[DGD] Current state of MUD-dom

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004, Bart van Leeuwen wrote:
> > 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.

The problem, I think, is that they were never quite standard.
Everyone's room.c was just a little different, object.c was just
a little different, combat was different, guilds and spells and
races were way different. Hence none of the code was interchangable.
No one was willing to use someone else's room.c to save some time.
Partly this was pride. Not so much people unwilling to share - code
that wasn't game content was usually not too hard to come by - but
no one wanted to use vanilla TMI-2. They always wanted to customize
the code in some way to fit their game ideas. Once they did it, that
was the end of having a common low-level library to share.

I agree that it'd be great if we had this, I just think that while
as a community we want this, as individuals most of us don't.

> I get the impression that many newer potential players end up wanting huge
> environments with lots of people, or something graphical, and the smaller
> muds out there that survive and do well usually have an in part older and
> relatively fanatical playerbase.

I concur. Having good code matters very little to players, and
having good content doesn't matter all that much. Having a good
social environment is what really hooks people in. That can mean
chatting, that can mean a good game structure (the old Genocide
was the canonical example of just having a fun game to play) or
other things. But people need to have some reason to log in and
stay logged in. Limb-oriented combat (the big rage among coders
when I was last active) will not do that. Other players who are
fun to be around, for whatever reason, will.

TMI-2 debated starting a class in "how to build a good game" but
we gave it up when we realized none of us felt like we knew
enough about it to teach it. That's the biggest problem that
most new MUDs have, I think. What do you offer to get people
to come to your MUD, as opposed to hundreds of others, and
stay there once they get there?

Steve


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