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."

Comments

Re:Could it be because MUDs suck?

[Deraj DeZine]

The whole text-based game industry is being replaced, or has been replaced, by games with visuals because there is no good reason to restrict gameplay to text-only when you can spruce it up with immersive graphical environmen

Sort of like how those old text-based "books" disappeared shortly after the invention of the motion picture?

Random thoughts from an occasional MUD coder.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do some occasional development work on Shattered World -- in-game, not game driver, that is. These are some random thoughts that I have on MUDs and the problems they face that aren't faced by other development projects:

1. 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.)
2. 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.
3. 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.