Subject: [DGD] Any advice?
From: dgd at list.imaginary.com (Stephen Schmidt)
Date: Mon May 19 23:15:01 2003

On Tue, 20 May 2003, Ben Chambers wrote:
> While the challenge is part of my reason for doing this, I also feel that
> coding it myself will allow me to have more flexibility in how it is
> implemented and what exactly I want it to do and how it does it.  For
> example, I'm sure that because Melville was written from scratch, it is more
> like what you originally intended than if you had changed your ideas in
> order to allow the mudlib to be built on top of the kernel.

In truth, probably not, for two reasons. First, the kernel mudlib
is, if you build over it correctly, highly transparent to the
end goals. In terms of functionality, the kernel strikes me as
extremely flexible (though I'm not very familiar with it) and
I doubt it misses any features I would consider important. In
terms of elegance, that might not be true - the kernel has
features that I personally don't anticipate that I'd ever use,
and if I built something for myself from scratch, I could get
something that did less than the present kernel does, but did
everything I wanted, in less space (but much more programmer
time, of course).

Second, Melville was always oriented towards being a real simple
mudlib that would be familiar to someone who coded on MudOS or
other post-LP-2.4.5 drivers, but would let you start to get
into the internals of how DGD worked. In 1994 I think it did
a decent job of that. Nowadays the driver has moved so far
beyond Melville that it doesn't anymore. Today it's main
purpose is to give a familiar mudlib to someone who wants to
code more or less the same way they did in 1994 (which is
perhaps a dumb goal - why use DGD if you're not going to take
advantage of its power? - but the evidence shows that there
is a small but reliable market for it.) Both of those goals
could be carried out equally well in a mudlib that ran over
the kernel, and the "intro to DGD" one could, of course, be
carried out much better that way. Today I would guess that
Phantasmal, which does run over the kernel, is the right way
to go for someone relatively inexperienced in game design who
is interested in learning how to hack DGD. (Disclaimer: I know
Phantasmal only from discussion on this group, I may be totally
wrong about that.)

Steve