I hate typing code. I don't want to do more of it than I have to, in this respect I'm no different from most other programmers. I'm also lazy, I read somewhere that a good sysadmin ought to be lazy, if given the choice to spend 2 hours doing something by hand or spending 8 hours to build a utility that did the same thing, the good sysadmin chooses the lazy way - building an utility that does the work for him... :-) The project is founded on the observation that a majority of the source code files in an LP mud are laid out in a very similar way, it's only the values of the parameters to the functions that are different. There ought to be some good possibilities for timesaving by hiding a large part of the typing behind a series of forms. I also hope that builders will find themselves with more time writing good and interesting descriptions when they don't have to type repetitious code.

The name LPC Builder comes from the design goal of being a tool for MUD builders who write and create on LP Mud's.

LPC Builder is a code generator. Its made up of a number of "designers", a series of forms with which the user sets the parameters to the most commonly used function calls in LPC. The ambition is to provide code generation for all major object types but not necessarily for all possible function calls. The vast majority of LPC rooms, for example, uses only a portion of the possible function calls. If LPC builder can cover the common ones and spare the builder of typing repetitious code it has done its job.

It's not an editor. LPC Builder is not meant to replace an programmers editor (such as vi, emacs or jedit), the code pane has some few very basic editing capabilities but it's assumed that the user uses a text editor to put some finishing touches to the LPC source code generated by LPC Builder. For example, you may want to use a code beautifier to indent the code the way you want it. Also, please note that LPC Builder cannot upload files to a mud, but there are plenty of editors who are able to do so.

For the beta release, plans are to include support for two more mudlibs. The beta will also include support for most of the objects you can create with the LandLib. The delta release will not include any features beyond what is planned for the beta.

For the next major release we will include internationalization support, printing functionality and possible syntax highlightning. A general overhaul of the code is also planned. For release 3.0 plans are still very vauge, perhaps support for upploading and downloading files to the mud?

The present version is 0.5 alpha, it was released on June 27, 2003

LPC Builder is a Java application. It's developed with Borland JBuilder PE, plus a few other tools. It uses and requires JDK 1.4  LPC Builder has been tested on Linux, Solaris, Windows 98 and Windows 2000.

 LPC Builder is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. LPC Builder is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with LPC Builder; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

Please send bug reports, comments and the like to: peter.brink@brinkdata.se