[DGD] just out of curiosity

[Ragnar Lonn]

I agree that the depth of most MUDs that have been around a while are 
way beyond WoW and other 3D games/worlds, including programmable ones 
like Second Life. But this is not because the textual medium is better 
than the graphical one (it is just different). It is because MUDs have 
been around a long time and have managed to harness the power of the 
creative community in ways that the 3D worlds have not - yet.

Those of you who have been around a while will remember the old 
AberMUDs. Content there was very far from the quality you'll see in a 
well-run MUD today. Graphics and 3D complicates things, yes, but saying 
"it is too complicated/hard, it will never work" is such a whiny 
attitude, IMO, and completely baseless - textual MUDs are incredibly 
complex today compared to what they used to be, and that development 
hasn't stopped. They are getting more complex by the day.

Going from textual to graphical is evolution. It provides a new user 
experience/immersion and opens up the market to a much larger audience. 
A larger audience means a larger recruiting pool for content creation 
talent, and also more incentive for content creators to get into the 
game (so to speak - to start creating content, I mean). Again, just look 
at the crappy (sorry, but that's my opinion) example of 2nd Life. They 
have managed to get millions of users, despite the fact that their 
solution performs rather poorly and their world is a chaos of blinking 
signposts where you couldn't find a cool atmosphere if your life 
depended on it.

Textual is great, but it is a small niche. Graphical is mainstream, 
which offers huge potential if you don't screw things up like 2nd Life 
and forget that a creative community needs direction.

   /Ragnar



On 09/13/2012 09:14 PM, Wim van der Vegt wrote:
> Hi,
>   
> FAYI, A long ago (file timestamps date back to 1995) there was already a
> nice client called Pueblo (<http://www.chaco.com/>) that integrated 3D
> client-side graphics with lpc (and dgd). It used html & vrml to render
> and animate rooms. It had a nice demos like of solving the chess queens
> problem in lpc. Much to my suprise it's now opensource
> (<http://pueblo.sourceforge.net/>), guess I did look ito it for it since
> 2005.
>   
> The problem I see with 2D and 3D graphics is that most programmers
> (including me) are not graphical designers and it's that design that is
> hard and takes long to get right and in the end determines if the user
> plays it more that a couple of minutes.
>   
> Personally I hardly play muds anymore (was a bit too addicted to one and
> just had to stop). But the textual nature is just a part of the learning
> curve and once past that they suck a player into gameplay just as much
> (and maybe even more) then Warcraft. The depth of the muds I played was
> far beyond Warcraft.
>   
> It's the first part of that learning curve that imho kept off a lot of
> players (and not the depth, storylines etc.).
>   
> In the end, I still have a soft spot for Dgd (must update sources).