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                  JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 16TH SEPTEMBER, 2015
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Of other worlds, not my own
   DATE: Wed 16 Sep 21:11:23 BST 2015

Just about to settle into a few hours coding on WolfMUD and thought I'd better
write a journal entry first.

Weekend before last[1] I did manage a few extra hours with the code and even
managed a few more on the following Wednesday. Wonders will never cease...

In my last journal entry I said was chatting to someone via long, rambling,
somewhat delayed - no er... thoughtful emails with someone. Well, I think Josh
deserves a mention. Especially after reading everything on the WolfMUD
website: journal entries, history, the lot!

Josh is currently working on his own MUD - with a working title of wetdirt[2].
The core of the MUD is written in C and is a heavy rewrite of his own heavy
rewrite of Socketmud - a descendent of Merc, which is a descendant of DikuMUD.
The core contains the networking code, utility functions better implemented in
C for performance and hooks to Lua[3]. Lua is an embeddable, extensible,
scripting language which is used for scripting the MUD and for the world
definition language.

C and Lua? Well Josh was also interested in Go, especially it's concurrency,
and sort of stumbled over WolfMUD nearly kicking it out of the way. In Josh's
own words:


  "I went and looked around at how much of an issue the concurrency in Go
  might give me if I tried re-writing things there. I'd heard of WolfMUD, many
  times, while looking up various MUD engines before settling on writing my
  own, but I always scrolled right past when I ran into the word 'Java' that
  has grown to have such a negative tone to it these days."


Luckily - otherwise this would be a very short journal entry - he continues:


  "Then I ran into your history writeup, and your journal on re-working
  everything into go, and it swallowed a few hours of my evening already, even
  without making it over to poke at the code itself yet."


Being able to chat to people like this is very interesting. For example Josh
started by writing the networking code first, creating a working chat server
and then fleshing it out. Whereas I nearly always start with the world and a
working 'single user MUD' - or old school text adventure :) - and then add the
networking.

Apart for discussing each others implementations we've also been bouncing
ideas off each other for our MUD wish lists. For instance: weather, day and
night descriptive text and transitions, smarter and more interactive Mobs,
mini independent governing routines[4], world persistence, sharding. We also
discussed many other things not MUD related as we drifted off topic.

Lastly we discussed the current WolfMUD website and a few improvements that
could be made.

--
Diddymus

  [1] 5th and 6th September

  [2] wet dirt = mud, get it? ;)

  [3] LUA official site: https://www.lua.org/

  [4] The example I gave was from the Matrix Reloaded and the discussion of
      Neo with the Oracle about routines to govern the birds, watch over the
      trees, the winds, sunset and sunrise...


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