I haven't been updating many files lately, so here's a note on how
I've been wasting time lately.
This story goes back to October when I was revisiting MUD online
adventure games after a break of several years. MUDs are still great
fun, but the play gets repetitious pretty quickly. So I started
thinking about MUD building, which has great potential for creative
expression. I then started wondering which MUD platform would be best
for learning the art and craftof building, which led to nostalgic
revisiting of several MUD/MUSH/MUX/... servers and discoveries of a
few new ones.
This led to thoughts of what kind of server could make the experience
of MUDing more accessible to a contemporary audience. The obvious
answer is something web-based, that looks more like a web page than a
command terminal, and performs a lot better than all the previous
attempts at such a creature. Since managing a MUD world can be seen
as primarily a database problem, maybe an open content managment
framework would be a good way to start. I spent some time looking at
Joomla, but settled on Drupal as the most promising platform because
of its flexibility and programability.
I haven't yet gotten around to implementing a Drupal Web-MUD, but I
did program a Drupal installer script for the SDF MOTD project. I was
impressed enough with Drupal that I started to think about using
Drupal to present all my SDF web, and maybe even gopher content.
Thinking about the layout of the site, I remembered my plan for the
top entry page, "Papa's Universe," an index of all my web sites
presented as an ASCII star chart. Thinking it would be nice to
generate a random star map, I remembered a program I wrote nearly
twenty years ago and always meant to revisit that generated an ASCII
map of normally distributed (looks much nicer than "flat"
distribution) stars for X Windows wallpaper.
So I decided to reinvent my star map program. It would be easy enough
in a scripting language like Perl, but why not take the chance to
learn a new language. Or relearn, since I decided to do it in C, a
language I learned in college and haven't touched since except for
minor patches to get programs to build. So I found a decent C
tutorial on line and have been working through it on the commuting
train when I didn't need the time to nap, which hasn't been very
often this season.
And that's what I've been doing. Don't worry if it doesn't make much
sense. It doesn't to me, either.
