18 Jun, 2010, Noplex wrote in the 61st comment:
Votes: 0
Instead of size limitation how about time? Who can produce the best submission in one weekend?
18 Jun, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 62nd comment:
Votes: 0
Noplex said:
Instead of size limitation how about time? Who can produce the best submission in one weekend?

Three problems I can see with a time-based approach:

1) I don't mind putting in a few hours here and there, but real life obligations would make it extremely difficult for me to dedicate an entire weekend to a contest.

2) I have several hundred thousand lines of custom code I've written over the last eight years that has never been made public. How would you know if I decided to reuse large chunks of it?

3) What's to stop a mud owner from getting their entire development team to work on the submission, and just pretending that they're one person? If the prize is something that benefits the whole mud, it could well provide the incentive for people to do this.

A size limit means people can put in the time when they've got it available, and offsets much of the advantage of code reuse and team development. The same with fixed goals, such as the MudMagic contests.

But basing it on time is too open-ended for my tastes.
18 Jun, 2010, Noplex wrote in the 63rd comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
1) I don't mind putting in a few hours here and there, but real life obligations would make it extremely difficult for me to dedicate an entire weekend to a contest.

This is true, but then again, how would we count 16K nowadays? If you use Ruby or Python does that count libraries? Am I allowed to use boost in C++, etc? There are limitations to every contests.

KaVir said:
2) I have several hundred thousand lines of custom code I've written over the last eight years that has never been made public. How would you know if I decided to reuse large chunks of it?

A git repository must be created at the beginning of the contest. We'll see all commits.

KaVir said:
3) What's to stop a mud owner from getting their entire development team to work on the submission, and just pretending that they're one person? If the prize is something that benefits the whole mud, it could well provide the incentive for people to do this.

Well, nothing of course, but once again a Git repository would show how much code is being committed. It can be fairly obvious if multiple people are working on a single project (code styles, etc).

Just like the original it is about what you can produce with the limitations provided. You're obviously still going to plan ahead. If you think you're going to be sitting in front of the machine for the whole weekend then you can be more ambitious, otherwise, you'll plan accordingly and go for something more creative.
18 Jun, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 64th comment:
Votes: 0
Noplex said:
This is true, but then again, how would we count 16K nowadays?

The same as last time I presume - it worked pretty well.

Noplex said:
If you use Ruby or Python does that count libraries?

The original 16K mud competition had five Python entries in the high-level category, along with one Perl mud and one Tcl mud. The rules stated that "You can only use the core libraries that come with the language", with the exception that "If your language of choices does not support sockets in its standard libraries, you can use an external library just for that".

However I would personally prefer to see a more goal-oriented contest, like those held by MudMagic.
18 Jun, 2010, Noplex wrote in the 65th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
However I would personally prefer to see a more goal-oriented contest, like those held by MudMagic.


I would rather this as well. I was merely stating an alternative to the 16K competition.
18 Jun, 2010, Runter wrote in the 66th comment:
Votes: 0
Regardless, I would like to see more competitions spring up.
19 Jun, 2010, Tyche wrote in the 67th comment:
Votes: 0
A discussion on different ways to describe characters has been spawned…
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