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

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 20 Apr 2000 21:58:28 -0700 
Charles  <caugusti at gladstone.uoregon.edu> wrote:

> Honestly I'm not sure (unless the people buying this product had
> no idea about what's available on the internet) why anyone would
> buy a MUD developement kit.  With the number of code bases out
> there currently, and the features of those code bases, OLC etc, it
> seems to me that the only advantage would be better documentation.

I have little idea what his product is really like.  Consider a
product as follows:

  -- Fully visual programming and debugging environment with
breakpoints, watchpoints, backtraces, configurable displays etc.

  -- Drag'n'drop area creation and definition with fully hypertexted
and templatised description generation (no more 10,000 different
sword descriptions, just specify the differences and we do the
rest).

  -- Automatic map generation with visiual overview and editing (no
more having to manually create exits, just drag links to the
appropriate rooms).

  -- Dynamically updated statistics and on your game and player
activies with admin-selectable and configurable graphs and charts of
activity changes over time (think of how much easier balancing your
game will be!).

  -- First class customer a support!

  -- etc.

I could very easily see many being willing to pay $$$ for such a
hand-holding well supported richly developed and fleshed out product
however we may argue the basic value of its underpinnings.

> Anyhow, personally I'd just download Circle or ROM..

Target markets.  

I happen to like XEmacs, DBG/DDD and some xterms as a development
environment.  I'm confortable and productive there.  Others like MS
Visual C++ with all its GUI bells and whistles, or the variously
similar (to me) competitors from Symantec et al.  They're
comfortable and productive there.  Every one of the people I've
talked to who like the GUI IDE development environments has looked
at my preference rather the same way they look at lice or raving
lunatics.  I look rather the same way at their tools (tho I like to
think I hide it better).  

I would be, and in fact have, paid significant several thousands of
dollars for the above development environment (pre general 'net
access days when OS vendors "sold" ports of Lucid Emacs, GNU tools
etc to their platforms for non-trivial fees).  I don't wonder at
other's willingness to pay such fees to MS and co today.

Often the value, real or perceived, is not in the product itself,
but in the surrounding infrastructure that comes with the package
(support, extentions, community, available developer talent (say the
vendor also does custom consulting/customisation), etc).

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder at kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...


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