The main problem (well, problem in my view) with a UDP based mud is
you will need a special client to access it. Sure, most likely better
than 80% of your users use zMud which could be considered a special
client anyway... but with current muds you _can_ use telnet. The
advantage to things as the are is the mud speaks no protocol (the mud
is not speaking tcp, its simply writing to a character interface) and
the client does not need to be protocol-aware. If you introduce a udp-based
mud, you will be pretty much required to have a protocol-aware client.
As for the reliability/speed... its true, udp is less (sometimes significantly
less) reliable than tcp on a wide area network. This is because there is
no handshaking going on to make sure packets arrive in the same order
they were sent, or even that they arrive at all. (Of course you can build this
sort of thing into your protocol, requiring the client to deal with it as
well.) Speed is probably going to be the same for either protocol since the
overhead of network lag (when there is an average of 10 oe so gateways between
the two endpoints) will overshadow protocol speed differences.
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