This page is a work in progess. It will answer new questions as they arrive in the devteam mailbox.
Q: Where did this idea come from?
A: It was the seed of an idea to make a quickie master room installer for those moments when I wanted to fire up a game for the sheer hell of it. This happens a lot, as I like to take new versions of servers and compile them on my system. I hate having to dig the support code I want out of 3 different master rooms, so I wrote a small installer that worked on TinyMUSH 2.2.x.
What happened from there was that I realized that a lot of people wanted to toss in a set of base globals and get on with the creative stuff. They wanted this on other platforms than TinyMUSH, too. At the time, to do that you either had to slink around softcode archives for all the pieces, code your own from scratch, or get MIAM.
The MIAM option was fine for MUX users, if you could get it debugged enough to work at all, but left Penn and TinyMUSH games in the cold. Thus, I got another wild hair and asked why we couldn't just make a cross-platform system that could hit all three platforms and let people take the base code and make it pretty. Since no one told me that I was totally nuts, I took my little installer file and started grabbing other pieces. People donated softcode to the effort. The rest is mostly history.
Q: So is this like MIAM?
A: Only in respect to it being a quotable package that will eventually offer a bit more than 'the basics'. The idea of softcode packages isn't all that new, though it seems that the politics of the MUSH community precludes them ever getting built. A lot of coders are either a lot of hot air, or are 'not a good fit', so a lot of games suffer from hacked up master rooms and really crappy softcode in them. MIAM and MUDCore happened as individual efforts and are aimed at specific platforms and/or genres, where SGP has been a group effort from the start. Cross-platform viability and genre-independence are our primary goals, though any code that is works on TM 2.2/MUX 2/Penn/Rhost qualifies for inclusion in the main branch.
Q: Why is it called 'SGP'?
A: It didn't have a name for a long time, then got dubbed BiGGiE(I was never really sure what it meant, but knew it had something about 'bovine' in it). It was renamed Bovine Game Globals Project(BGGP), but we found that cumbersome mouthful and renamed it Bovine Globals Project(BGP). After some months of casual work, and the advent of MUX 2.0 and the Codebase Project and a few madmen who wanted to code, but not code for a specific game, it got renamed yet again. Sandbox Globals Project(SGP) won out because it was an effort of more than just me and was widely developed by people who hang at The Sandbox.
Q: Who all is involved?
A: Lots of folks at varying levels. I fired the imaginations of a few coders I knew and let them play around. Many of them accepted the offer and donated code, advice, and technical expertise. Hilikiradi took on the task of modernizing the ancient and venerable PLACES code so that it used the capabilities of more modern servers. BEM donated the components of the cgen. Others followed suit for various reasons, some of those being a desire to get people wanting to make new games to quit pestering them for softcode.
Q: You really got this code working on PennMUSH, Tiny 2.2.x, MUX, And RhostMUSH?
A: Yes. Yes we did. The actual differences between platforms are terribly small, since they all basically come from the same root. We were able to account for differences of flags and such by building some minimal switching into the installer files that checked the server versions. From there, it was pretty much a done deal. Brazil, Talek, Ashen-Shugar, and Javelin have been particularly helpful with expertise on their servers and have made it much easier to get things working on those platforms. Without the support of the server maintainers, SGP would have a lot harder time accomplishing its goals.
Q: What about TinyMUSH 3?
A: We aren't testing there and aren't planning to port the system to that platform. The reason is because the TM3 maintainers simply haven't been very helpful and refused to take bug reports when we found problems with the server(like it crashing when loading code or typing '+who'). Given the broad-based support from the other devteams, we saw no reason to continue attempting to work with the TM3 maintainers.
Q: I have a copy of SGP in my master room that someone loaded for testing purposes. There are no helpfiles or anything. What do I do?
A: SGP was released to a handful of people for testing purposes prior to 26Jun00. I am betting that these games no longer exist, but just in case, I provide helpful advice(tm). Personally, I wouldn't rely on that code for anything, since there were a load of bugs fixed for the actual beta release. If the code you have was installed before 26Jun00, then you need to save any customizations and then nuke and reinstall the SGP code, then add the customizations back to the code as required.
Q: But I'm not a coder!
A: Well, you probably need to get a little bit of code savvy before you run a MUSH in the first place. I know it sounds harsh, but there is only so much a code package can do if you can't do the basics for yourself.
Q: I hear there is a character generation in the works. I really need one for my game that does X, Y, and Z.
A: The first answer is yes, there is a cgen. It is a BASIC system for setting stat attributes to character objects and number of functions related to character sheet code. It is not designed to work with a specific genre, though it should certainly be possible to get it to work with most published game systems. With a bit of preparation, and about 5-10 hours, you should be able to get it to work for you.
However, we stress that there will be no provided walkthrough statting areas provided. There will be many decisions for the god, coder, and game staff to make in regard to how to implement the code on a given game. This is how it should be. This is also why you will have to have a competent coder on your game to succeed.