January 1999
- From DevMud: Database module Greg Connor
- From DevMud: Database module Mik Clarke
- From DevMud: Database module Greg Connor
- From DevMud: Database module J C Lawrence
- From DevMud: Database module Greg Connor
- ADMIN: Resends and possible duplicates J C Lawrence
- Info about different skill systems Emil Eifrem
- Info about different skill systems Nathan F Yospe
- Info about different skill systems Ben Greear
- Info about different skill systems Emil Eifrem
- Info about different skill systems Ben Greear
- Info about different skill systems Emil Eifrem
- Info about different skill systems Nathan F Yospe
- Info about different skill systems Travis S. Casey
- Info about different skill systems Mik Clarke
- New features for ScryMUD (Player-run Shops) Ben Greear
- [OT Humor] Mudder's Rhapsody Jon A. Lambert
- [OT Humor] Mudder's Rhapsody Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- [OT Humor] Mudder's Rhapsody The Wildman
- Guild/skill/spell relation (or "webs") Petri Virkkula
- Guild/skill/spell relation (or "webs") David Bennett
- mobile movement Matthew Mihaly
- mobile movement Adam Wiggins
- mobile movement Koster, Raph
- mobile movement Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- mobile movement David Bennett
- mobile movement Kylotan
- mobile movement quzah [softhome]
- mobile movement Ling
- mobile movement J C Lawrence
- mobile movement Oliver Jowett
- mobile movement Oliver Jowett
- mobile movement Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- mobile movement Richard Woolcock
- mobile movement J C Lawrence
- mobile movement Ling
- mobile movement Marc Hernandez
- mobile movement J C Lawrence
- mobile movement Ling
- mobile movement Holly Sommer
- mobile movement Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- mobile movement Koster, Raph
- mobile movement Chris Gray
- Intelligent WebGlimpse archive searching at Kanga.Nu (was J C Lawrence
- [RRE]MediaMOO annual birthday symposia: 1/20 Bruce Mitchener, Jr.
- [RRE]MediaMOO annual birthday symposia: 1/20 Koster, Raph
- OT: Mike Sellers needs some help load testing J C Lawrence
- Keegan's MUD Tree J C Lawrence
- Intelligent WebGlimpse archive searching at Kanga.Nu Marian Griffith
- Intelligent WebGlimpse archive searching at Kanga.Nu Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Intelligent WebGlimpse archive searching at Kanga.Nu Dominic J. Eidson
- Intelligent WebGlimpse archive searching at Kanga.Nu J C Lawrence
- Intelligent WebGlimpse archive searching at Kanga.Nu Marian Griffith
- GRASS GIS Web Site Elis Pomales
- Thoughts Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- mobile movement (the fault of tracking) quzah [softhome]
- ADMIN Name server problems and upes J C Lawrence
- Adjective Server Christopher Allen
- Reputations, More Mazes Eli Stevens {KiZurich}
- Reputations, More Mazes J C Lawrence
- Reputations, More Mazes Eli Stevens {KiZurich}
- Mules (was something different) Marian Griffith
- Mules (was something different) J C Lawrence
- Mules (was something different) Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Levels versus Skills Marian Griffith
- Levels versus Skills Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Levels versus Skills J C Lawrence
- Levels versus Skills quzah [softhome]
- Levels versus Skills Vladimir Prelovac
- Levels versus Skills quzah [softhome]
- Levels versus Skills J C Lawrence
- Levels versus Skills Petri Virkkula
- Levels versus Skills J C Lawrence
- Levels versus Skills Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- From Devmud: Database module, draft 3 Greg Connor
- Matrix Game Ling
- Graphic design doc Thinus Barnard
- Graphic design doc Chris Gray
- ADMIN: List server and Kanga.Nu host changes J C Lawrence
- ADMIN: List server and Kanga.Nu host changes Koster, Raph
- Sockets and fibers Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Sockets and fibers Adam J. Thornton
- Sockets and fibers Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Sockets and fibers J C Lawrence
- Sockets and fibers Jon A. Lambert
- Sockets and fibers Adam J. Thornton
- Sockets and fibers Dr. Cat
- Sockets and fibers Jo Dillon
- [DevMUD] From Devmud: Database module, draft 3 Greg Connor
- META: list "peerage" Koster, Raph
- META: list "peerage" John Bertoglio
- META: list "peerage" diablo@best.com
- META: list "peerage" Andy Cink
- META: list "peerage" Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- META: list "peerage" Quzah [softhome]
- META: list "peerage" Michael.Willey@abnamro.com
- META: list "peerage" Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- META: list "peerage" Holly Sommer
- META: list "peerage" Travis S. Casey
- META: list "peerage" Andy Cink
- META: list "peerage" Quzah [softhome]
- META: list "peerage" Matthew D. Fuller
- META: list "peerage" Laurel Fan
- META: list "peerage" Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- META: list "peerage" David Bennett
- META: list "peerage" Bruce Mitchener, Jr.
