chapter 9 "The Future" In the late 1990's, Descartes @ Nightmare released a public domain version of the Nightmare lib called Dead Souls, and pulled the official Nightmare lib from distribution. They were very similar, but Dead Souls lacked documentation. His final realease of Dead Souls was 1.1. As you must know by now, from reading the FAQ's (you *did* read the FAQ's, right?) at some point I lost my mind and decided to dust off that old lib, get it working, and get people using it so that I could have other people to discuss LPC code with. I can honestly say I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I mean, when I started, it sure *seemed* like things "mostly worked". The hard part was just getting it installed, right? It's now been slightly over a year since I started realizing that fixing A broke B, and fixing B broke A and C, etc, ad nauseam. My guiding principle was "get it working" with a corollary of "make it work well". My main aim was bugfixes, but where a feature gap made it obviously difficult for a beginner, I attempted to address it with a new system. Hence, admintool, QCS, SNOOP_D, etc. In other cases, a new system was trivially easy to add and its absence was an unreasonable burden, such as SetAction for rooms. Sometimes a new system comes from my desire to have a tool that makes my own life easier while fixing the lib, such as the medical tricorder, remote control, and the laboratory facility east of the Creators' Hall. For the most part, though, my main focus has been fixing stuff, not adding stuff. The intention has been to release Dead Souls 2.1 as a version that is as free of pain as possible, as clear of bugs as reasonable, and as fun and useful as 1.1 should have been. Today it is May 18 2006, and I think that I am very close to that landmark. Today I am at the point where the list of bugs consists of minor annoyances, of the kind that players would hardly ever take note. The future for Dead Souls I see as lots of fun for me. I yearn to be free of doing nothing but fix fix fix. As great as Dead Souls is, it needs major new systems to make it fully competitive with the libs currently out there. Adding these new systems is the kind of fun challenge I'd really meant to be doing all along, but suckered myself out of. Post 2.1 I intend to concentrate on things like mounts, vehicles, naval/vehicle combat, 3d travel, extending virtual rooms, player-independent world persistence, and lots of other fun stuff. I'm not in the habit of making promises about the lib. As the Dead Souls community knows, I prefer to just *make* a new system than talk about it. I wanted to share these plans with you, though, so that you know that Dead Souls development continues apace, and great things are on the horizon.