MUDs in Perl

[Greg McCarroll]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 11:31:26AM +0200, Abigail wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 03:05:10AM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:
> > Dear lazyweb,
> > 
> > If you wanted to write a MUD (i.e. the rooms, NPCs, etc) in Perl, what
> > driver would you use?
> 
> I'm not aware of any (free) MUD drivers that use Perl. A dozen years ago or
> so, someone released a mud written in Perl, but asked a fee. 
> 
> > The main reason I'm asking about Perl is that I speak it.  If this
> > would be the ideal opportunity for me to learn another language then
> > I'd be interested in that too.  I already speak LPC but am not aware
> > of anything like CPAN for it.  The two main things I'm interested in
> > are code re-use and automated testing.
> 
> 
> Would writing a driver based on POE be that hard?
> 

not at all, trivial in fact - assuming you trusted your wizards. the
scary bit would be seeing just how much crack could be crammed into
the mudlib.

Consider a room ...

You are standing in a street in Amsterdam.
> look
[ a quick call to some CPAN weather module ... ]
It is an overcast day.
> look graphical
[ a longer call to some Flickr image retrieval module searching
  for 'Amsterdam street', application of an ASCII art module, storing
  the image so the room now has persistent image. ]

Now lets consider a faulty bag of holding, 0 encumbrance but
occasionally losing things ... enter Tie::Hash::Cannabinol.

AUTOLOAD could be horrendously abused. 

I suspect that any such project would descend quickly into wizard
wars, insanely complex objects requiring huge CPU/Memory/bandwidth,
unmaintainable code, arguments over which CPAN modules to add in and a
slow lumbering system that people would like but want to port to
something faster -- your average Perl system really ;-)

G.