[DGD] Current state of MUD-dom

[Par Winzell]

Stephen Schmidt wrote:

> What's needed is a mud system (either a new driver, or DGD with
> a new mudlib - I believe the existing kernel can handle this
> with an http interface and enough graphics to survive in
> a web-ified environment. That will require changing some
> fundamentals about how LPMud works, in particular it will be
> hard to replace the long description of a room with a graphic
> image.

I am not at all sure MUDs have to relinquish their text-based approach 
to descriptions to survive. A pretty client can certainly make things 
more pleasant, and some illustrations make sense, but replacing room 
descriptions with art sounds like a costly endevaour with fairly dubious 
benefits. If I ever invest time into a MUD, I will continue to rely on 
the assumption that my target audience still enjoys the text medium.


> The problem with an http interface is that it doesn't handle
> two-way chat very elegantly. So some kind of support for that
> is also needed; maybe Java, maybe something more advanced.
> Some way that I can type "Mobydick shouts: The end is near!
> Repent!" and the other users in the same room as me get a
> message "Mobydick shouts: The end is near! Repent!" in real
> time.

I don't understand this paragraph. What's wrong with the way everything 
is done now? You'll need persistent connections, obviously; polling chat 
clients are horrible. If you are worried about firewalls, you can do 
what Skotos does; we run our persistent connection over port 443, which 
is open (unproxied) on many of the more lenient firewalls.

If the concern is to get the user into a chat space without irritating 
client downloads and the such, Java 1.1 still works decently. The Skotos 
strategy has been to offer such a client to get people into the game 
with as little fuss as possible, but to quickly encourage them to use 
either the IE-based plugin client or the Mozilla-based client which is 
based on XUL and JavaScript. If they are already using Mozilla, of 
course, you can go with that directly and skip the Java client.

Another launch approach is Java Web Start, which works quite well these 
days. If I had my choice at this point I would probably go with JWS, but 
then my main goal would not be to minimize the barrier of entry.


As for the larger conversation topic, I think the basic problem is that 
the overwhelming amount of work being done in the LPMud area is endless 
redundant reimplementations of trivial low level libraries that should 
have been standardized a decade ago. There is virtually no coordination 
in the LPMud world; it seems like every single good programmer whose LPC 
interest is peaking finds a new ancient mudlib to bring from the 1991 
era to the 1993 era, and it just STOPS there. I don't understand it.

Zell
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