[DGD] just out of curiosity

[Wim van der Vegt]

Hi Ragnar (and others),
 
I Could not agree more!
 
Graphical MMO's are very slowly growing beyond their current simplicity
of quest going like 'bring this item from a to b' and 'slash n identical
monsters roaming around nearby'.
 
The only thing IMHO MMO's brought new is massive dungeon raid type of
gameplay (but still these monster behave very predictable). Slowly MMO's
like Guildwars are creating NPC's that adapt to the crowd facing them,
making it more fun to play and give the game more depth. The social part
of MMO games is as important as it was in traditional muds.
 
Graphical is the way but it's also where the big money is (not only to
earn but first to pay on wages of designers). Guildwars II took more
then two year (acconding to my kids) to create (with already a solid
base) and how long have we been waiting on successors of some Blizard
games. I think mud's are more 'hobby' type of project of work where
MMO's are big business. And lets not forget, there are not that many
successfull MMO's (still) around. But a lot of illegal/private Warcraft
servers share the same 'hobby' like character of MUD's with enthousiatic
admins.
Having tried 3D game creation environments like Unity3D I can say, mud
are easier to program (to be exact, the programming is the least of the
problems, decent 3D [animated] models are the problem).
 
So I think a real win might be if tools like DGD/Hydra could be used to
create decent looking 2D/3D games without to much knowledge of graphical
design.
 
I also think people are a it more superficial and most of them flock in
herd. It's that and lack of a decent span of attention (the zapping
culture) that perhaps drives people into these MMO's. Today people zap
from one killer app/game to the next.
 
What i found very refreshing recently was Diablo-III's mix of single and
multiplayer (just open your private game for a while, invite some
players to solve a problem and continue). For the rest the game was the
usual boring kill them all. But it was the mix or almost borderlessness
of single and multiplayer that was interesting.
 
As for DGD, I wonder what exact type of application Felix sees for
Hydra. It's surely powerfull enough to run chat, messaging services and
multiuser games (altough there are alternatives like photon that are
essentially object mirroring servers that can serve multiple game
types). I personally think an integration into Unity3D as back-end
server would be nice (they have a very rudementary server).
-- 
Wim van der Vegt
On Sep 14, 2012 09:03 "Ragnar Lonn" <prl at gatorhole.se> wrote:
> 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).
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