Up to Main Index                           Up to Journal for October, 2014

                    JOURNAL FOR TUESDAY 21ST OCTOBER, 2014
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: It's so crazy it might just work...
   DATE: Tue 21 Oct 20:42:59 BST 2014

I had an idea. I've since given it quite a bit of thought. I thought I'd share
my idea with you dear reader :)

What if you logged into WolfMUD and got a MUD shell. Just like logging into a
Telnet or SSH session on a Linux/Unix type system and getting a Bash shell.
Instead of navigating directory structures using 'cd' you navigated locations.
Instead of listing directory contents using 'ls' you used 'look' to see the
location contents. Instead of a monolithic executable commands like 'look',
'north', 'inv' and all of the other commands were separate executables?

I'm sure that writing individual commands would make development and testing
easier. From Doug McIlroy[1]:

  This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it
  well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text
  streams, because that is a universal interface.

So this would fit into the Unix philosophy well as well.

What other benefits could it have? Scripting for quests, events and general
creature behaviour could be very powerful. Modify the MUD in game or creating
things in game would become very easy, as would persistence of the MUD.

If you used SSH and setup a custom MUD shell you could throw out all of the
networking code. You could use normal user accounts and throw out most of the
account code. You could probably use the system's normal logging mechanism.
You would also get security, caching and other normal OS features for 'free'.

How about allowing access to a local only mail system in game? :)

The only thing I'm not sure about is concurrency between players and/or the
environment. I guess you could hold locks on the directories/locations like
WolfMUD currently holds location locks?

I think this idea and its approach is very intriguing and holds a lot of
interesting potential. Anyone else intrigued by this? diddymus@wolfmud.org

Also once the framework/conventions were in place any language could be used
to write additional commands and functionality ;)

Meanwhile back in the real world...

The code cleanup is going well and comments are being updated. Commits are
even being made in a logic progression. More news and hopefully an update
soon!

--
Diddymus

  [1] Inventor of Unix pipes.


  Up to Main Index                           Up to Journal for October, 2014