Utility Routines: ----------------- UberMUD proved to my satisfaction that 90% of a MUD is redundant boring code, usually series of calls to some very simple operations. In order to make programming UnterMUD as simple as possible, there are what amounts to 2 layers in the code for manipulating objects. The lowest of the layers deals with the raw object pointers and lets you manipulate values within them directly. The higher level does the same thing, but prints error messages, checks errors, and operates on the NAME of the object, rather than a pointer to it. One result of the use of the NAME of the object rather than the pointer is a small performance hit that is utterly trivial in the face of network speeds (the typical MUD bottleneck) so people are encouraged to use these routines as much as possible, in preference to actually banging around in low-level objects.