[MUD-Dev2] Text based MUD's - State of the art (if any)

[Jeffrey Kesselman]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Jacob Cord <homechicken at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 8:55 AM, Tiago <tiago.matias at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thing is, is it worth it? Will anyone still care ? Is it a waste of time?
>
> I'm doing the exact same thing for much the same reasons, and have
> been for several years. Honestly, I see my audience as myself, and
> develop accordingly. I have (what I believe to be, anyway) some
> wonderful ideas on virtual world persistence, mobile AI, etc. In fact,
> I think it helps to not play other MUDs at the same time, so you don't
> get "locked down" into a certain way of thinking. Your design can and
> should be your own.

One of our base demo apps for Project Darkstar is a text mud.  We've had
a lot of fun with it using it as a teaching/exploration tool at past
JavaOne conferences.

Of course, its my baby, but I'd recommend looking at the PDS serve as a
starting point.  It basically does a all the hard things for you in
terms of scalability, reliability and persistence.

If you want a telnet connection aka old style muds, that probably would
involve programming at its custom transport layer, but if your willing
to use its default client API then all you need to worry about is MUD
logic.  (The default client API is currently available from the
community in C, Java, and Action Script and i believe there are python
and C# projects in the works right now.)

JK