Magical MOO environments: HHCL and enCore
Posted: June 25th, 2002 | 1 Comment »As a prelude to a big piece I want to write about why MOO systems are so
cool, here’s something I was pointed at a couple of years ago:
HHCL is a British advertising
agency, a breed not normally known for pushing the boundaries of 10-year-old
Internet cults. Any doubts I had about the effectiveness of a text-based interface
for this kind of site have been pushed aside by their
reasons for trying it
and the fact that it’s several orders of magnitude more innovative than most of the
Flash-based shite I get pelted with these days.
(Darrell Berry, HHCL’s chief techie, mailed me the other day to remind me of the link -
I’m hoping to collar him soon and hear about his experiences)
But, irrelevant of whether it works for this particular use, it’s incredibly
cool. People have been trying to overlay web interfaces to MOO for years
(the Sprawl/ChibaMOO tried it back in ’95), but this is the only one I’ve seen that
makes sense, bringing the best from both web and command-line mediums. The
software is enCore, created
by the University of Texas for their educational MOO, Lingua.
(They even wrote a
book about how they did it) The latest version of the software appears
to rock even harder – it’s even got a freaking
program
editor.
Well thanks for the praise.
A couple of clarifications in order, I guess:
First, I’ve left HHCL and set up my own business (although my good friends at HHCL are still clients of ours)
And second, I think hhland shows great promise, but it’s really only a prototype of what it could be — there’s a lot of beta code in that site that we built ourselves or glued into enCore from a number of other open source projects — including integration with HHCL’s main servers for easy document management (the document backend of hhland is simply some folders on an NT domain server), integration with Windows messaging (page someone inMOO and they get a popup message on their PC whether or not they are logged into hhland) etc. etc.
All the above works and works well, but the system is definitely nowhere near as smooth and simple as it should be. We’ve learned a lot, and I hope to actually find the time to share that learning back to the community some quiet day — possibly a few drinks with Yoz might help start that process!
If anyone has any questions about anything to do with hhland and why we thought it worth so many sleepless nights in build, email me at darrell@ku24.com…