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Why Is Free MUD Development Lagging?
Thanks to Skotos for its editorial discussing why free, open-source MUD development is failing to advance swiftly. The author notes "The best [text-based MUD] efforts have been almost entirely closed-source... Free MUDs, by contrast, just haven't advanced very fast." He points to several possible factors, suggesting that "MUD information is indexed poorly, and many projects don't maintain a web site with even a basic description of what they're doing", and continues: "Another reason is licensing. The Diku license is poorly understood and shoddily enforced... LPMUDs aren't much better", before concluding: "There is no existing license that does for MUD servers what the GPL does for applications. That grudging spread of features has never happened for MUD servers the way it has for GPL-licensed applications and libraries."
Sort of like how those old text-based "books" disappeared shortly after the invention of the motion picture?
True story.
People don't have the time or money to maintain something as a video game, even one as small as a MUD.
There are some quiet big and really complex MUDs I wouldn't call "small videogames". The core of these MUDs is mostly old and [t]rusty, but they have rich content. At least here in Germany a few big MUDs are running well and healthy, with new players signing on every day and a lot of people maintaining and enhancing these virtual worlds.
Not the truth. I'm a fan of graphical MMORPGs, don't get me wrong, but the MUD I play is doing very well. Aardwolf (www.aardmud.org) currently has an average of about 500 people connected at all times and has been running (for free actually) for the past 7 years. That's a pretty impressive record, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Even with MMORPGS around, there's something attractive still in text-based MUDs
-- Breaking Windows: Not just for kids anymore KDE
Anyhow, the Xerox thing is that Xerox owns the code (Pavel Curtis wrote most of it while under the employ of Xerox)
- Game balance. It's very easy to code up a wham-blam-thank-you-ma'am sword that kills the toughest dragons in an instant. It's also very easy to kill the fun of the game by doing just that. There are a lot of subtle interactions that can come in and surprise you. Case in point: a certain quest (courtesy of a now-defunct MUD, which I ported to Shattered) uses a bottle to get the questor into a particular room, where a critical item is obtained. Unfortunately, that bottle could be used elsewhere in the game to obtain a bit of breathing space for healing and suchlike against tougher monsters. This was solved by letting you get in the bottle wherever you liked, but out of the bottle only in areas related to the quest the bottle was created for. (Yes, it's an ugly, cheap hack.)
- The game code, or "mudlib". Parts of this are generic (or could be): the code for logging in; the basic room object; the basic monster object; the basic weapon object; a base poison; wearable items; shops; etc. Other parts are specific to the game: town design, quests, guilds, and so on. Splitting these two parts, unless you're scrupulous about it from the start, is very tedious and annoying. Even if you're scrupulous at the start, it's very easy for code to wander off in random directions if you don't keep a tight check on it.
- Copyright and originality. It's very easy to copy ideas (and there are several cases on the 'Net of ideas popping up in other MUDs a few days or weeks after appearing in Shattered). It's a lot harder to come up with something original and fun.
Those are ones that spring up off the top of my head. Game balance, in particular, is a tricky one. Once a game-unbalancing item is out there, it can be tricky to recall, and it can be even harder to undo the damage it causes. Most of the time, we end up settling for just putting paid to the more blatent abuses of the system, and punishing (in-game, eg: by random deaths) abusing players.The other thing is, running a MUD is inherently political. There will always be morons out to spoil everybody else's fun; there will always be people who disagree (for whatever reason) with your view of things. Working on back-end code (logins, building blocks -- like the base room, base monster, etc) is very tedious without the chance to do something a bit more visible. Unless you really love it, you're liable to get burnt out relatively quickly.
And finally: the time factor. I have a lot less time to code than I used to, and my useful output on Shattered has dropped over the past year or two. This is partly a function of growing older, and is one of the reasons why, as other posters have said, you tend to get teenagers and suchlike in MUD development.
Speaking of the admin side of things, it's getting harder to attract new players. Partly that's due to the MMORPG syndrome -- people like to see pretty graphics, and MUDs take a bit more effort to understand, since you're just reading text -- and it's also partly because people just don't understand that the 'Net is more than just email and the WWW. But then, Shattered isn't in this game to have a massive player base online all the time (although it'd be nice!)
But, when all is said and done, the kick I get in seeing players exploring, for the first time, a new quest that I've just put in makes up for a lot of that. There's also a reasonable amount of social interaction, both for the players, and for the admins.
Anyway -- I'm rambling, and I need to get back to work. As I said -- just random thoughts.
MUDs are alive and well. They say development is lagging, but there are a lot of MUDs that have playerbases rivaling some of the smaller MMORPGs.
I'm an Imm. I won't shamelessly plug the tiny MUD I work on, but there is a lot that goes into running a MUD. Mostly the people that keep it working do so out of pure love for their particular little slice of the Telnet Protocol. I don't see MUDs dying, but I also don't see them increasing exponentially, either. The developers of MUDs are nowhere near as sophisticated or organized as open source developers, nor will they ever seek such a union, for dozens of reasons that have already been belabored to death.
