chapter 9 "The Future"

    In the late 1990's, Descartes @ Nightmare released
a public domain version of the Nightmare lib called
Dead Souls, and pulled the official Nightmare lib from
distribution. They were very similar, but Dead Souls
lacked documentation.

    His final realease of Dead Souls was 1.1.

    As you must know by now, from reading the FAQ's (you
*did* read the FAQ's, right?) at some point I lost my mind
and decided to dust off that old lib, get it working, and
get people using it so that I could have other people to
discuss LPC code with.

    I can honestly say I didn't know what I was getting
myself into. I mean, when I started, it sure *seemed* like
things "mostly worked". The hard part was just getting it
installed, right?

    It's now been slightly over a year since I started
realizing that fixing A broke B, and fixing B broke A
and C, etc, ad nauseam. My guiding principle was "get it
working" with a corollary of "make it work well". My
main aim was bugfixes, but where a feature gap made it
obviously difficult for a beginner, I attempted to address
it with a new system. Hence, admintool, QCS, SNOOP_D, etc.

    In other cases, a new system was trivially easy
to add and its absence was an unreasonable burden, such
as SetAction for rooms.

    Sometimes a new system comes from my desire to have
a tool that makes my own life easier while fixing the
lib, such as the medical tricorder, remote control, and
the laboratory facility east of the Creators' Hall.

    For the most part, though, my main focus has been 
fixing stuff, not adding stuff. The intention has been 
to release Dead Souls 2.1 as a version that is as free
of pain as possible, as clear of bugs as reasonable, and
as fun and useful as 1.1 should have been. Today it is
May 18 2006, and I think that I am very close
to that landmark. Today I am at the point where the list
of bugs consists of minor annoyances, of the kind that
players would hardly ever take note.

    The future for Dead Souls I see as lots of fun for me.
I yearn to be free of doing nothing but fix fix fix. As
great as Dead Souls is, it needs major new systems to make
it fully competitive with the libs currently out there.
Adding these new systems is the kind of fun challenge
I'd really meant to be doing all along, but suckered
myself out of.

    Post 2.1 I intend to concentrate on things like
mounts, vehicles, naval/vehicle combat, 3d travel, extending
virtual rooms, player-independent world persistence, 
and lots of other fun stuff. I'm not in the habit of
making promises about the lib. As the Dead Souls community
knows, I prefer to just *make* a new system than talk
about it. I wanted to share these plans with you, though,
so that you know that Dead Souls development continues
apace, and great things are on the horizon.


