What is the definition of a 'stock codebase'? How many code changes do you have to have to break free from that definition of 'stock'? Do code changes matter? Can you be considered not stock just by unique, well-written areas?

When is a MUD stock? At 50 changes? 100? 500+? Does it matter?

Your opinions?

- Zenn

Stock codebase means that no non-trivial changes were made. Trivial changes to a codebase aren't really enough to consider it not-stock. Same for areas.

Basically to lose "stock" status, non-trivial changes must be made.

I don't think it matters for anything other than advertisement purposes, e.g. whether or not you can claim to be original.

Which still leaves entirely open to interpretation what exactly constitutes a "trivial" change, both on code and areas. But overall, I think David's right that the term itself really only applies to advertising anyway, whether you're advertising that your mud is non-stock or you're advertising a non-stock codebase distribution…

I think that it's the kind of thing that might not have a precise definition, but rather a "I know it when I see it" judgment. For some things it's actually pretty easy: you can clearly quantify how many of your rooms are original. If you have 10,000 rooms and 5,000 of them are default rooms, then you are 50% stock. It's more complicated for code; I think that if you added just a few skills and changed strings you still qualify as stock. The honest thing to say could be that you are stock with features added, for example. I think that relatively few MUDs could truly claim to be far from stock in terms of their code.

But again it all depends on why the claim is being made…

I'm pretty sure that AFKMud can lay legitimate claim to being "not stock" if you're looking at it in terms of Smaug. A pretty clear cut case. What's not so clear cut is something more like FUSS, where it's been mostly bug fixes and minor feature improvements. I'd say anything less than the degree of change between stock Smaug and FUSS would be stretching believability.

I agree about AFKMud and also about less than FUSS being almost certainly stock. Actually, I think that FUSS is not really all that stock anymore, especially due to things like the weather system. In some sense the weather system should not have been in the FUSS base if you take the name literally: not due to its quality or anything like that but simply to the fact that it is not stock at all (and so arguably is not a "fix" on stock because it wasn't really a bug in stock to begin with). Other features are similar (the Lua scripting language would have been one of them). It seems to me that such extensions would be more appropriate in a new branch of the code, like "improved SMAUG" or something like that. But that's neither here nor there at the moment.

IMO no, but you could have "a stock mud with an original world", just as you could have "an original mud with a stock world".


Unfortunately there's nothing stopping people from saying anything they like in their adverts. The phrase "highly modified" has become almost synonymous with "stock clone" as far as mud adverts are concerned.


However AFKMud itself is a stock codebase. Such is the drawback of releasing your code; you turn a unique mud into a stock codebase.

True. I don't think anyone was trying to deny it created a new generation of stock. Just that when compared with its ancestry, it's not stock anymore. Someday someone will create a MUD using it, develop it, change it, do new and different things with it, and possibly release the results. Then they'll no longer be a stock AFKMud, but will be a stock whatever.

Oh, as I told you, stock, in my opinion, which people I've talked to agree with, is a MUD that hasn't changed that much from the original. Unimportant changes such as modifiying a greeting, fixing typos, adding in a few snippets, don't really make you not stock.

Sure, my MUD is a bit on the stock side in terms of areas, but in terms of code, we have a lot of different things. But the stock stuff is still there, we just add, delete, and modify. While Webster might define stock as "changed from the original", in my opinion, that's not what it means. My 2 cents.

Would you mind citing the whole Webster definition? I'm a little surprised by a definition that says "changed from the original"…

I was a bit confused as well, especially since Webster doesn't seem to agree with "changed from the original".

The only mention of "original" by the Webster definition of Stock is "the original (as a person, race, or language) from which others derive". I'd say that use could be reasonably applied to muds as well - when you put a copy of Mud X onto a download site, it becomes the "stock" codebase from which other muds are derived.

I would also consider a mud "stock" if it was an exact (or near exact) copy of the original stock codebase.

Also of possible interest:

http://www.iowa-mug.net/muddic/dic/S.htm...

http://www.iowa-mug.net/muddic/dic/S.htm...

I didn't say Webster gave that definition, I was speaking hypothetically. I said Webster "might define", not Webster "defines it as" and then quoted the definition. :)

Yes, Kavir. I didn't look at any definitions and didn't mean to imply that I did, but you basically said what I was trying to say. The original MUD is the source you download, and arguably a bit of "stock" will always remain in it, but I don't define stock as being one letter changed from the original, rather, significant changes or modifications that either hide/remove the original or drastically modify the original.

Uh, ok then, but that wasn't clear at all given the presence of "while"… :wink: It sounded like you were accusing Webster of making a definition that you disagreed with. (Incidentally, it's interesting to disagree with dictionary definitions! That goes against the whole point of having dictionaries…)

Banner(Who is referring to my MUD): Yes, we have installed snippets, changed our greeting & fixed bugs and typos.

We've also installed custom quest code, project tracking code, Survey & osay commands, ankle1 and ankle2 wearlocs, cwarn for copyover warnings, guide system for players, holonet transmitters, buildwalk for immortals..

Not to mention a ton of stuff that we didn't document.

I'd say we could claim to be 'slightly modified', at best. No, maybe we don't have the fancy 500+ code changes that you do, but does that make us stock? Not in my opinion.

Is FUSS stock FotE? No. And yet, what did they do -but- bugfixes, a few new systems, and snippets?

Er, the defintion of FUSS is: Fixed Up Stock Source. Lol. FUSS is nothing but the bare essentials, it's not a beefed up codebase like RiP or FoTE. And I wasn't referring to your MUD, I was referring to the handful of mud owners/coders out there that do the described and claim to be completely original.

Well, err, sort of…

Uh oh.

Incoming Samson…

*ducks*

I suppose that all depends on one's definition of the bare essentials these days :)

As for FUSS, technically it stands for Fixed Up Smaug Source, though the alternate of Fixed Up Stock Source fits as well, and there were at one time plans to include things from other branches of the Merc tree. That never got very far though because nobody outside of Smaug was ever interested in joining up to launch a Rom FUSS, or a Merc FUSS, or whatever.