On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 03:07:13PM -0500, Patrick Dughi wrote: >On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Mike Stilson wrote: >> On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 03:28:01AM -0500, Patrick Dughi wrote: >> > Kinda curious about what people feel about the popularity of text >> >muds lately.. if they're going downhill, vanishing, etc. They rocked in >> >the early 90's when I started, but now I have to explain what they are to >> >kids who can't remember when they didn't have email. >> >> They still seem pretty good to me. It's just a lot harder for them to >> survive. Players run from boring ones like the plague. It seems to me >> (like it kinda always was, just much more obvious now) that the ones >> that are doing ok are original ones, with good thought and planning into >> them, active (not sporadic or chaotic) development, and (catch-22 time) >> good playerbases. >> > I wonder if the increase in attention on multiplayer RPG's is >going to help or hurt the CircleMUD community in specific? On one hand, >it sucks the players away, but on the other, we're seeing alot of new >faces on the list; people who want to make their own muds but maybe can't >step up to writing a graphics engine just yet. Also, I think there's a bit of basic disillusionment there. Lots of kids thinking "Oh, I'll run my own! I'll have all the power in the game and I'll be real popular, all my friends will think I'm l33t!" Oh, wait, coolgraphicmud costs money? Well, what can I get for free? > So, less players, but more potential muds? It's starting to seem that way. > Though I've been out of the MUD community proper for a while, I >haven't been noticing any new muds popping up recently. In fact - as you >said - the only ones I notice anymore are the large muds that have been >around for a while, and have implemented a way to charge players (usually >not for playing, usually for item/stat/etc upgrades). Those ones are even >appearing in banner ads. There's still a good number of totally-free ones, occasionally I find one and wander around for a little while. The problem anymore is that within the first half hour, I'll recognize three or four other muds that they got all their "original" ideas from. Sometimes it's not bad. An interesting new combination of old ideas, sometimes they just plain suck and you can tell they somehow basically just stole what they thought was cool w/o giving any thought to anything else. > Where are all those new potential muds? I know they're not >actually just sitting back and planning, that would be too much to ask. They're sitting at ftp.circlemud.org/pub/CircleMUD/contrib/server waiting for people who really shouldn't be coding to download them, compile, run, and go "Duh, why aren't people coming.". (Sorry, my attitude has become a little bit jaded lately). But I know some are. I pretty much shut mine down for a bit while we re-think a few things, and come up with a better plan than we were working under. Code audits in my spare time... sheesh, I need to get out more. > Is there something we can do to draw people in, or perhaps >consilidate our efforts to generate something new and useful which would >..augh, buzzterm, provide value added items for our players - or >administrators? Make some type of centralized "server" (no, not like IMC) or just network (a-la IRC) where you can connect to, type uh, "/muds" and you get a list of all the participating muds, # of players, uh something like that? (For those who remember or played bolo on the Mac, I'm actually thinking of something like that.) A rudimentary server for something like that could probably be done with about 20 lines of perl, and would need maybe 10 lines of code added to the mud. In fact I think I'll try it and see. > - Win32/Xwindows 'Circlemud' Client, with nifty built-ins that >zmud/etc can't duplicate? There's a feature that isn't in zmud? It's been a bunch of years since I even looked at it and even then I couldn't think of a single thing it could have short of an AI backend or a real nice sounding, intelligent TTS parser with inflection, adjustable tones, male/female voice selection, etc :) > - Abilitity to either travel between, or fight with other muds >(Dark Age of Camelot / B.R.E)? I think this has come up a few times before, and the problem that always grinds it to a halt is balancing between muds. What's puny on megahacknslash mud will own the universe on someone's donthurttheflowers mud. > - Graphical capabilities? (no, not pueblo) There was a service or something (I don't remember exactly at the moment) called portal which sat between your mud and the player and with a custom client (again, if I remember right) and some semi-cryptic messages from the mud it could send files (mp3/wav/au) to be played at certain times, I think there were some images or something, dunno, I'll dig around for some pdf I had about it. Otherwise, some nethack-ish Qt graphic would probably be pretty easy to do (but of course it'd be MUCH more cool to have OpenGL 3d looking combat/walking/etc ;-) > Anything .. well.. 'minor' anyone can think of? Hmm. Some "competitions"? most original mud, coolest idea, most stable (with a reasonable playerbase)? (Vague criteria, sure.. maybe vote on the circle webpage, winner gets their mud addy & logo put somewhere prominent for a week/month/47.3seconds on uh, somewhere. </ramble> -me PS: This probably needs a new subject but I couldn't think of one. -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | | Newbie List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/circle-newbies/ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 06/25/03 PDT