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

[Richard Woolcock]

I'm going to reply to two messages in one, to save spam.

Andy Cink wrote:
> 
> At 04:24 PM 9/22/98 -0500, Raph Koster wrote:
> >So I got into a discussion on Usenet with a fellow named Jag about
> >whether or not Diablo was a mud. It started out because he wanted to
> >know if there was any difference between the following terms:
> >
> >mud
> >persistent world (PWOG)
> >massively multiplayer online rpg (MMORPG)
> >online rpg (ORPG)
> >online game
> >
> >The point made by Jag was that rebooting a Diku and starting a new game
> >of Diablo isn't really very different. Yet in my gut, I still think that
> >Diablo is not a mud, and a Diku is.
> 
> In my mind, there is one thing that would make something like
> a diku a mud, whereas a game like Diablo is not (in my mind,
> anyways) a mud. And that is permanency. I don't mean permanent
> towns, or permanent characters, but a permanent location that
> persists even when nobody is present.

My Diku doesn't.  The mud only bothers dealing with rooms that 
players or mobs are currently within (and the mobs vanish if left
alone for a while).

Make Nylander wrote:
>
> A DikuMUD environment is not persistent, either. When you
> restart the server, all objects, NPCs and exits between
> rooms in the world get reset to their pre-defined defaults.

My Diku *is* persistant.  If you kill someone, their corpse
remains in the room forever* (slowing rotting away, eventually
becoming a skeleton) unless someone removes it.  There is no
pre-defined default as such (although I have various backups
of the world, in case I want to change back to before half of 
a particular forest got chopped down).

*At least this is how it appears from a player's point of view.
 In fact, the corpse is saved, and loaded up the next time someone
 enters the room - getting renamed to rotting/rotten/skeleton
 depending on how long it has been lying in the room.

[snip]

> In my opinion, what is a MUD is defined by the technique
> and purpose of implementation, not by attributes of the running
> environment (e.g. the size of object database).

I really don't think there IS any clear way to specify what a MUD
is.  The original MUD was a Multi-User version of Dungeon, so I
suppose you could say that any multi-user text-based game is a mud.
As far as graphical muds go, I still tend to think of them as muds,
although of a different 'species' so to speak.

KaVir.