[MUD-Dev] size

[ceo]

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

>> 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.

Actually, at typical prices for typical game bw usage for about
5k-10k players, it's enough to rent an office for about 5-10 people
in central London.

One of the problems is that games tend to use all their bandwidth
all the time, so they are well beyond the limits of most hosting
plans. Another is that the BW usage isn't staggeringly high enough
to get into the exponential discounts for bulk buying (at least, it
wasn't the last time I looked - prices may have come down since then
:)).

You also have to get a pretty trustworthy host. Finally, of course,
95% of commercial hosts will rip you off with a stupidly expensive
BW plan, and it's getting tricky to find the 5% with sensible rates
- unless you go to one of the massive companies (who may not be
interested in talking to you).

> 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.

...despite the above, in essence I agree with you :). Then again,
writing text MUD's is a crazy endeavour only for the truly driven
anyway ;P, so although relatively speaking graphical is perhaps not
much worse, it's still frickin hard.

Although I do think that graphical MUD dev has much much nastier
traps along the path of development :(

Adam M
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