[MUD-Dev] size

[Amanda Walker]

On Oct 6, 2003, at 5:51 AM, Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:

> Well I'd argue that the 3d engine is the least of your problems
> anyway. Its generating the meshes, the the textures, the music,
> the sounds, the animations.

Sure.  There are plenty of examples of good-quality content being
built on a budget or for free (notably the FPS mod scene).

> Until recently most buy in engines were woefully inadequate for
> outdoor terrain anyway. Even now, very few are suited to zoneless
> spooling in of data*.

None of the most successful games today are zoneless, so I don't
think that is a constaint.  A desireable, certainly, but not a
constraint.

> Beyond those issues, 3d games require considerably more bandwitdth
> than a text mud (in the order of 1k a sec is a typical target),
> which makes it hard to justify if you aren't billing.

Why?  This is less than running an Internet radio station, which is
a huge cottage industry.  Bandwidth is cheap these days, as is
hosting center space. Hobbyist-shoestring cheap only for a small
number of players, but definitely small-company cheap.  Cheaper than
leasing office space.

> The server code is also by necessity considerably more complex as
> you can't make simple assumptions about rooms, but instead have to
> have complicated spatial partitioning routines to limit working
> set size. Hell even writing path finding for a 3d game is a
> monumental task compared to in a mud.

Sure, but how many people actually write MUD server code?  Most text
MUDs are based on pre-written server code bases already.  It's hard
enough to get conversations going about implementation here on
mud-dev, which is allegedly full of implementors and tinkerers.

I'm not arguing that rolling your own doesn't have advantages.  But
if you have a great game idea, you can start building it now, on a
small budget, without having to start with sand and a hot fire.
I've heard a number of complaints that graphical MUDs are
necessarily big and expensive to build because you have to reinvent
a whole pile of wheels before you can ever get started.  I think
that claim is wrong.

Amanda Walker
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