[MUD-Dev] Small scale commercial text MUDs

[Matt Mihaly]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, John W Pierce wrote:
>> 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.

Thanks, though I'm not sure how perceptive it was. One just has to go
out and hit the random button on Mudconnector to see the atrocious
quality of the average MUD.

 
> 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.

Hmm, well, I guess it depends on what you mean by small scale. For
example, I consider Achaea to be pretty small scale (peaking at just
under 200 online currently, though we've grown pretty steadily for the
past 2 years), though I realize compared to 99% of MUDs, we're
large. Still, once you use the word 'commercial' I think you have to
start comparing yourself, size-wise, to the other commercial players,
and 200 simultaneous online looks miiiiighty small.

I'll also tell you that the driver is not the hardest part. It's not
really very hard. Heck, I can sell you our engine for 3 grand plus 10%
of gross if you want. I don't know if that qualifies as prohibitively
expensive, but I'll respectfully say that if you can't come up with 3
grand, you're going to have a hard time sorting out a commercial MUD I
think. If you're really serious about it, I'd suggest that 3000 isn't
a lot of money. I spent 10 grand on our original engine, discovered
what a complete piece of crap it was (Hourglass, Avalon's
engine. Didn't even support local variables when I bought it. Couldn't
use anything but the 4 pre-defined databases, had to use gotos for
things, etc. Absolutely horrid.) and subsequently licensed and then
outright bought the copyright to the language/engine we use now
(Vortex). Vortex is better, but still not great, due to being too slow
and, I'm told by my CTO, due to missing some things he wants. So,
we're in the final stages of development on a new engine/language I'm
calling Rapture.

Seriously, if you're not going to aim high, you don't _need_ a great
driver. Content, content, content. I can tell you right now that not a
single accolade Achaea has ever gotten has a bit to do with our
technology. Although I have a very competent CTO now, I had to teach
myself to program (badly) to originally write Achaea, and the code and
the technology is sub-standard. Does it matter at the scale we
operate? Some, but it's not crucial. Content makes a good MUD, not
technology.

--matt

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