[MUD-Dev] Re: Ugh, IS Diablo a mud?

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 22 Sep 1998 17:03:35 -0500 
Koster, Raph<rkoster at origin.ea.com> wrote:

> What about Lyra's Underlight? It's a mud in my mind. It has no
> NPCs at all.

<I'm not familiar with Underlight.  Will have to go dig that one up.>

Its probably also worth examining the MUDs that tend towards
non-MUDdom.  There seem to be three flavours of these:  glorified
IRC, heavy simulations, and pure gamist.  (Comments welcome)  Of
those only the pure gamist seems really interesting, with things
like Tron and a couple of the heavily mechanical non-RP battletech
games coming in there as well.  

For me a critical point that defines a MUD lies in the degree and
finesse with which I can affect the game world.  Its not a question
of size or the number of players (as long as its more than single
digits), but of detail.  If there is a cup on the table, is it a
reasonable guess that I should be able to pick it up, put it dowm,
drink from it, etc?  Its not required that all those things be
supported, or that I might be able to make a fire from logs, or dig
with a spade, or catch a fish with a worm, a hook, and a bit of
string, but if those *type* of defailed world-level interactions are
supported and expectable at some level the game has largely
satisfied my working definition of MUD.

DOOM, Quake, Diable, Descent et al have all the general requirements
of MUDs (multiplayer, more or less persistant world, etc) but all
also fail to have the detail support discussed above.  Tron is built 
directly atop a classic MUD base (LPC), supports most of the
familiar MUD commands (tell, shout, etc), but doesn't have a
persistent world, any concept of saved object states, etc, but
*does* support detailed control as above, once given the fact that
there are no teacups, saucers, logs, fish, worms, strings, etc in
the Tron world.

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