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

> On 12/13/05, malcolm.ryan / gmail.com <malcolm.ryan / gmail.com> 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 / gmail.com
> Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad / FreeBSD.org
> 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