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Phantasmal MUD Lib for DGD
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Phantasmal Site > History A Brief History of PhantasmalI've done a number of MUD projects before Phantasmal, and a great many TCP/IP servers in C. I had switched to a C/Perl hybrid and was trying to figure out how to safely interrupt Perl code after it had overrun its processor allotment and gotten itself all tangled up. I could control its operations, functions and memory usage with the excellent Sandbox module, but the processor thing was eluding me. I'd worked out a solution involving an external Perl process which could be fully killed and restarted if anything went badly wrong, but I had no way to limit the maximum latency... And then, during a random web search, it hit me. DGD. A server that already did everything I wanted. It looked good. The feature list was beautiful. The additional stuff it did like recompile-in-place and atomic functions was awe-inspiring. It was very actively maintained. It had an intelligent author and the code was lean, svelte and secure. On June 18th, I started building an experimental DGD-based MUD to replace my all-custom C-and-perl hybrid MUD (called "Black Oyster"). It was my first work on DGD. I dug deeper into DGD. There wasn't much documentation. "Read the mailing list" was pretty much what it boiled down to. I did. Then I arranged salient bits into an early prototype web site. And I kept building. After awhile, I realized that not only was there no good MUDLib, people had been asking for one for years, and nobody was seriously working on one. So I cobbled some stuff together, built a new public domain ObjectD, released it, and added a simple MUDLib on top. Thus, on February 8, 2002 was Phantasmal 0.001 released. I follow Linus Torvalds' lead on object numbers -- start very, very small, with the assumption that you can always have a version 1.0 when it's bug-free :-) Early on, it lived in my personal BitKeeper repository and I'd periodically make releases FTPable from my personal machine. I didn't bother to keep statistics, and I don't know if anybody bothered to download the early releases. It was more learning code for folks on the DGD mailing list, and that was plenty for me. On March 12th, about a month later, I put it up on SourceForge. Development had been pretty wild at the beginning and Phantasmal version 0.001 through 0.005 were all before I moved to SourceForge. You can find them there now, but the listed downloads are all people that downloaded them as a historical curiosity or because some later release didn't work :-)
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