The Zenith MUD Protocol draft is now officially available. Still just a draft, but it's out there.
I've yet to have any negative feedback on it (except for the original name, whose acronym was SMP), so I'm quite hopeful the protocol will be popular.
I've been put in charge of pulling together a gameplay spec and final storyboard for the Angry Pixels game project. That is, I'm like the ditor; I don't actually come up with the final concepts, just help everyone get it pulled together. This is good, because we rather hadn't bothered previously with this, and we rather needed to.
Hopefully I'll do a less lame job on this than I have for them otherwise. ^^;
Most everyone here should be familiar with Programs do one thing, and do it well. I think I realized why so many apps fail on that these days. In my AweMUD work, I had started looking at some of the needed features I hadn't implemented yet. One such feature was a reporting DB; for things like bug reporting, player abuse reporting, etc.
I spent a couple hours writing some DB interfaces; it ran off a simple text file, with a few methods for adding, querying, and removing entries. Eventually I realized the flat text file just really sucked for that work.
So next I do the smart thing, and start looking for some decent DB libraries. I wanted something BSD or MIT licensed. I found SQLite, which I'd looked at before, and thought it the perfect fit. Another hour later, I had a basic reporting system. The file storage was excellent, but the features rather lacked. It was a pretty piss poor bug/issue tracker. As I was adding the mail feature (to notify admins of new entries), I realized it would be pretty easy to just write a Perl script that took mail sent to a particular address, and insert bug/issue reports into a real issue tracker. And if I could do that, AweMUD didn't need it's own built in tracker.
I see where I went wrong. AweMUD is a MUD server. That's what it does, that's all it should do, and it will do it well. The problem I had, and that many others might be having, is that I thought that bug/abuse/etc. tracking was one of the things a MUD server has to do. If players can't report stuff from in the game, they might not bother at all. They need to be able to report stuff, but it isn't the MUD server that has to do all the tracking.
One just needs to remember features like that can, and should be, implemented externally. Let the tools work together. The only downside I see is that a complete AweMUD installation may take a little more work now, if you want the reporting abilities to work. Ah well.