[Inheritance] Hi Ben

[Tenth]

> Hmm...I see I'm the third person on this list. Well, I guess that makes me
> special somehow. ("Look at me! I follow links from Freshmeat!) 

	Well, Ben, you're technically the first person on this list, since Glyph and
myself are the project/list administrators.  So if nothing else, you're the
fastest Freshmeat-visitor-guy we've had so far.  ;-)

> I've had some experience working with Diku-MUD code, but this seems pretty
> new. After reading about Twisted Reality, I immediately became possessed with
> a desire to author with it. I'f you've ever worked with the ROM Diku-MUD
> codebase, you know why. This seems like a good way to learn how to use TR. 
> Anyway, I'm not sure how much I'll be able to contribute to your project,
> since I've had zero experience working with Java, but I'm willing to learn.

	Ouch... Yeah, I have some fond memories of Diku-MUD, but whenever I try
to think back to my attempts at programming for Diku and Circle, I start
twitching and having flashbacks about meathooks and stuff. Maybe I'm actually
thinking of the puzzlebox from Hellraiser... Ah well. They're very much alike
in the whole "meathooks stuck through your head" aspect.

	Anyway, I started working on this project fairly ignorant of Java, and
I've really come to like it (and more importantly, the nifty API Glyph and
company built with it).... I previously just wanted to do writing and make maps
and design things because I was so hopeless at programming, but TR really made
life a lot easier for me. The design makes sense, things work in fairly
intuitive ways, and you can debug everything other than massive changes to the
underlying design from inside the game, while it's running... And unless you're
a terrible designer, the major parts of the design should usually be in pretty
good shape.  ;-)

	We probably won't have the inheritance map+code available for another
day or two (we still need to finish extracting it from the Divunal map and make
sure it builds and runs by itself) but the new docs on the TR site are a good
place to start reading, and if you download the Pump you can take a look at the
sample map file (the game persists into plain text format, thankfully enough).
The sample stuff with the pump is really, really simple, but being able to
see how a Player, Thing, or Room is stored will make reading about them in the
TR and verb code a little clearer.

	And you can always post questions here, too. As soon as we have
Inheritance running on it's own server (before Christmas, I would hope) we can
give out authoring accounts and show people around inside the game. (We weren't
kidding about Authors being able to view and modify code from the game client. 
;-)

Thanks again for your interest,

- Tenth



-----
"They don't call me Colonel Homer because I'm some dumb-ass army guy."
- Homer Simpson