I'm curious how many other MUD hackers out there work on private projects just for fun. I have a serious penchant for grabbing random MUD distributions and either picking a feature to modernize and expand, or running the whole kit and kabodle through lint or other static analysis tools and fixing a lot of the cruft that shows up.

Some of this could probably be made useful (e.g., releasing the feature expansions as snippets), but most of it is done with full knowledge that I'm going to toss it out the window when I'm done. It's fun for me to gain better familiarity and practice with the tools and to get insight into how others implement their designs.

Anyone else?

These days, I don't really have enough time to do things "just for fun" without a clearer goal in mind. When I work on something, I try to do so with the intention of it being useful. It's not that I do things I don't enjoy in my spare time, it's just that given the choice between something that I'll throw away and something I'll release, I'm more likely to work on the thing I might release – or will use in some other project. I rarely (or maybe never, actually) write things fully intending to throw them out, unless I'm prototyping something.

Things were different a few years ago, though, when I spent more time on random things. I guess now I have little enough that I try to focus it more on things I'll find more interesting later on.

I've always been a hoarder, and hate throwing things away. Whenever I wanted to try something out, I'd usually try and turn it into a snippet. When I created a prototype for my combat system, I turned it into a public codebase release. When I created a poker snippet for the MudMagic coding competition, I spent ages trying to find a way to fit it thematically into my mud, because I didn't want the effort to be wasted :P

But I think it's a matter of personal taste. I know some people get most of their fun from tinkering with ideas.

I find the less time I have to play with them, the more ideas I seem to have :).

I've been wanting to push the latest flavor of AckFUSS out for awhile now; I got some features done that I wanted and things are clean and stable, however, I told myself I wouldn't until I had finished my side program to convert area files – so I could bundle it. Now that I'm working full time again, and overnight at that, there seems to be a spot less time to work on that side program while spending what daylight I have with my non-nocturnal family :D

Every project I do for myself is a throwaway project. I've never made a MUD for players or for releasing or anything other then the fact that I enjoy writing lines of code. I don't do it now and it clearly shows lately…

Anyways, everything I write is just garbage and I release it to the public to make fun of as they wish.