[MUD-Dev] "From Kansas to Oz"

[Miroslav Silovic]

> In <9706081638.84om at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA>, on 06/08/97 
>    at 10:33 AM, cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA (Chris Gray) said:
> 
> >Anyone else reading/read "From Kansas to Oz" in the April 1997 issue
> >of the Communications of the ACM? Its about cooperative and virtual
> >debugging in the latest LambdaMOO system. 
> 
> Yup.  I thought I mentioned it here?
> 
> What I thought particularly interesting was that by adding multiple
> roots to the normally single-rooted MOO heirarchy they were able to
> get infinite automatically generated parallel worlds with each world
> able to access itself and its rightmost neighbor only (generations of
> Oz).  There's something about that concept I find flat out
> fascinating.  Don't really know what to do with it yet, tho I'm
> determined I will do something.  Its too cute to ignore/

Actually the only reason why it's an achievement in MOO is that they
don't have multiple inheritance. Remember, with MI, you could easily
just put core functionality on root, and then spawn multiple world
parents from it, each with its own perm checking. I think I know
exactly how I would do that in Cold (but its security scheme is
different from MOO so it's much easier).

On the other hand, the idea of multiple worlds, each looking at one
below, /is/ cute. :)

> >Looks like a kewl system to
> >play around with. The idea of "graphical" MUD is in some ways taken
> >one step further, in that your view is a mixture of what the elements
> >of the MUD want you to see, and of the definitions of elements, and
> >the tools you are using to work with them.
> 
> True.  They are probably the (near?) first to add a GUI drag'n'drop
> development environment to a MUD, let alone also adding an online
> interactive GUI debugger in the same system.  

This is quite impressive. I think Jeffk wrote something like that in
Java, a year or two ago, but it went unpublicised. Jeff?

	Miro