Fun with Erlang (was Re: Stand Alone Erlang for Windows. yet again)

[Alexander Williams]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 01:46:30PM -0600, Chris Pressey wrote:
> I'm working on a game myself; it's sort of an MUD/MUSE/IF/roguelike
> thing, so I'd be especially interested in hearing about any online games
> or other fun stuff that's been attempted in Erlang.

Ooooh, now, this is fun: I was just thinking about Erlang-based MU*
the other night (and, naturally, that led to my thoughts about Binary
Strings vs List Strings; parsing eats up time in MU* design).

Theoretically, a MU* implimented in Erlang could have easily
distributable/extensible distributed databases; one could literally
walk off the edge of one MU* and onto another hosted on another site
and hardly know the difference ... except for any local player-mods
that might have been made.  Strolling from a systemless SocialEM
(Erlang MU*) onto a World of Darkness EM wouldn't necessarily give you
stats and structure (though the WoD could be coded to stat you as Joe
Average; capturing migrating processes would be nicely necessary).

The main question that it occured to me to ask would be "How is the
best way to allow programming/extending the live system?"  The
facility for live upgrade of Erlang code gives us a direct hook into
fixing things, but one has to impliment security on top of that.  Do
we go with the LP-like model with directories of files which are then
instanced into existance, or something more MUX-like with instances
being live at all times but possibly inherited from?

Options, options.

-- 
Alexander Williams (thantos@REDACTED)               | In the End,
  "Blue Jester needs food."                             | Oblivion
  "Blue Jester needs fuku-wearing cuties."              | Always
  http://www.chancel.org                                | Wins