68 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
68 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
chapter 9 "The Future"
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In the late 1990's, Descartes @ Nightmare released
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a public domain version of the Nightmare lib called
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Dead Souls, and pulled the official Nightmare lib from
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distribution. They were very similar, but Dead Souls
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lacked documentation.
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His final realease of Dead Souls was 1.1.
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As you must know by now, from reading the FAQ's (you
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*did* read the FAQ's, right?) at some point I lost my mind
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and decided to dust off that old lib, get it working, and
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get people using it so that I could have other people to
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discuss LPC code with.
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I can honestly say I didn't know what I was getting
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myself into. I mean, when I started, it sure *seemed* like
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things "mostly worked". The hard part was just getting it
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installed, right?
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It's now been slightly over a year since I started
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realizing that fixing A broke B, and fixing B broke A
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and C, etc, ad nauseam. My guiding principle was "get it
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working" with a corollary of "make it work well". My
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main aim was bugfixes, but where a feature gap made it
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obviously difficult for a beginner, I attempted to address
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it with a new system. Hence, admintool, QCS, SNOOP_D, etc.
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In other cases, a new system was trivially easy
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to add and its absence was an unreasonable burden, such
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as SetAction for rooms.
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Sometimes a new system comes from my desire to have
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a tool that makes my own life easier while fixing the
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lib, such as the medical tricorder, remote control, and
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the laboratory facility east of the Creators' Hall.
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For the most part, though, my main focus has been
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fixing stuff, not adding stuff. The intention has been
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to release Dead Souls 2.1 as a version that is as free
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of pain as possible, as clear of bugs as reasonable, and
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as fun and useful as 1.1 should have been. Today it is
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May 18 2006, and I think that I am very close
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to that landmark. Today I am at the point where the list
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of bugs consists of minor annoyances, of the kind that
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players would hardly ever take note.
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The future for Dead Souls I see as lots of fun for me.
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I yearn to be free of doing nothing but fix fix fix. As
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great as Dead Souls is, it needs major new systems to make
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it fully competitive with the libs currently out there.
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Adding these new systems is the kind of fun challenge
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I'd really meant to be doing all along, but suckered
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myself out of.
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Post 2.1 I intend to concentrate on things like
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mounts, vehicles, naval/vehicle combat, 3d travel, extending
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virtual rooms, player-independent world persistence,
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and lots of other fun stuff. I'm not in the habit of
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making promises about the lib. As the Dead Souls community
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knows, I prefer to just *make* a new system than talk
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about it. I wanted to share these plans with you, though,
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so that you know that Dead Souls development continues
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apace, and great things are on the horizon.
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