bussetechsoftware studio

You can build and walk: verbs, movement, and the compatibility harness

Last time GenMURK became a place — two terminals, one room, presence and speech. This session gave players hands. A typed line now becomes a change in the world of record: dig The Vault, open vault = The Vault, create a silver chalice, lock use vault = #4. Standing in a room you control, you build; you go through an exit and everyone in the room you left sees you depart, live. It is the ordinary, tactile core of a MUD/MUSE — and it runs end to end through the same audited, row-secured world model the engine uses, on localhost, and nowhere else.

What landed

  • A command dispatch pipeline. Typed input → parse → dispatch → either the ordering domain (speech, presence) or the world of record (building, movement). Built-in verbs are ordinary code and carry no fuel budget; only softcode is metered — that boundary is now a visible line in the code, and the $-command path (a later session) slots in beside it as the one metered branch.
  • Building verbs (GM-R7). dig, open, create, set, name, describe, lock — each respecting ownership and the capability tiers, each an audited write to the world of record. Opening an exit requires controlling the room you open it in; a plain builder builds in rooms they dug, and wiring exits from shared rooms is a wizard’s job — the same shape the reference had, without inventing its room-flag machinery yet.
  • Movement and name matching (GM-R6 / GM-R12). go/enter/leave, and the resolution that turns me, here, a #dbref, or a partial name into an object — scoped to what you can actually see. An exit’s lock gates who may pass; another player failing that lock is now a real, tested refusal.
  • The proof. A scripted session — dig two rooms, open exits both ways, create and lock a thing, have a second player fail the lock, move so presence fires — runs green through the real Postgres-backed stack, with the durable arrive/depart record checked. Nothing is hosted; the acceptance run is a local gate, exactly like the sandbox proof.

The compatibility harness (GM-R22)

A returning user from the early-90s reference should onboard with minimal relearning — that is the STEERCO minimum bar. This session built the harness that makes it testable: the player-facing command surface is now data, and a conformance runner drives each command’s syntax through the real parser and checks it lands in the right behavior class.

Here is the honest part. The canonical reference command list is still a preservation task — captured separately, not yet finished. So every command in the harness today traces to one of GenMURK’s own requirements of record, not to anyone’s memory of the wider MUSH family; the runner rejects any name that can’t be traced that way. Coverage reads 100% of a provisional set, and the harness says so loudly. The day the canonical list lands, it drops straight in as data and coverage becomes a real number — with the gaps named, not hidden. Where the sandbox forces a difference from the reference (it always wins), the divergence is recorded and rendered for returning users on the new compatibility page.

Still localhost, still nothing hosted — the running world lives behind the sandbox gate, and hosted exposure is a later, separately-authorized step. What changed is that GenMURK is now a world you can build in, and a compatibility promise that has teeth.