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Old 08-09-2012, 04:16 PM   #32
camlorn
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Re: MUD Creation/Coding Help

Agreed, +1 to dentin. He said what I was trying to say way more concisely than I said it.

For what it's worth, I was in the same place once--I wasn't coming from writing, but I believed I could throw a mud together in a week with little knowledge; I even announced it, because I honestly thought I could have one open by "tomorrow". I look back on that fondly--I cancelled it a week later, because it's not just running the server, and you can't just use someone else's and have anything worth playing; since then, I've learned that I'll probably never start a mud, because it takes years of work (in most cases--there are exceptions, but you're not going to get it to under 6 months, and even then, your game is going to be lackluster).

Anyone can write an article; a good one takes talent. The thing is, though, software is more like a list of instructions: I can say "start the mud server", but it's more like "start the mud server (see section 1.1)" and then I have to go write a bunch of directions that define in excruciating detail what exactly a mud server does when it starts. I don't mean things like "load the areas", but like:

1. Open areas.lst:
2. For each line in areas.lst:
2.1. Open file listed in the current line of areas.lst:
2.2 Go to the area loader bit which won't fit in a single post on this forum, and which I'm omitting for brevity.
2.3. If anything bad happened (another herculian task, depending on how the previous bit works to determine this), stop.
3. Return to whatever called me.

Each of those subdivides a lot more; I could sit here all day and produce a list like that, and it'd be so big as to be unbelieveable to a non-programmer; a computer is like that, and you don't know how to write that list yet. And all it'd do is load the areas and stop, nothing else--you wouldn't be able to walk around, you wouldn't have combat, you wouldn't even have players. If we call each direction a line (I know it's not, but as an analogy), it comes out to at least 1000 lines to load areas, assuming no scripting functionality or anything--in practice, it's much, much more--when I say 1000 lines, I'm talking about the size of the actual file containing those directions, if that gives you some idea.

Programming is like a cake recipe, wherein you aren't told that it's a cake. It could be a car or any number of other things, and you, the computer, only follow the directions. If it says to take the entire bowl of cake batter and pour it over your head, you'll do that, simply because it says to, and for all you know, this is some form of nontraditional art. So you, the programmer, have to be able to tell it what exactly to do, but you can't tell it what the final result is--if your directions work, you get what you want, if they don't you get nothing or something unexpected (we call this a bug). The computer can't figure out that this is a mud as opposed to a word processor or a music editing software. Perhaps it's some sort of melange of all three. A computer doesn't even know what a mud is.

That's really the best explanation of what you don't know, short of going and learning it, that I can come up with; maybe someone can do better, as it's admittedly poor.
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