42pm about the rewrite of WolfMUD in Google's Go language:
______________________________________________________________________________

Hello to everybody still subscribed to this discussion group.

It has been a very long time since I last posted here and a long time since I
worked on WolfMUD. Many of you on this group may even have forgotten you were
subscribed, but I hope you had not forgotten about WolfMUD!

The reason for my posting is that I have an announcement to make.

I am once again working on WolfMUD. In fact I am rewriting it from scratch and
this time in Google's Go language: https://golang.org

I have always had a WolfMUD to work on and I've always used it as a learning
tool. Since I no longer have any involvement with Java, and have not for a
long time, continuing with the current WolfMUD was merely becoming tiresome. I
know this may be a blow to some of you - but there is some good news. I expect
to make one final release of the Java WolfMUD. The biggest change will be the
license it's released under. This last release will put WolfMUD under an Open
Source license - probably GPL but maybe MIT. Something I now realise I should
have done from the beginning :(

In the meantime work has already started on the new WolfMUD, although I don't
have any code to show anyone yet. However I do have a plan which I hope will
correct some of the errors and omissions from before.

  - The new WolfMUD will be released under an Open Source license from the
    very start.

  - The code will be much better documented to help other developers. Looking
    over the old code makes me cringe and Go has some nice documentation
    features I plan on using.

  - There will be unit testing for WolfMUD. How I ever wrote the old version
    without any formal way of testing changes I don't know.

  - The code will be managed using the GIT version control system. I have not
    decided if I will host on something like Google code, github or WolfMUD's
    main server yet. I hope others will hack on the code and use Git to feed
    me changes and ideas!

  - The minimum goal of a version 1 release is to reproduce the existing
    functionality of the last Java version of WolfMUD. This may take me a
    while as I am not merely translating Java into Go I'm rewriting with new
    ideas and ways of doing things and looking at the Java sources sparingly,
    see note on cringing above.

  - Let people see more of the development work that goes into creating a MUD
    codebase. This will be through releasing code and also keeping an online
    journal.


I am also working on a new website for WolfMUD, using my own tools and site
generator, which will fit nicely with a MUD's text only theme. I hope to have
the new site live soon.

In the meantime I would appreciate any comments and opinions from you all. To
give you some ideas:

  - If there are things in the old WolfMUD you loved and want to see kept

  - If there was something critical that was never implemented

  - If something was implemented badly


I hope for some people this will be an interesting opportunity - or excuse -
to take a look at Google's Go language and get involved with WolfMUD again.

WolfMUD is dead - long live WolfMUD!

Regards,
Andrew 'Diddymus' Rolfe
Creator of WolfMUD


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