[MUD-Dev] State of the art?

[Andy Cink]

>So my question is something that sort of overlaps material that is in the
>FAQ, but not really. What do you think are the most important and/or
>influential muds, and why? What contributions did they make to the state of
>the art, or what significant muds owe a lot to them?
>
>-Raph

This got me thinking, is there a difference between "fun" and
"state of the art"? For example, maybe mud A is well coded,
has lots of fancy code, is extremely efficient, has lots of
buzz words (all the fancy technical stuff about databases
and such that goes right over my head :)) but is completely
boring to play.

Then we have mud B that's based on merc or envy or circle,
and has lots of clever ideas, spells, races, classes, as
well as interesting quests for the players, lots of items,
variety, etc, etc.

In terms of advancing the state of the art, it's entirely
possibility that the kudos would go to mud A. They found
lots of clever and advanced ways of making things happen.
Their groundwork would later allow future coders to do
things that mud B could never support. But the thing is,
mud A is a technological marvel but completely boring,
and mud B is a lot of fun, but technologically lacking.

Where is the middle ground, and who gets the credit? And
which mud would you rather play? I guess to build a good
mud, you need a balance of both advanced code, and good
old fashioned strong features. (And a strong world with
lots of things to interact with)

Personally, I'd much rather play the fun mud, than the
advanced mud. I would argue that it's more important to
build a fun game, than a technologically sophisticated
game. Yeah a mud might have a SQL database, full thread
support, but does it have any players? Is it fun? Still,
I look forward to hearing from people about the things
they've liked in the muds they've seen, and will be writing
my own reply under the original thread heading ;)

Andy


------------------------------------------------------
Head Coder/Designer of a nameless MUD
EARTH FIRST! We'll stripmine the other planets later.
Ranthor at earthlink.net