[MUD-Dev] The impact of the web on muds

[Chris Gray]

[Caliban:]

[Lots of stuff snipped, but I'll touch on parts of it.]

One of the things that you touch on is fairly subjective. That is the
concept of the "mood" of the MUD, and the kind of things you as a player
want from a MUD. If you get that best from a well-written text MUD, where
your imagination provides the details and lets you enter the MUD world,
then by all means play in, and try to extend the possibilities of, the
text MUDs.

But, please keep in mind that other people work in different ways. When
I play a game, immersion simply doesn't happen. What I like doing is being
in control to the extent that I understand what I need to do in the world.
And, what I really like to do is explore. I like to see what is there, what
the builder's imaginations have come up with. My enjoyment of that is often
badly disrupted by the all-too-common mispellings, bad grammar, horrible
formatting, etc. My mind is too picky about the details to be able to ride
over them and figure out what the builder was trying to get at. My hope is
that with graphics, and a display engine that doesn't glitch, I won't have
that problem. With a pure polygon based engine (i.e. *no* bitmap frames),
I should get a display that doesn't disrupt me, and so hopefully get some
of the immersion that you already do.

On the technical issues, yes the couple of Meg for graphics and sound verus
the 1K or so for text does sound like a big difference. What I had always
envisioned is a MUD which requires a CD on the client machine. The big
stuff (models of the objects, monsters, etc.; textures, sounds, music
scores) would be on that CD, and the client engine would generate the
multimedia show from that and from much smaller dynamic stuff sent from
the server (possibly in the form of some kind of script). Think of the
scripts for a play, that say in very general terms what actions are to
happen, what lines actors say, what the music score is, etc. That's the
kind of information I see the server dynamically creating and shipping
to the client.

With a setup like that, the user could even customize things. You could
create your own modified model of the dragon, so it looks more like what
you think a dragon ought to look like. (There are some problems with
that, such as consistency of world events between client and server, but
I'll ignore those.)

And I agree, that we probably won't see anything like this soon. The CPU
power to do it should arrive in not too big a time, but the human resources
to set up a system that can do this, and to build a good world on top of
it, may not be forthcoming.

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA