[MUD-Dev] shrink wrapped mud development kit (fwd)

[Chris Jacobson]

On 4/20/00 8:52 PM, J C Lawrence (claw at cp.net) stated:

>Ideas? thoughts? Feedback? Do you think this would draw more
>people into the hobby? Allow people not as technical to develop
>and run their own mud?

If the source code was included, it might be worthwhile; without that, 
you are limiting your target audience.  How can new features be added?  
How can features be removed?  How can systems be tweaked/changed/adjusted?

Granted, you could provide plugin support (which requires people to learn 
more than is necessary to make changes - writing a DLL or plugin is 
harder than modifying source or adding a function), or you could provide 
variables to tweak (but no matter how many you provide, you'll never 
reach the flexibility that most of your audience will desire).  The only 
real solution (without giving away the source code) would be a scripting 
language in which the majority of the game is written already - but then, 
you ARE giving away a significant portion of the source already: the code 
written in the scripting language.

Also, targetting Linux (and I'm assuming you mean solely Linux-x86) and 
Win32 limits your audience as well.  Most MUDs are not run from Windows - 
until Win2K, windows was not stable for this; and Win2k is an expensive 
upgrade that most people may not make for a while.  (and it's stability 
is still something to be looked into).  Not all servers run Linux on an 
x86 platform.  Not all servers even run Linux (thank god).

Granted, you are targetting new users; but your audience may be far too 
small.  It may be in your best interest to target new users as well as 
existing users - otherwise, after using your package and finding it 
lacking, they will toss it aside (maybe even sell it off to someone else 
- Lost Sale!), and use one of the existing, source-available systems.

Always consider your target audience, and it's size, before marketting a 
product... or you may end up sorely disappointed, and may even lose money.

- Chris Jacobson



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