Subject: Re: MOO Institute

From: [email-masked] (Frank Crowell)
Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1992 19:08:57 -0700

I think FMPL or CoolMUD could be used mostly by people that want to do
 heavy hacking on the server and database.  But right now, it 
 would take a lot of work to just have a basic system up and running.
 
 The MOO environment is ready-to-go; it would allow some ideas to be 
 implemented; and it could serve as an information interchange. 
 As for the MOO Institute, I could imagine a SIG CoolMUD or
 SIG FMPL.
 
 -- 
 Frank Crowell [email-masked]
 Netcom - Online Communication Services San Jose, CA

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From: [email-masked] (Jay A. Carlson)
Date: Sun, 2 Aug 1992 09:30:52 -0700

FMPL is unsuitable for many-programmer MUDs due to its utter lack of
security.  In fact, I'm not sure it's suitable for even
multi-programmer MUDs, since it's so easy to blow away other people's
work.  COOL, on the other hand, has such security, but until recently
could not be used for many-programmer MUDs due to its lack of
unparsing.  After a cursory glance at 1.1, I'm not sure I'd want to
work with it either because the programming facilities seem to want
you to use the C preprocessor heavily.

--Jonny

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 2 Aug 1992 16:17:35 -0700

I've taken a reasonably close look at COOLMUD, and corresponded with its
author about it a little.  I like it a lot, it has plenty of promise, but it
still has some problems which make it unviable for A many-programmer MUD.

> COOL, on the other hand, has such security, but until recently could not be
> used for many-programmer MUDs due to its lack of unparsing.  After a cursory
> glance at 1.1, I'm not sure I'd want to work with it either because the
> programming facilities seem to want you to use the C preprocessor heavily.

1.1.1 does have 'unparsing'.  It also is designed for use with cpp, which
makes the unparsing a little wierd.

There are two chief problems I have with it;

1) There is no easy way for a wizard to gain access to anything in the DB. 
This is because wizards simply have the power to reprogram any method on any
object in their local database -- so to check something, some reprogramming
must be done by the wizard.  A nefarious player/programmer could lock
information away from a wizard in such a way that it would take a good deal of
work for said Wiz to access it.

2) The security system isn't as advanced as would be needed (IMHO).  For
example, there is no way for a player to allow eirself to be moved from room
to room by exits, while at the same time preventing others from @teleport ing
them around.  The difficulty is that there is no way of telling what chain of
methods led to yours getting called (you only know the caller, not the
callers).

COOLMUD does offer MI and a distributed DB.  Objects cannot have parents from
a foreign COOLMUD database, however.  Hence, the problem with LambdaMOO
"having all the cool stuff" would still exist were it a COOLMUD.  Further,
according to the author, the connections for the distributed database are not
really suitable for 'long-haul' networks.  The database for COOLMUD is still
stored in core, and it has no garbage collector other than a simple
copy-on-reference policy (two problems which plague MOO).

The command parser is a method on the player, which is a very welcome change
from the server-wired command parser in MOO.  Name/object matching is also
accomplished without help from the server.  COOLMUD's language is a refinement
of the MOO language (although I'd still prefer LISP) with some refreshing
changes (verbs and methods are separate, variables have type, etc.).

Anybody interested in server hacking on MUDs of any sort will gain by taking a
careful look at COOLMUD 1.1.1.  You can get it, along with some cursory, out
of date (when I got it) documentation via anonymous ftp from piggy.ucsb.edu.

SRI SYADASTI SYADAVAKTAVYA SYADASTI SYANNASTI SYADASTI CAVAKTAVYASCA
SYADASTI SYANNASTI SYADAVATAVYASCA SYADASTI SYANNASTI SYADAVAKTAVYASCA

-K*

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 03:16:40 -0700

COOLMUD 2.0 is out.  This is obviously the wrong place to be talking about it
but some of the bad things about COOLMUD 1.1 that I mentioned before have gone
away, so to be fair to ghond I figure I should revise my remarks a little bit.

> The database for COOLMUD is still stored in core, and it has no garbage
> collector other than a simple copy-on-reference policy (two problems which
> plague MOO).

Both of these problems are gone now.  Lists and strings have reference counts,
and the disk-based db stuff is in alpha.

> You can get it, along with some cursory, out of date (when I got it) 
> documentation via anonymous ftp from piggy.ucsb.edu.

Still the case for 2.0, but you may have to search around a bit.

-K*