- META: list "peerage" diablo@best.com
- META: list "peerage" Matthew D. Fuller
- META: list "peerage" Caliban Tiresias Darklock
On 07:15 PM 1/26/99 -0600, I personally witnessed Matthew D. Fuller jumping
up to say:
>On Tue, Jan 26, 1999 at 10:11:44AM -0800, a little birdie told me
>that Caliban Tiresias Darklock remarked
>>
>> Now I look at Windows and go hey, this is precisely what I hated
>> about the Mac, and precisely why I didn't buy one, and now I have it anyway.
>
>Note that I don't ;)
Some of us get paid to build things your average Joe will use, like, and
pay for (not necessarily in that order.) ;)
>But the shallower the curve
>is, the more people you'll get that jump in on the low end and never even
>CONSIDER going beyond it.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm on that shallow end of Visual
Basic, myself; I know enough not to embarrass myself, and that's all I care
to learn. If I need to know more than that, I'm going to start making noise
about working in a "real" language. (If working in another language isn't
an option, then I'll climb as high as I need to and stop.) There are plenty
of people out there who don't NEED to write database-driven web sites with
DHTML and loads of server-side script. Why should they learn to do it?
Not everyone who runs a MUD wants to advance the state of the art; and as
much as many of us might detest the idea of BEING followers, you have to
admit that without any of them at all -- the process of leading becomes
rather pointless.
>Some sort of middle ground is necessary, but you'll never get
>any two people to agree on where it is ;) (especially me, I'm really
>stubborn)
I keep saying over and over in thousands of ways that the human mind cannot
really grasp an absolute. When I say "middle ground", everyone immediately
looks to the one side and then to the other; then they select an area which
is squarely in between those points, and that's the middle. Can't argue
with that. But as soon as you get someone else there, he sees different
endpoints, so he places the middle ground somewhere else. Then they argue
about where the endpoints are, and it tends to be "as far as you can see in
THAT direction" without regard for how short- or far-sighted the other
person may be, or what the visibility conditions are from moment to moment.
Or, more succinctly: how far away is the horizon? Hmmm.
>Then again, a lot of people would argue that if you can't swim, get outta
>the ocean.
But what exactly does "swim" mean? I mean, most people figure if they can
jump in the water and paddle around a while without drowning, they can
swim. However, if you think swimming the English Channel is a good
warmup... you're likely to have a healthy degree of contempt for those
people, aren't you?
>I've
>never had any formal training; what I know about C is from reading the K&R
>book long ago, trial and error, and reading manpages. Makefiles, all from
>reading existing ones and the manpage.
The vast majority of the world -- I know, I don't understand this either --
does not enjoy reading technical documentation! How they ever get along in
the world is beyond me, too, but oddly enough they surely *are* the type of
people that make up the preponderance of the population.
>Should you have to spend years studying? No, but you
>shouldn't grab a kit and run 'install.bat' and be done with it.
If you replace "be done with it" with the phrase "start playing with it", I
think that's *exactly* what you should do. When you start playing with it,
you should be able to get answers to your questions quickly and easily; if
it's a pain in the ass to get an answer, then you start to associate that
pain in the ass with asking the question in the first place, and eventually
you stop asking questions and only learn when you stumble over something.
If then... someone once said "All men stumble over the truth now and again.
Most of them pick themselves up and hurry on as if nothing happened." ;)
>I think
>I can feel pretty confident saying that there is NO base system you will
>ever find that you can customize to exactly the way you want your world
>without touching code
I'm *completely* confident in saying this is a tremendous and arguably
unforgivable oversight on the part of MUD developers. ;)
>I hold a rather extreme view, but that's party because the status quo is
>(IMO) too far to the other extreme, so I'm trying to counterbalance a
>little.
Extreme views are nice. They make very good platforms from which to launch
flaming arrows. ;)
>Indeed. Interesting meta-approach; maybe a mud of muds, where higher
>'level' players get more 'stuff' on their sub-muds...
