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Skotos

So What's This Skotos Thing?

Periodically, you'll see Skotos mentioned with regard to DGD. You may find the sheer frequency of reference confusing, especially since they're not actually the vendors of DGD itself.

Skotos is a company that makes commercial games, including commercial MUDs. They do pay-for-play, with a single monthly fee for access to their entire set of offerings. They also sublicense DGD for commercial use — if you want to make money off a DGD-based MUD, Skotos are the folks to talk to.

Until SkotOS 2.0 (their open-source DGD-based offering) comes out, there's little or no code from Skotos that is open source. Any DGD library is of the keenest interest to DGD programmers at this point. It's not like we've got many libs to look at. That makes us (well, me and a few others, certainly) quite keen to find out more about how Skotos' library works.

Folks with a more commercial bent are also quite curious how their licensing scheme for commercial use of DGD works. You can find out a bit about becoming a developer for them on their web site.

This is an old 'What Is Skotos?' description from the company itself:

About Skotos Tech
-----------------
Skotos Tech is an exciting new game company determined to bring an entirely
fresh paradigm to the world of online gaming. Quality stories will be the
key to the Skotos experience, not gory special effects. Through high-quality
graphically-enhanced text-based games, Skotos plans to create a virtual
community of gamers and storytellers from all over the world. Besides
providing its own games, Skotos will also offer tools and services to world
designers, authors, and programmers, so that they easily can create their
own games and offer them to the Skotos online community.

The central goal of Skotos is to produce a core set of games, forming a
storytelling community. These games will be the natural evolution of MUDs
and other text-based games, but they will be richer, with more consistency
and integrity than anything currently available, and will feature a level of
advancement that is only possible with the full resources of a professional
company. Graphical clients will round out these games, providing a more
immersive experience without overdominating the text. These core games will
run the spectrum of genres, helping Skotos to create a wide and varied
community. From romance to science fiction, Skotos Tech will cater to a
variety of interests.

The world of Skotos Tech will be much larger than just a small collection of
core entertainments. Skotos will also feature games playing out specific
story lines, with definite beginnings, middles, and endings. Events will
intrude as players interact with each other to accomplish their own goals.
These fixed-duration games will combine the best features of Live Action
Role-Playing Games (LARPs) and text adventures in a way previously unseen in
the online world.

And that's just the start of Skotos' online gaming experience. Skotos Tech
will also offer tools for creating online games and will act as a service
provider to developers. These games, produced by external developers, will
be available through the Skotos servers. The best storytellers, game
authors, and programmers will be invited to become associates at Skotos
Tech, offering their games in exchange for a percentage of revenues.
Externally developed games will be rigorously tested to ensure that they
meet Skotos' standards of quality before they become part of the Skotos
family.

But, Skotos is doing more than just creating a nexus of online games. Skotos
Tech is creating a true community. Skotos users will be able to interact
with each other not just in the games, but also in other online forums. They
will be able to register e-mail addresses and web pages, both for themselves
and their characters in the various on-line games. Skotos Tech gamers will
be able to share the accomplishments of their characters, as well as their
own interests, drawing together the players of all the Skotos Tech games
into one community of storytellers and gamers.

Skotos Tech is currently in its initial stages of development. Its initial
funding is through Alacrity Ventures, and is being incubated at Alacrity's
management center. The initial release of Skotos Tech is planned for
September, 2000. Watch www.skotos.net for more information. If you are
interested in joining our team or becoming an associate, mail
jobs@skotos.net.
  

From: dgd@dworkin.nl (Par Winzell)
Date: Tue May  3 16:38:01 2005
Subject: [DGD] Software Development Tools

Neil McBride wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> It's been a while since I've poked my head up in here - hope you're all
> doing well ;)  I've been thinking lately about software development tools,
> preferably linux but maybe the evil M$ side if there's something good
> enough there.
> 
> I find that the way I tend to work on my own little mud project is about
> once every few months or more, and lately whenever I go to do some more
> work on it, I find myself working out where I was up to, what I was
> thinking, etc.  In spite of somewhat excessive comments in code and the
> half-written design docs, I still find myself going back to the start for
> a refresher course on what I've done.

For SkotOS 2.0, I use --

 * Subversion for source control. RIP CVS. IMO this is the only
significant alternative at the moment.
 * Mantis for bug tracking. This is invaluable to me, for the reason you
mention... The only realistic way for me to keep discipline is to have a
place where I can go to add a bug note whenever I work a bit on some
bug. If I keep it in my head, it's lost by the time I come back to the
project. Do not use Bugzilla!
 * Doxygen for documentation. Doxygen out of the box does an excellent
job at parsing LPC, and even without any actual documentation, Doxygen
can build you a ton of really gorgeous pages cross-referencing your code
every which way. Adding a little LPC-specific pre-processor would let it
keep track of subclassing structures and such, too.
 * Emacs remains the editor of choice, of course.

Zell

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