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

Could it be because MUDs suck?

[ObviousGuy]

MUDs are a dying genre. They are swiftly being replaced MMPORGS.

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 environments.

So with MUDs, someone decides to build one as a project and it gains a few players, but after a while everyone leaves and the MUD dies. Repeat every semester as some new college kid decides that he wants to build his own MUD.

So you end up with people inventing the same tech over and over, but never improving on the past projects because no one bothered to document their project the semester before. But also because the project is mostly intended to polish programming skills and try out some game design techniques, the game itself is hardly ever more than a proof of concept and it never captures the attention of gamers as much as Everquest or any other professionally-designed game.

Re:Could it be because MUDs suck?

[Matthew Bafford]

Plus, the more established MUDs don't want to share code because they want to hang on to whatever advantage they have over every other MUD.

It's too easy to start up a new MUD (unzip, compile, run), so each MUD wants to hold on tight to whatever advantage they have. It's a shame that more MUD owners don't realize it's the people and the environment that make a good MUD, NOT the special features (for the most part).

-y

Re:Could it be because MUDs suck?

[Cecil]

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 environments.

You're wrong. There's one very good, and very solid reason that MMORPGs will never provide quite the same thing as text-based environments (specifically MOOs, MUCKs, MUSHes, etc): user-created-content.

Anyone who has a basic grasp of a language (and most people do -- though IM conversations sometimes indicate otherwise) can create whatever their imagination desires simply by writing some mediocre descriptive prose to get their message across. Short of sudden and marked advances in brain-to-computer interface technology, the artistically-challenged among us will never be able to as fully express our imaginations in a MMORPG, even one of the few that allows user-created-content. And the people who are excellent artists often find that it's a lot simpler and more convenient to simply write some description than do high-quality artwork or 3D models for whatever it is they're imagining.

So don't be so quick to abandon those text based worlds. There will always be some that survive and even flourish. Admittedly, the number of players has been thinning out significantly in the past several years, and we don't believe it'll stop anytime in the near future. But you'd be surprised how many new players we still continue to get, and how many reasons they have for staying.

Duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could ask the same about any game genre: why are the free, open-source first-person shooters lagging? The large amount of work that goes into any game means that they're not as easy to develop. Due to the time they consume, it's difficult to pay the rent if you create them as anything other than commercial, closed-source products (and sell the result).

But don't forget that MUDS are also a dying genre. They are less popular than ever. Because of this, there are going to be fewer projects - open or closed working in the genre. MUDS need writers as the primary content authors. And good writers are not very likely to want to give their work away for free.

Finally, if you really want an open-source MUD: make one yourself.

No, it couldn't be.

[Pyromage]

Because MUDs are great! Sure, it's not the same as Everquest, but who said it had to be? MUDs have many advantages over graphical systems, and vice versa. They simply are not competing. What *is* happening is that the new generation of youngins' just doesn't have the mental capacity to work a MUD.

Damned kids these days.

A few reasons

[Majere]

One reason I think mud development is lagging, is namely that
muds in my experience attract young players and are ran by teenagers and college student. I rarely meet players over the age of 30. This leads to inexperienced coding and less bleeding edge technology. That could be part of the problem.

Also, muds are in competition with each other. We had short discussion about opening up the source to the mud I work on (The Northern Crossroads), and it was determined that if we opened up the source. We would lose our uniqueness among other muds. If everyone else used our features.

Another thing, they are just games. They aren't very important on the overall realm of things, why should we be devoting tons of time and energy in keeping something alive, when its not profitable or really useful in the end.

(Heh, not a very organized post)

Muds still have one advantage

[Sogol]

They are the only games that you can play discreetly at work.

MUDs aren't necessarily suited to be open source

[Illusion]

I'm a staunch advocate of open source -- almost everything else I write is GPLed -- and yet the MUD I've been running for 9 years isn't open source. We don't use anyone elses code or world, and we don't share ours.

