Re: Ruby as a MUD language


On Dec 15, 2005, at 2:00 AM, Garance A Drosehn wrote:

On 12/13/05, malcolm.ryan@xxxxxxxxx <malcolm.ryan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm thinking about building a new MUD server (for those who are less
ancient than I, think "MUD == text only MMORPG"). I'd like to allow
players to build and program objects in the world, but I'd rather avoid
having to write my own programming language. I was wondering whether an
existing scripting language like Ruby might be useable? 

If you are hoping to create a MUD with some object-oriented language,
then the result would probably be called a "MOO".

Building an entire MOO from scratch is going to be a lot of work,
particularly if you want it to be reliable in all the little-boring- details,
such as handling many simultaneous network connections (some of
which will be going haywire...), and not having some tiny memory
leak which turns into gigabytes of wasted memory after the MOO
has been up-and-running for 10 weeks straight. You'll also probably
want some notion of access-levels, such that users can modify the
objects they create, but they don't modify the objects which
implement the login-sequence to your virtual world.

You might want to start with some already existing MOO, like the
LambdaMOO project at sourceforge, and then change that such
that the language is more ruby-like.  Of course, that would also be
a project that requires a lot of work!

Some friends and I use a slightly-modified version of LambdaMOO
for a chat-system we wrote, and it handles many of the details that
we probably never would have done right.  And even *with* all that
work done, there is plenty of work in defining our actual "virtual
world" that we never get around to everything we'd like to do.

There are many things I like about LambdaMOO, but certainly I
would like it more if the language "looked and felt" more like ruby!

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =             drosihn@xxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA



As far as handling all the connection garbage, the FaerieMUD guys have this to offer:
http://www.deveiate.org/projects/MUES



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