Graphical MUDs

From: Shane P. Lee (tacodog21@yahoo.com)
Date: 09/11/02


 I decided to start a new thread with this one, hope no one minds.
So far, I have yet to find one single "free" graphical MUD. Mostly
this is due to bandwith issues. Most impls have no problem shelling
out $15 to $35 a month for a basic shell account with one or two
telnet ports, but the bandwith for real-time graphical MUDs is much
greater, and thus the sysadmins charge a higher price, if they allow
them at all.
 And then there's the privacy issue. No one wants their uber-kool,
high-tech source to fall into the hands of some geek who's ftp-ing
around and grabbing everyone's source code on the server, so they
generally try to buy a private server where they are the only clients.
 Of course, a really popular game (Arch-Mage springs to mind) tends to
have several games running on several ports, which is extremely
expensive as well (hence all the extra advertising).
 One way to handle the extra costs (IMHO) would be to design and sell
a graphical client, which the user MUST use to connect to the game.
You could store all the graphics, sounds, ect. in cache and that itself
would cut back on bandwith. Of course, from what I understand from the
DIKU and CircleMUD licenses, you wouldn't be able to sell the client
if you used a DIKU or CircleMUD source.

 I hope Alex doesn't get upset at me for sending this, as it really
belongs on another list, perhaps MudConnector or something.

-FIRE

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