A perspective out of time - the mudreport document

[claw at null.net]

On 03/21/97 at 04:23 PM, Nathan Yospe <yospe at hawaii.edu> said:

>The document Chris mentioned (See Gods) turned out to be a somewhat
>dated and extremely enlightening piece of work. 

It should also be read with the awareness that it was written as a
marketing pice to sell MUD2.  Its pretty obvious when you read the
MUD2 section, and Bartle makes no bones of it, but it does lead to a
lot of damning with faint praise and glossed over features of
competitors.

>As I didn't come into
>the world of MUDs until late 1994 (having tried Deeper Trouble at the
>behest of a then DT wiz in 1993 and having found it lacking) much of
>what the document (UK centric and dated ~1990, it appeared... also
>phone centric, with little significance taken to the internet) was
>new to me, and rather interesting, expecially in light of the
>discountive predictions for LP and TinyMUD lines (and we all know
>what the real breakdown is, sad to say... LP, Tiny, and Diku, a cheap
>hardcode clone)

As I've probably mentioned here before I started with dial-up MUDs
(Shades and SXMUD/MUD1 specifically), not knowing that anything like
the 'net even existed.  I worked a chunk with Pip Caudrey (MirrorWorld
et al) on most of the early dial-up MUD servers.

Heck, at that time we were talking dreamingly of setting up PSS
connections to the US so them bloody yanks could access our games in
England...

>I find it interesting how many advanced concepts were being tackled
>even back then (though their willingness to give credit for as yet
>unaccomplished claims was amusing) compared to now...

Yeah right.  Care to comment on Medeivia and Vryce's vaunted claims
for all the things he does "that nobody has ever done before".  (sic) 
Or all the other DIKUs running without credits, the endless new MUD
advertisements claiming that they are the first ever to implement
global channels, auctions, rolling resets, or some othre age-old
drivel.

Nothing has really changed on that score.  Its just the cast of
characters was a lot smaller back then.

>...where I suspect
>we (the members of this list) make up a sizable portion of the
>groundbreaking efforts. What exactly happened? I know some of you
>have been involved in this for longer than I. Any thoughts?

Very few MUD server authors manage to stick with the effort long
enough to come out with a professional product.  Most end up married,
with kids, and a job that conspire to convince them that MUDding is no
longer that important.  Look at it this way:

  How many MUD servers can you think of that were developed by people 
  __NOT__ in college?  Next up of course is to count the percentage of

  games set up an run by non-college students, and running on
non-school 
  equipment.  

Even for the sites that don't have a .edu domain, there are a gawd
awful lot of them that are really just DNS entries pointing inside of
a college domain (cf cold.org).

>I suppose, from the perspectives provided in the documents, that most
>of it has been done before, if crudely, and often as part of a failed
>package. Mention of discreet gridding and coordinate systems,
>economics, and sophisticated language implementations are made... and
>yet there are Dikus out there, and most of the mentioned muds are
>gone (except MUD1, MUD2, Dirt, Shades, and some of the Tinys and
>LPs... none of which have particularly impressed me.) 

Almost all of the source mentioned was proprietary.  Few to none of
the original authors continued into the internet or net-connected
server world.  Of course almost all the games mentioned are English
(the original hotbed of MUD development), and had very little to no
exposure to the rest of the world.

Ergo.  There was no cross-pollination.  The not-invented-here syndrome
bit big time.  Most had never even heard of the English efforts, or
even thought that anyone might have ever attempted anything in the
area before.  Heck -- why do you think its so tough for the DIKU crowd
to realise that most of the features they are so gawdamned proud of as
examples of ace programming by their pet Imps can be done by a dead
drunk LP Imp crushing his sotted face into the keyboard as he falls
over unconcious?

>Or was the
>document naive or simply viewing through lenses of a less discerning
>nature than we are today? 

Not really.  It paints a slightly rosy picture of the state of the art
at that time (which was pretty crude all told), as a way of making
MUD2 seem even rosier as a diamond among mere gems as vs a shinier
pebble among dull stones.  There was very little to no polish in games
then.  Originality however was at an all time high -- there were no
two games alike.  NIH ruled rampant -- unfortunately causing most of
the advances to die where they were born.

Things are a lot glossier now.  Games tend to be more consistant,
slicker, more of the corners are painted, the grammar is more often
correct, the parsers actually attempt to do real work, the MUD worlds
are a lot more complex, and they're more stable.  (We thought a game
that had to be rebooted once a day was doing pretty damned well). 
Things are a LOT slicker now.  

However the rate of change has also fallen off.  MUDs were constantly
and rapidly advancing back then.  Most MUD attempts had star-high
goals (as you read), ran on bottom-end hardware is high school kid's
bedrooms (most of us MUD server authors were between 14 and 19 years
old), and were convinced that they would be the ones to achieve them,
beating out all others.  There were people working on full AI's for
MUD mobiles, fully interactive worlds, OO, and all that rot.  

Frankly, now the public MUD advancement push seem to be mostly for a
gorier message than, "The cityguard *TOTALLY* obliterates you with his
slash!"  Its been a long time since I've seen a MUD author come up
with something radically new, tho there have been some who tried
(Stephan White, Dave Engberg, etc).  But I see very few new apples on
the tree and an awful lot of apple polishing going on.  Its now the
game of having a slightly spiffier version of what everyone else has
too under the excuse that users want familiar games with familiar
areas so they won't get lost.

Why is it the only truly original, non-variation-on-a-theme, MUD I can
think of within the last 3 - 4 years is Tron?  Bloody hell, even MUD++
is attempting to be Merc clone, and Mordor and Circle didn't even try
to have a new idea -- they just aped the flow. 

</peeve>

>Whatever the case... somehow we ended up
>with Nightmare LP, Circle, and ROM. Bleah.

Sad, isn't it?

<<Sorry the french above>>

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...