[MUD-Dev] Re: Mud-Client, and specifically, COOLMud and SFWhite

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 29 Apr 1998 18:41:31 -0700 
Jay Sax<cimri1 at gte.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Apr 1998 17:08:12 -0700, J C Lawrence wrote:

>> Stephen White is of course the original programmer of MOO (before
>> LambdaMOO), and author of COOLMud, which is quite possibly the most
>> utterly elegant MUD server out there.

> How about a few more words on COOLMud?  What I've seen on SFWhite's
> site is several years old now ('94 date as I recall), including the
> COOLMud server, etc.  His page at the school says there is no active
> COOLMud mud out there, and when I wrote to ask him what's up several
> weeks ago I never received a reply.

Stephen has moved on.  His current project can be found at:

  <URL:http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~sfwhite/VNet.html>

CoolMUD is effectively dead.  It is unsupported, I know of no active
servers running it, and the field interest (outside of this list) in
the product is indistinguishable from zero.  

The reasons for this dearth of interest are many, and generally
simple.  The most significant being that any CoolMUD effort would have 
to be a from-scratch effort.  There is no pre-existant world which can 
be bolted on to.  There are not sample databases, language manuals, or 
collections of neat tricks.  Anything which gets done with CoolMUD
will require the similar effort as doing <whatever> with say one of
the LPC server sans the benefit of a pore-canned MUDLib.  

Vanishingly few are willing to undertake that level of ramp-up when
they can go out and grab a server with a pre-canned and complex world
free for the asking.  

That all said, CoolMUD remains an amazingly elegant and concise piece
of work.  Of course if someone ported LambdaCore to Cool this could
get interesting, or perhaps a version of CoolLP alal LPMOO...

Similar BTW can be said of Interlude, except that in Interlude's case
the server code is in very poor shape (doesn't even pretend to build).
Interluds does have some really *neat* design approaches however.

> Just curious -- what's up with that?

Roughly the above.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.