I've been thinking about something really heinous: the idea of people on
some MUD being able to work their way into staff positions within the game
context, and from higher levels of that actually *fork* the MUD -- spawning
off an exact copy of the MUD, which *they* control.
>The problem is you have to make the person WANT to learn more; too much
>mentality these days is 'I want to know as little as possible, but I
>still want everything to do what I want it to', which is a good deal of
>why Windows/Mac are so popular.
Inchoative thought: give learning the system some kind of reward built into
the game. In my current project, you can script the game, and scripting it
has real benefits to the player within the game -- specifically, rather
than tediously shuttle back and forth between two locations 50 times, the
scripter can just run a script that does this fifty times. If he gets
better at scripting, he can write a loop which he terminates after it
finishes his task. If he gets even better, he can make a loop that executes
fifty times. A real master can make a loop that figures out how many times
it needs to run, runs that many times without generating output, and alerts
the user when its done.
Now, the part I haven't figured out yet is how you let people *know*
they'll get real tangible benefits from scripting.
>You have to somehow break around that to
>really succeed, and that's pretty tough to do.
Agreed. What would you suggest to get around it? I have some thoughts, but
they're in serious need of clarification before I can actually write them
down. You know how sometimes you have this idea, but you just have no clue
how to say it to someone else? That's where I am on this.
-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock caliban@darklock.com
| Darklock Communications http://www.darklock.com/
| U L T I M A T E U N I V E R S E I S N O T D E A D
| 774577496C6C6E457645727355626D4974H -ÊBAL::3146=-
- META: list "peerage" Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- META: list "peerage" Brandon A Downey
- META: list "peerage" Travis Casey
- META: list "peerage" Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- META: list "peerage" Dominic J. Eidson
- META: List "peerage" Marian Griffith
- META: List "peerage" Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- META: list "peerage" Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- META: list "peerage" Sayeed
- Mugu Chris Gray
- META: List peerage and behaviour J C Lawrence
- META: list "peerage" Chris Gray
- ADMIN: We're working again. J C Lawrence
- Java I/O and threads. Elis Pomales
- Java I/O and threads. Jo Dillon
- Java I/O and threads. cynbe@muq.org
- Java I/O and threads. Jo Dillon
- Java I/O and threads. Elis Pomales
- Reset Death Wes Connell
- Reset Death Quzah [softhome]
- Reset Death Wes Connell
- Reset Death Mik Clarke
- Reset Death Andrew C.M. McClintock
- Reset Death Mik Clarke
- PvP and mob capacities (was "List Peerage") Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- combat diablo@best.com
- META: list "peerage" Darrin Hyrup
- META: list "peerage" J C Lawrence
- Telmaron and Mud servers was: META: list "peerage" Elis Pomales
- META: list "peerage" Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- META: list "peerage" Ben Greear
- Who is? (was about level vs skills) Marian Griffith
- Who is? (was about level vs skills) Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- exploration points diablo@best.com
- [MUD-Dev] Juha Lindfors
- Stock Mud Demographics ##Make Nylander
- ADMIN: Off-topic and the ever present reminders on quoting. J C Lawrence
- Mud reviewing Andy Cink
- Mud reviewing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Mud reviewing diablo@best.com
- Mud reviewing Andru Luvisi
- Mud reviewing diablo@best.com
- Mud reviewing J C Lawrence
- Mud reviewing Dan Shiovitz
- Mud reviewing diablo@best.com
- Mud reviewing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Mud reviewing diablo@best.com
- Mud reviewing Richard Woolcock
- Mud reviewing David Bennett
- Mud reviewing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- MUD Admin skills Hal Black
- Subdue Holly Sommer
- processors diablo@best.com
- processors John Bertoglio
- processors Wes Connell
- processors Laurel Fan
- processors Mik Clarke
- processors J C Lawrence
- processors diablo@best.com
- processors Quzah [softhome]
- processors Mik Clarke
- processors J C Lawrence
- processors Marc Hernandez
- processors Adam Wiggins
- processors Greg Underwood
- processors Adam Wiggins
- processors Chris Gray
- processors gunderwood@donet.com
- processors Jon A. Lambert
- processors Greg Underwood
- processors Petri Virkkula
- quests involving players diablo@best.com
- quests involving players Darren Henderson
- quests involving players Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- quests involving players Richard Woolcock