[DGD] just out of curiosity

[Felix A. Croes]

"Wim van der Vegt" <wim at vander-vegt.nl> wrote:

> 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.

The arguments against graphical games have changed little over the years.
But still, text muds are dying.  We can blame that on supercifiality and
herd mentality, but there are other factors at play.

Let me focus on one of them.  One thing that long puzzled me is the
lack of uptake of DGD's more advanced features in the LPmud community.
Even essential capabilities such as persistance through snapshots have
been more or less ignored.  I came to the conclusion that the period of
great growth for LPmuds was enabled by an influx of competent programmers,
who were attracted to LPmud when it was cool technology.  For them, the
evolution of the technology led away from text muds, to graphical muds
and to LPC as a generalized scripting language (Pike).

Note that I am talking about the influx of new developers.  There is
also the issue of students with a lot of free time on their hands
becoming professionals with a family to support, but as long as they
are replaced by new students, this would not be a problem.  Alas, the
competent programmers are gone, and they are not coming back.  It is
more difficult now for text muds to evolve into graphical muds than it
was in the mid 90s.

This in spite of new enabling technologies such as HTML5 and websockets.
Web browsers with good javascript support are as ubiquitous now as
telnet used to be, and could, even for text muds, enable step-by-step
improvements such as separate map and inventory screens.  Best of all,
since it would all be happening in the browser, from the user's point
of view there is no client.

But I am certain that no text mud player will be persuaded. :)

What now for DGD?  From a technological point of view, DGD is an
object-oriented database management system.  It has advanced features
such as atomic functions and fast, easy upgrading of LPC code without
taking the server down.  There is a future for DGD in the cloud.

Regards,
Felix Croes