[Twisted-Python] Reality?

[Josiah Carlson]

Good day,

I was just mucking around in the #python channel talking with some guys,
and ended up expressing my opinion of Reality, which at this point is
not very high.

Why you ask?

I suppose my biggest problem is documentation and the lack of a proper
distribution.  In order to get reality, I had to use CVS, not a big deal,
but I would have been much more contented with a tgz archive.  You know,
it could include that 'demo' world I've read about after searching
through the mailing list archives.

Along those same lines, nowhere in the cvs listing is _ANY_
documentation, save the docstrings in the source.  Not to mention that
on the twistedmatrix.com site, there is only passing reference to
reality and how to get to it (get it from cvs, but you need to use the
command:
cvs -d:pserver:anon at twistedmatrix.com:/cvs co Reality
Which I don't believe is listed anywhere on the twistedmatrix.com site.

Along the 'demo' world I referred to above, information about that is
also not listed on the twistedmatrix.com site, anywhere in the source 
(that I could find), documentation is nowhere to be found, save in the
email archives...but email lists are not documentation.


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.

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.  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.  I want to make a DND 3rd ed rule-based mud.  CircleMUD,
SMAUG, ROM, ENVY, etc., are all 2nd ed based.  Pulling out all that code
for thaco, percent-based skills/spells, etc., and replacing it with D20
rules would be a daunting task (there are 3 guys who did it this past
spring with CircleMud for a class, but their source is not downloadable). 
I'm not looking to re-make something that is doing too-much already.  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.

Thanks,
 - Josiah Carlson