[MUD-Dev] Clients

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

At 09:22 PM 2/11/98 +0000, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
>
>By continuing to build muds with conventional text Telnet interfaces, it
>is certain that the hobbyist mud audience will not grow.  In fact it 
>will likely shrink.  The only reason it has grown is that by sheer numbers
>who have gain access to the internet.  Some have tried to compare this
>with the text adventure game phenomenon.  I don't agree.  

Text adventure games had one major feature that MUDs lack: you could learn,
play, and solve the average text adventure game in a week. Following this,
it was largely an easter-egg search, finding the amusing things like the
granite walls in Zork or the terrible Cthulhu-mythos puns in Lurking
Horror, and within a matter of a month or two you exhausted the
possibilities and were ready to move on. Luckily, a good text adventure
game could be built (using an existing parser like Infocom's) in that
period of time, so you could pick up a new one. 

In a sickening development, the complexity and development cycle of modern
games have increased dramatically while the attention span of the average
player has decreased sharply. Hence the drive toward games which can be
learned in a minute, played in a day, and then discarded -- such as Doom --
although networked play of games like Quake has strongly increased
replayability. 

Solutions? Um... maybe these aren't problems. Maybe they're design
criteria. ;)

>It's not a

>text vs. graphics popularity contest.  It's largely an obscure-kludgy-unix-
>command-line-babble interface vs. something more windows/lisa/x-like.
>It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We'll do the interface like its
>always been done and complain about the IQ of the rest of the I-net.

Well, you have to admit that the intelligence level of the average adult
American has declined quite rapidly since the eighties. There are thousands
of ways you could point the finger on this -- drugs in the 60's,
conspicuous consumption, poor school quality, television broadcasts
(daytime talk shows being strongly blamed on this score), single parent
families, rampant secular humanism, chemicals in the water and
preservatives in the food (for all you black-helicopter-conspiracy-theory
folks out there) -- but there's no one factor that really contributes to
it, and it certainly isn't universal. (I came out rather well, I think.) 

>I know, most everybody has their servers running on *nix, yet the majority
>of the mud playerbase use a GUI environment.  What's handy and familiar 
>for the server-author, is an utterly alien turn-off for the average user. 

Anyone given any real thought toward building a server ENTIRELY under NT,
with GUI server manager and administrative interface? It's a much more
robust solution than it once was, and another thought would be that with
the impending release of the BeOS for Intel we might be able to do
something over *there* as well.

I wonder if you could build an effective MUD using ActiveX, ASP, and SQL
Server. A lot of people seem to be trying to do one in Java. 

Hehehehe, VB-MUD. LOL

>Warning: Don't get the idea that I really "care" about the above.  I'm 
>not a crusader...just a quiet observer. <splurgh>  

Me, I'm a crusader. My latest crusade is spam. I'm for it. Am I a
masochist, or what?

>> It seems to relate rather well to the
>> graphics/text argument, as well: why text? Well, we've always done it that
>> way. Graphic MUDs? 
>
>Is there really LESS text in a Graphical mud?  

There sort of has to be, doesn't there? I mean, the graphics replace some
of the text, but you are correct in that there will always be SOME text. At
least until real time audio becomes feasible. 

Oh, yuck. Imagine a server that worked like those horrid laggy crackly
internet phone things. You type and click to do things, but to talk you
just yell into a microphone. Kill me now.

>Isn't this an unwarranted assumption? 
>Are Doom and Diablo responsible for this?

I must say, Quake in my opinion *is* a MUD -- it saves state (player
efficiency and frag count), permits a lot of simultaneous players (over
seventy on Base100), is programmable and customisable, and simulates a
world within which the players interact. I'd like to see a Quake level
emphasising the puzzle aspects of play which can be so readily simulated.
Some of the things American McGee is doing in his designs really are
inspiring, and I think there's real potential to produce some very cerebral
concepts and get a little farther from the "if it moves kill it"
philosophy... although there's certainly something to say for the
satisfaction of coming home from a job where you get the kinds of interface
design quandaries we do, slapping Q2 in the drive, and calling up a few
CRBots wearing the skin that looks most like your boss. ;)