[Reality] Re: [Twisted-Python] Reality?

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

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On Wed, 24 Jul 2002 01:09:57 -0700, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson@isd.net> wrote:

> To get to the point; if you want people to use reality, get a distribution of
> any stable version, a world file with help about what is currently available
> in the mini-world, and a little how-to for getting the thing to run.  It also
> wouldn't hurt to get a link to this distribution on some download page at
> twisted.

Yes, that would all help.

I'm sure it would also help for us to have a killer game that was totally
addictive and thousands of people were playing based on the infrastructure.
We're working on that too.

At one point, we did have such a distribution, but we only have so much
manpower -- we're currently maintaining twisted.reality along with, a
webserver, a database interface, an asynchronous networking infrastructure, an
application server platform, two (although at least I hope to phase one out)
web templating systems, a remote object protocol, a multi-protocol chat server,
a multi-protocol chat client, a user authentication system, and still trying to
write code that we can all get paid for somehow.

All in all I think we're doing a pretty good job, but some things will
inevitably fall through the cracks.

I have to say I understand your confusion and your problems with Twisted
Reality.  Reality itself is in a state of flux.  We're currently in the process
of exploring a new command-processing system and replacing the old, grotty one
that we were using before.  There isn't even a demonstration world, or game, to
load up in TR and poke around at what it can do.

Nevertheless, in many cases, I would still recommend using it.  The primary
reason is social, not technical; in using Reality you are using something that
I am dedicated to maintaining into the future; virtual world creation,
especially as it relates to text-based games, is my passion.  It's the whole
point of all the nuts and bolts in the Twisted framework.  This commitment,
combined their experience with my other efforts, has lead several other
energetic, intelligent people to use the Reality framework, even in spite of
the current technical state of disarray.

That's not to say it's for everybody.  If your project is only going to last
for a month or two, and you don't plan to maintain it beyond that, the future
maintenance and evolution of Reality as a framework probably is not really an
issue for you.  If you plan to have a game that lives for a long time, though,
that could be crucial to its survival, as it would reduce the size of the team
*you* need to gain the interest of by a lot.

> I'm telling you this because I have just embarked on a project that quite
> possibly could last until I start my phd in september - possibly longer.
> Building a mud server and a mud using the server.

Well; those are two separate projects :-).  Are you planning to use Twisted at
all for this?

> I'm doing this because I don't believe any mud servers currently available
> are workable solutions to the problem of 'how do I make my mud do X', where X
> is anything.

It sounds like you're saying you're unaware of any programmable MUD servers.
Have you looked at any of MOO ancestry? NightmareMUD, or anything that uses
LPC?  ColdMUD?

> At 37k lines of code for circlemud, and nearly 140k lines for SMAUG, either
> is too huge.

> Reality is a nice change, but it still feels bulky (in terms of source code
> size) and I wouldn't want to muck around in the source for anything.

Your comparison seems a little weird:

glyph@zelda:~/Projects/Reality% find . -name "*.py" | xargs wc -l | tail -1 
   6273 total

That's including all those docstrings you mentioned earlier, and unit tests,
too.  Now, I understand the functionality isn't really comparable to circlemud,
but it *is* 1/6 the size.  How rediculously small would you consider a
non-bulky game to be?


-- 
 |    <`'>    |  Glyph Lefkowitz: Traveling Sorcerer   |
 |   < _/ >   |  Lead Developer,  the Twisted project  |
 |  < ___/ >  |      http://www.twistedmatrix.com      |

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