25 May, 2010, Mr_Logic wrote in the 1st comment:
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I came across this very interesting (albeit very OLD) article detailing a competition that I completely missed. The entries looked interesting, so I downloaded the available sources and figured I could play around with them a bit… and none of them would compile.

Has anyone else had a go at them?

16K MUD Competition
25 May, 2010, 3squire wrote in the 2nd comment:
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I rewrote tankmage deathmatch in PHP if you want to play. It has a web GUI and everything. Lemme know and I'll share the source.

(With minimal rewriting you could use the PHP engine on Telnet too rather than websockets)
25 May, 2010, Mr_Logic wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Cool. If that's your entry on TMC, I followed it and got a blank gray square where the interface should have gone. I'm using Google Chrome on a Win XP machine. I didn't do any extensive troubleshooting on it though.
25 May, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 4th comment:
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Mr_Logic said:
I came across this very interesting (albeit very OLD) article detailing a competition that I completely missed. The entries looked interesting, so I downloaded the available sources and figured I could play around with them a bit… and none of them would compile.

They're 10 years old, and your compiler probably isn't. It would feel a bit strange to update my entry now, but I did recently update the second version if you're interested.
25 May, 2010, Chris Bailey wrote in the 5th comment:
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I think I'll skip on updating my entry also. A new 16kb contest would be pretty neat though.



(Skipping the update because I have no entry. :P )
25 May, 2010, 3squire wrote in the 6th comment:
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Well, that's because I use free mud hosting and I was hosting a demonstration of Kusht at the time. You can try it, it'll work now.

I'd love to see someone else host it though. It's pretty lightweight, but like most games, it still requires a dedicated thread on which to run which is hard to obtain for free.
27 May, 2010, Idealiad wrote in the 7th comment:
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Chris Bailey said:
A new 16kb contest would be pretty neat though.


Would you want to do the same thing or change it up some?
27 May, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 8th comment:
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What I think might be fun and useful… a 64K contest that requires reasonably named variables/functions/etc. :)

In other words, clarity of code would be part of the judging criteria. The 16K contest was cool, but in many cases entries got obfuscated in order to cram stuff into that 16K limit.
27 May, 2010, Runter wrote in the 9th comment:
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quixadhal said:
What I think might be fun and useful… a 64K contest that requires reasonably named variables/functions/etc. :)

In other words, clarity of code would be part of the judging criteria. The 16K contest was cool, but in many cases entries got obfuscated in order to cram stuff into that 16K limit.


I'm not sure that's true. The code I looked at wasn't really obfuscated and one of the criteria for judging the code related to maintainability.
27 May, 2010, Idealiad wrote in the 10th comment:
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Yeah, I remember Erwin saying something like 75% of KaVir's code was comments.

(don't quote me on that)
27 May, 2010, 3squire wrote in the 11th comment:
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Well comments did not get factored into the byte-limits but the programmers definitely – let's say they "cut corners" when it came to a ton of the code. Almost every single entry was obfuscated in my opinion because if you look at the first few lines of most of them, they do all sorts of crazy <moderated> to reduce whole phrases of code into single letters or words just so they won't have to write the code line, which is a big no-no (even though it does save a lot of space in a 16k competition)

However, it would be interesting to write a competition for a new mud with other criteria in my opinion though, I think a competition to build a mud with the best OLC possible or the best NPC interactions or most fun combat or most realistic objects or most engaging puzzles/minigames or most intriguing skill system or criteria like that which are often thought of as tertiary steps in developing codebases, but are really primary in differentiating games from one-another
27 May, 2010, Igabod wrote in the 12th comment:
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I for one would be most excited to see a competition for the best OLC. Out of all the muds I've tried none have a truly great OLC. The one that comes closest is coffeemud's web-based building in my opinion but it is still lacking hugely. Not to mention the fact that it's not exactly an OLC.

[edit to add] plus it has a good bit of redundant code in it which is confusing.
27 May, 2010, Runter wrote in the 13th comment:
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I would like to see more competitions, certainly.
27 May, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 14th comment:
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Idealiad said:
Yeah, I remember Erwin saying something like 75% of KaVir's code was comments.

(don't quote me on that)


It was 46% comments, and I also used a type of Hungarian notation for naming my variables. However the naming convention and minimal macro usage was a trade-off - it left me far less room for features, and features had a much higher weighing in the score.

I've seen a few people suggest another 16K competition, or a 32K competition, but nothing seems to come of it - and I'm not sure you'd get the same sort of interest these days anyway. MudMagic held three coding competitions, and the last one had only a single entry, despite a first prize of $500.
27 May, 2010, Scandum wrote in the 15th comment:
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Instead of another competition I'd rather see more cooperation, which unfortunately seems too challenging to pull off.
27 May, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 16th comment:
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Scandum said:
Instead of another competition I'd rather see more cooperation, which unfortunately seems too challenging to pull off.

Most muds are already cooperative projects, and some codebases and clients are open source, allowing anyone to contribute. But I find a healthy dose of competition gets me much more motivated.
27 May, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 17th comment:
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Competition is good, but these competitions are sort of contests in a void, in a sense. The winner doesn't end up with the "best MUD" or "most played MUD"; the product is subject to somewhat artificial constraints. I'd be more interested in a longer-term type of competition, but of course the logistics there are quite complicated…
27 May, 2010, Koron wrote in the 18th comment:
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I've always looked at these competitions as excellent learning tools once they're completed. It's nice to get a feel for how other people implement features, and (in theory!) the 16k thing forced people to be efficient where possible.

So yeah, while I wouldn't be participating in one, I would surely love to see a competition of some sort come around.
27 May, 2010, Asylumius wrote in the 19th comment:
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I liked what MudMagic was doing, but between the people who aren't interested, don't have time, etc. in an already small and niche community, it apparently just doesn't work. Like Kavir pointed out, if money can't get people motivated, I don't have a better idea.
27 May, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 20th comment:
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Asylumius said:
I liked what MudMagic was doing, but between the people who aren't interested, don't have time, etc. in an already small and niche community, it apparently just doesn't work. Like Kavir pointed out, if money can't get people motivated, I don't have a better idea.

For people with full-time jobs and outside activities (I know, I know) it's extremely difficult to lay aside chunks of time for short-duration, intensive work on a project. So any competition that involved, say, a week of work, would basically be impossible for me to realistically participate in, even if you were to increase the prize money (you'd have to increase it a fair bit before it became worth sacrificing other things (like work…) for that week). So it's not that I'm uninterested in principle: it's that practical reality just doesn't make this very feasible, even though I think I would enjoy participating.
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