[MUD-Dev] Re: Why did it take years?

[Bruce]

On Tuesday, October 27, 1998, James Wilson wrote:
>This is quite a different design goal than "we'll write something that
>kicks MOO and Cold's butts", which appears to be the goal of MUQ. Maybe
>MUQ does end up kicking ass after ten years of development, but it's not
>necessarily the a good place to go to pilfer small sharp tools that can be
>readily glued into some alien systems.


What makes a successful server?

On the merits that I consider, I would look at Cold and Muq as failures (to
date, not necessarily for the rest of time), and MOO as a partial success.

A successful server isn't just one that has a really good driver portion.
Good applications must be built on top of it.  I'd expect it to be in wide
(or prominent) use.  Sure, Cold has ColdCore and a commercial use or three.
I don't know who uses Muq.  But, it isn't just what exists on the server
side.  Client-side tools are important as well in this day and age.  MOO has
a huge number of users, lots of different applications.  It is used by
researchers.  It has been the testbed of some really cool client side work
(cf TkMOO and TWin, both previously mentioned here).

 - Bruce