Mostly, I wish there were fewer MUDs. 99% of what is out there is the result of someone with little or no skill grabbing a copy of an open-source MUD, adding a few hundred poorly-written rooms to the world, changing the code just enough to make it crash hourly, and then advertising on Mudconnector or similar. Will these people have anything at all to contribute back to an open source project? No. They do, however, succeed in cheapening the experience that the average user has when connecting to something running that code.

-- Aaron

With a Grain of Salt

[true_tavish]

I would expect no less from Skotos to publish an article foretelling the downfall of the free game community. Where will all the gamers turn to now in order to fill their desires? Free MUDs continue to thrive and are still creating new and innovative designs. The problem is there are just so many new games out there that do rely upon pre-existing code, it is hard to find those on the leading edge.

Amazingly enough a large percentage of the MUDers I run across are from the age group that is supposedly too graphically oriented to play text-based games. The allure of free, fun, and gaming still seems to hold some drawing power after all. Especially considering that word of mouth and the occasional banner on niche sites is the sum total of advertising for the games.

MUDs and MMORPGs: the word and the image

[0x0d0a]

MUDs are a dying genre. They are swiftly being replaced MMPORGS.

Perhaps in market share, but the player base seems to be roughly constant (though I really wouldn't notice anything short of an order-of-magnitude shift in some direction).

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 environments.

Perhaps in theory, but there are a number of good reasons I can think of. The big one, the fact that the client interface is simple, is a huge deal. It means:

* MUD clients have a simple protocol -- the same text that you're looking at on-screen. It's *very* easy for players to customize clients to fit a given MUD's protocol (via triggers or regexes on prompts). There is no standard GUI MUD client. Such a thing is not impossible (and ever since VRML fell on it's face I've been wondering who's going to try next). I guess it'd be something like Neal Stephenson's Metaverse. Worldforge is one effort, but it seems far too ambitious to ever usefully come to fruition -- it's been six years in the making, and it's still not ready.

* Lightweight clients. Most games, even in this day and age, *still* suck down all the CPU time on a computer, and make no effort to avoid doing so. Some of this is because OSes provide crummy latency on sleep functions, some of it is because there's little reason to do so. If I'm compiling XFree86 in the background, I can play a MUD in the background without worrying about the CPU usage. Not true of Neverwinter Nights or Jagged Alliance 2 or really any other game on my computer that I can think of. Most games don't do this.

* Very powerful, mature clients. There are excellent MUD clients out there. They have triggers, aliases, macros, etc. It's much harder and less obvious how to do this with a GUI environment. This is the same problem that GUI and TUI apps face -- the reason all the "real" programs that a UNIX guru uses are text-based is because the text-based programs have a very powerful, simple way to tie the two together. After more than two decades of GUIs, we *still* do not have good, universal GUI scripting and user-controllable IPC mechanisms on the degree of the simple pipe that the TUI provides.

* Unobtrusiveness. It's easy to snap a MUD window into the background for a moment while chatting on ICQ or web browsing or something similar. Most 3d MMORPGs have, in the name of "immersiveness", made it standard to take over the entire display.

* Easier creation. If you took a look at all the MUDs, rooms, worlds, and mobs out there, you'd be amazed at the sheer amount of content. It's easy for anyone that can write and has a bit of imagination to sit down and make a MUD world. It's much harder to be a good skinner and modeler. I can write a description of a green-haired female elf wearing a green silk gown and with a burnished bronze waistband that glows red. I can certainly not skin and model one, not without expending many, many times as much time and effort. Hence, there is just *more content* out there for MUDs.

* Better handling of text. There is a lot of text in MUDs, and a fair amount in MMORPGs. I can read text in my scrollback-buffer-ized MUD client much more easily than I can with little bits of text floating in the air over character's heads.

* Spatial distance is a function of gameplay-related meaningfulness. In an MMORPG, I may walk for a minute to cover some random, boring green hill. In a MUD (or an TUI IF game), I may walk ten feet each step if I'm in a detailed city full of things to do, and cover ten miles if I'm in the countryside. The boring and the mundane are naturally filtered out.

* Natural logging. It's easy to keep a complete log (not just of messages) in a MUD. It's much harder to do so with a MMORPG.

* MUDs do a better job of completely taking advantage of their medium