The point about the licenses is a good one. There's not a single MUD out there that isn't heavily derived from one of the original ones. Every single one of those codebases specified all sorts of restrictions, including not making money off the product. If there's never a (legal) chance that you'll actually get anything out of your product, then your fervor kind of dies.
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
btech.no-ip.com 3049
btech.dhs.org 3030
http://btech.sourceforge.net/ The main Source Forge site.
Here's a historical archive of Battletech MUSE info:
http://hpgx.net/btmuse/
There's a few more out there running that I can't remember (like the 3056 Sim site), but 3030 is still very much alive, and the people there should be able to expand this list.
As the -1 replies demonstrate, Medievia is helped out greatly by people like AxL and such who manage to inspire a near universal hatred for medievians, such that, when they are discovered they are sometimes (perhaps more often than I think) told to go back from whence they came.
/least/ 5000 purchased items be sold every year to a playerbase composed of around 1250 donating players, or roughly 4 donation items per year per person spending about $200. That isn't to say it's not profitable, it most certainly is. However, the profit is more akin to that derived from a convenience store than that of the country club it is often accused of being.
The Medievia debacle demonstrates how fiercely protective coders are of code, even of code that isn't actually their own. (AxL, unless I am mistaken, has taken up a crusade on behalf of the DIKU team, not as a member of it.)
Upwards of $250k is a rather generous estimate. It would require at
The question of Medievia asks "Whats fair?" versus "Whats legal?" If Medievia did nothing more than cosmetic alterations, why has it persisted as a profitable online game? Certainly, it had roots in the DIKU framework and the legality of that is dubious at best. However, the licence proved neigh undefendable, whether the reasons behind that were a lack of funds to spend on trial or the relative strength of Mr. Krause's (Vryce) case, the reality is the same.
And what good would have come if the DIKU team could have up-held their copyright? Not much. The internet would have one less service that people were willing to use and support. There would be fewer MUDs stealing Medievia's good ideas (turnabout is fair play, after all.) And undoubtedly other (supposedly "clean") muds that get away with this without the rabble rousing of people like AxL and KaVir would never have started.
Example given: Materia Magica, formerly known as Moongate. Its sin is the exact same as Medievia's, of course AxL and the like never went after them because M.M.'s administrators learned how to obfuscate the fact from Medievia's example. Strange indeed, since a history of the admins involved in both MUDs reveals that they are, in many cases, the exact same people. This explains how Circle of Power moved their entire clan with ease between the two games before they had both developed beyond being similar games.
So yes, it is illegal, albeit a civil crime the developers and rabble-rousers are content to let pretty much everyone else get away with. The presence of Medievia in the MUD community has had an over-all positive effect, despite the attempts of AxL and others to harm it (efforts which have done more to harm the MUD "community" at large than Medievia).
On KaVir's Medievia licence page, he asks himself, "Who cares?" He responds to himself by saying "Many of us." I question the truth of the assertion, given the sheer apathy he and his group have for attacking "the problem" past this one mud. Given the sheer inability of most of the parties to conduct a serious discussion of the license past a flamewar or pre-written FAQ's about DIKU code, we shouldn't be amazed that nothing has come from the "debate" other than bile.
Just FYI, I don't know anything about Axl (axl rose?) besides the post on rec.games.mud.diku, the Hall of Shame. I have contributed to CircleMUD in the past, which is why I am interested in this issue. The story asks why free MUD development has stalled - one answer, as the quote from one of the linked pages points out (where a DIKU developer states that he gave up mostly because of this very issue), is places like medievia, where the devs just take code and repackage it and sell in-game items to addicted players.
You say that no one's followed up on other MUDs which do this and name an example. Fine, I've never heard of this other place and I'll take your word for it; there is a "hall of shame" where many games are pointed out, as I mentioned, and this should be added - post on the group please. However, this doesn't diminish the medievia case in the slightest - they are by far the most egregious offenders, as the admins have shown no remorse at all, or come forward with any sort of compromise. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, they claim their MUD doesn't have any DIKU code even when programmers from a couple of years ago (and source code) have attested otherwise. I think the logic is (and I'm not speaking for anyone besides myself here) that if enough people are aware of the issue, they can communicate this to people who play the game and the ethical ones among them will choose to leave. What other alternatives can you think of, besides expensive legal action?
I (and I think most other reasonable people - and axl doesn't seem to be one of them) would be satisfied if medievia made a complete accounting of its monies, and did something like donate the profits (note I said profits, it does take some money to keep the game running) to charity. You really think that given what we've seen of the admins, they're going to do anything like that?
You say 250K/yr is an excessive figure - I actually said "over the years" as in a cumulative, but your figures seem to indicate that 125K/yr is a reasonable extrapolation!
I wouldn't care if they made a profit from a commercial codebase, although I would think it a very silly game where you could buy any item for real money (yes, I think UO is silly now that they've started doing this). On medievia, you can do exactly that (through their talismans-by-proxy program), but the very design of the game (and no "conversions" to C++ and feature additions don't change that design) comes from a codebase that was intended for the community, and not for some casual thief to profit from.