It would have the following advantages:
- Better support for version control systems - as every script is a separate file, people could collaborate on a system without tromping over each other's changes.
- Ability to share a system between mudlet profiles - for example, you could have a UI that's common between each of the IRE games, and whenever you make changes to it, the changes propagate to all of them.
- Edit scripts with an external editor - whilst the built-in lua code editor is not too bad, external editors/IDEs can do so much more.
Triggers, aliases and buttons could take the form of lua files that define certain variables that are carefully imported, eg:
It would be possible to edit these external files from within the mudlet script editor, and every time you save your changes in the editor, the changes would be written to the files.
For commercial efforts (which I don't do, but can sympathise with), you could have precompiled lua chunks that are loaded in as scripts.
So, in short, I think it's a good idea, and I'd be happy to have a go at adding it in my own fork of mudlet, here. Would anyone else be interested in this feature? Are there any other things that you would request as part of it? Can anyone see any problems with it? Has anyone tried to do this before?