[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants)

[Sean Howard]

"Morris Cox" <morriscox at gmail.com> wrote:
> That is what I'm really interested in. I suspect that a company could
> make a lot of $$$ by building something like that and then selling
> licenses to it. Releasing it as open source and for free would greatly
> increase adoption;

Man, I wish that were true, but I really doubt that it would be
financially successful at all. In general, programs that make games don't
sell particularly well - most of the time, they are pirated. I'd love to
see a comparison between how many copies RPG Maker 2000 sold compared to
how many individuals have actually released games for it (especially since
it was never released outside of Japan). Stuff like Click n' Play,
Multimedia Fusion, and even Flash enjoy a huge amateur development
community, and yet are almost always pirated versions (Flash succeeds on
professional adoption, not garage developers).

Likewise, open source engines are out there, like the Ryzom one and the
Java whatchamacallit, but the problem with open source is that it is
usually very unfriendly to casual experimentation. That's why RedHat makes
money - it didn't invent Linux. It may it manageable for the end user.
I've found most open source projects tend to get adopted only by the most
hardcore techie, and those guys tend to be too competent with what's there
to really use each feature "incorrectly" - and hardcore techies tend to
lack a certain creative imagination as well.

I'm not saying that it couldn't happen, but it would have to be created
under a very specific philosophy, much like Wikipedia (which is a terrible
encyclopedia, but a successful communal project).

> What would be better is a system that
> would allow use of multiple languages so long as there was an
> interface between them. One developer could use C++ while another
> developer could use Java (or C# or PHP or XML, etc.) and still
> interoperate.

The newest version of Java has a built-in scripting language system, so
one guy could use Python, another JavaScript, Ruby, Forth, Perl, and so
on. It's a novel approach, but I wouldn't dare use every scripting
language at the same time for one project. Once you know one or two
languages, you can pick up a new one really quickly (one can start
programming a new language in about an hour), so adoption is not a
significant problem. However, a babel problem could slow the project down
to a crawl.

-- 
Sean Howard