I was wondering if anyone had the details on creating a Graphical MUD. Mainly I want to know things like: How much it would cost to support the server, Best ways of going about creating one, Any past experiences of do's and dont's. Any other comments would be useful too.

That's a question that cannot be answered unless you tell us what kind of graphical mud you're interested in. If you're interested in making a full-scale EQ competitor, figure 12-15 million dollar budget, a team hitting at least 40 people during some point in production and a 2.5-3 year dev cycle.

--matt

You could make an isometric game. They're sort of 2.5D in that they fake height with effects. There are some promising ones being done independently, like Illarion. Of course, there is still a -ton- of artwork to be made, and I think thats really the biggest challenge for a person familiar with text MUDs trying to get into the graphical field.

- Ryan

Yep. In fact, though it's since gone 3d, the first large-scale graphical mud, UO, was isometric. And one of the top 5 muds in the world (Ragnarok Online) is isometric, albeit with 3d backgrounds.

On a smaller scale, check out something like Furcadia, which was done without any investment at all.

--matt

Most likely an isometric application. Nothing commericial as I plan to make this as free as possible. I wanted to get an idea of how much a server would cost to maintain a considerably large crowd, because if it's too much I could develop it into a Neverwinter Nights style RPG. I'm still getting a general idea of things before I start to develop the game though.

Ahh! Well, it depends on how many simultaneous users you're planning on supporting. It sounds to me like you're thinking hobbyist mud size, so say, 150 simultaneous at max? Does that sound reasonable?

In that case if you wrote an efficient server you could do a shared account with Wolfpaw.net. For $28.99/month you can have unlimited players and 400 megs of space. I highly recommend Wolfpaw, in fact. We spend tens of thousands/year in hosting and bandwidth costs and I've not encountered another mud hosting service that can compete.

Now, that's the server cost. The big killer if you're going to host a game with a fair amount of players will be bandwidth costs. That tens of thousands/year I mentioned above is largely for bandwidth.
--matt

I was wondering how much bandwidth are server for an even larger crowd (say 500-1000 people). Would up the price ? I'm not really planning on that many, but I still need to know this as I am making plans

Well, it depends to a great extent on how efficient your server is. Everquest, for instance, is legendarily inefficient in the way it bundles information into packets. It costs them, reputedly, a lot of money.

The way bandwidth tends to work is that you can pay per gig up to a certain point. Beyond that point (and I'm not quite sure where that is) you're paying for peak capacity rather than actual usage.

I've heard figures like 1 kbs/second/player but I wouldn't be able to get better figures without asking around. Actually, I'll do that it's very relevant. I think I'll figure out how much bandwidth/average-#-of-players-online we use too.

--matt