<HEAD><TITLE>discuss@charon: [1605] in "Coldmud discussion meeting"</TITLE>
<H1>[1605] in Coldmud discussion meeting</H1></HEAD>
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<HR><H2>Re: newbie question about what cold/genesis can do...</H2>
<H3>daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tue Jul 11 15:36:46 2000
)</H3>
<PRE>
In-Reply-To: &lt;20000710172406.A3156@digiserve.ie&gt;
From: "Joshua Rosen" &lt;rozzin@jello.geekspace.com&gt;
To: coldstuff@cold.org
Cc: dp2@dp2.org
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 19:20:28 GMT
Reply-To: coldstuff@cold.org


Good paper... it sounds somewhat familiar:)

For the past several months, I've been working on a project closely related
to what you describe--dp2, the DROPPED POMEGRANATE PROJECT (yes, that -is-
an acronym).

It started when, in our Cold, a friend of mine started talking about
`web-browser-based MUDs', and I ,somewhat deliberately, misinterpreted him.

He'd meant `MUDs with web-browser-based UIs', but I'd interpreted it as `a
MUD that runs inside a web-browser'. Then I thought about having a MUD
*database* run inside a web-browser (er, client-side), but having the MUD
server still be a remote server.

My next thought was, `WOW'--rather than writing an e-mail and attaching a
POV-Ray scene-file that I'd written to it and sending it to someone, I
could just *hand* them the POV-scene.

The next night, another friend's mind came into sync with mine, and we went
out to dinner to discuss this. Thus was born project UNIVERSE.

The idea of project UNIVERSE was to have DIETYs that managed databases and
would connect to GOD servers and present objects to GODs for entrance of
said objects into the VR/MUD universe. The GODs would allow or deny entrace
of objects based upon arbitrary rule-sets, and would then govern
interaction between objects in managed by the DIETYs.

We decided that UNIVERSE was the reason that we existed, as it encompassed
`every cool project that [we'd] ben tempted to work on over the past few
years'..., and then we decided that UNIVERSE was not quite the correct
architecture, and that it was only a very small component of something much
more generalised and important. Thus was born dp2.

UNIVERSE was too centralised, for one--with dp2, we've moved away from the
client/server model, to a completely decentralised, peer-based system of
nodes (we call it the reticulum). We've also moved to a very event-based
architecture.

This system is perfect for MUDs, and is also very good for numerous other
sorts of systems (I won't get into those, here).

Currently, we're in the process of implementing various
components/subprojects of dp2, in several languages:

I'm writing a dp2 module for GUILE/Scheme, and a scheme-based AI
interaction-bot to hook up to the dp2 reticulum (his name is "fred").
I'm also updated an extensible e-mail client that I wrote, last year, so
that it can interact with the dp2 reticulum (it's now a generic
rfc822-handler with plug-in directory-protocols).

A coconspirator in the project (nick) is working with me on the dp2 Python
library, and on BARD, a purely distributed VR/MUD system that makes use of
the dp2 architecture.

We've got a first-generation communication protocol worked out, so,
hopefully, we'll have the BARD components and fred working together in the
next few months, and people will be able to connect and really experience
dp2.

We plan to complete dp2 libraries for several other languages--C (for
obvious reasons), Pike, possibly TOM, Haskell (when I get a chance to learn
it)....

Everyone currently involved in dp2 has experience with (at least) MOO,
Cold, and POO; we considered using MOO, Cold, and POO, and we won't be
using Cold or MOO in the near future, though we may steal tiny pieces of
POO's code for use in components of BARD. In the distant future, we'd like
to develop modules for Cold and MOO (cubik support will come with the TOM
module;)).

We've got a spot on sourceforge:
        http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/dp2
with a CVS repository, which contains all of our current code;

The dp2 home web-site is at:
        http://www.dp2.org/
It's got -some- documentation (we're working on this--really;)), and *lot*
of conversation-logs (these go all the way back to the original
conversation that inspired UNIVERSE). The web-site became a little mucky,
today--there are some documents that exist but just aren't reachable--it'll
all be fixed by tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the project isn't yet self-documenting enough for us to
really bring in more developers--we'd likely need to spend more time
educating them on exactly what we want to accomplish and getting them to
open their minds up wide than we would on actually developing things, so I
can only really recommend that you sit back and watch for a while--read the
documentation and the logs, check out the code; if, after doing the
reading, it `clicks' in your mind (you think, `cool! I know exactly what
they're talking about!'), then send us some e-mail.

If you just have a question about what we're doing or why we're doing it
(or what all of the contrived acronyms mean), send us an e-mail;).

Oh, as far as using the code goes: we've just started to do our bickering
about licensing issues, so the license for the project is undefined--get
the code, play with it, but please don't put it into any other projects,
until we have the licenses ironed out :\ (the exception is rzMail, which is
currently being distributed under the terms of the GPL).
John P . Looney writes:

&gt;  Excuse the pretentionism, but after playing with the "adventure.sh"
&gt; script that comes with bash [0], I thought "wouldn't it be cool if you
&gt; could do more, inside a mud-like environment.
&gt; 
&gt;  So, I wrote:
&gt;     http://www.RedBrick.dcu.ie/~valen/muce.ps
&gt;  as a kind of a joke. A few friends thought "that would be cool actually".
&gt; For those too lazy to read it, it's basically saying that "wouldn't it be
&gt; nice if you could run a mud-like virtual machine on your PC, and import
&gt; files from your PC (running windows, or unix, or whatever - it shouldn't
&gt; matter) as objects in a mud-like world. Then, you could clone a load of
&gt; URL objects, for instance, "go" to a friends "house" - which is a room, on
&gt; his PC, and do something like "give knapsack.urls to friend" or something.
&gt; 
&gt;  Anyway, I was thinking that if we were going to toy with this idea, the
&gt; Cold system might be a cunning place to start. If any of the developers
&gt; could have a look at the file, and tell me if I would be better off
&gt; starting from scratch, of from something like Circle mud, I'd appreciate
&gt; it.
</PRE>
