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