[MUD-Dev] Small scale commercial text MUDs

[John W Pierce]

> Matt Mihaly

> I firmly believe that most text MUDs are so awful and mainly so
> similar to each other, that there is plenty of opportunity for
> commercial text products that don't aim too high.

This is one of the most perceptive statements I've seen on this
list. It ranks right along side J C Lawrence's comment about the
similarities of MUD driver design and OS design. The only quibble I
have is with the "don't aim too high" part. That has a connotation of
"low quality", though I very seriously doubt that's what Matt
intended; I suspect he meant that in the sense of "don't count on
millions of players", or something similar.

The largest problem with running a small scale commercial text MUD, as
far as I'm concerned, is lack of a decent affordable driver. I'm not
fond of drivers that interpret user input as executable code, no
matter how good they say their security is, so that eliminates
Genesis/ColdC (in my opinion, by far the best of this type),
LambdaMOO, et al. I like even less systems that are, to all intents
and purposes, coded entirely in C/C++. That leaves LP-style drivers,
of which only DGD is available for commercial use. DGD is technically
an excellent driver, and the cost of a commercial use license is
imminently fair if you're aiming for a couple of thousand customers or
more; unfortunately, it's prohibitively expensive on a scale much
smaller than that.

So, like seemingly half the other people in the world (or at least on
this list), I'm writing a driver. Which is probably foolish, but I've
tried it before, and this time the hard part - the interpreter and
virtual machine - already exists, and I know in great detail what the
driver has to do. It's unlikely it'll ever reach the level of
persistence reliability that DGD gives, and I'm unlikely to even try
to emulate its "atomic" functions (Felix Croes is really, really
*good*), but at the scale I care about, it will suffice.

-- John W Pierce, R2 Systems, San Diego
   jwp at r2systems.com


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