The_Logos stated "Certainly there are other mud engines available. However, there are not, to my knowledge at least, other available mud engines available that have proved themselves to nearly the same extent in a commerical environment"

Which you then reinterpreted as "I'm quite aware of many good bases to work from for a hobbyist.  As logos noted, none of these have a proven track record of years in a commercial environment supporting several hundred simultaneous users."

My response was appropriate to your version of what he'd said, but rather irrelevent considering what he actually said.  That was the point I was trying to illustrate.

Diku II (aka VME) includes a fully embedded scripting system called DIL.  I have no idea how powerful it is, but I do know that it covers the creation of things like skills and spells, in addition to the usual OLC-style functionality.  Pricing is $99.95 for a non-commercial license, or $899.00 for a business license.  No royalties, although you have to pay for upgrades (if you want them) after the first year.

I've no idea, sorry.  You'd have to contact Skotos Tech I guess, as they appear to hold the exclusive rights to it now.  I know they posted a draft non-commercial license here, which might give you a rough idea of what to expect:

You've already answered your own questions about Cold in a later post.

You responded to my comments about the cost by asking how long it would take a company to develop an engine themselves.  The relevence of my above point was that I don't NEED much information about the engine to know that it will still take a huge amount of time to develop the mud.  Getting an engine is certainly a headstart, but shouldn't be compared with the development of an entire game (as you implied by asking about the progress of my own project).

Stilton asked earlier in the thread how long it would take to develop an engine completely from scratch.  Well, it took us around five weeks to attain the above level of talker functionality (ie create a character, walk around rooms, talk to people, etc) under similar conditions (two programmers in their spare time).

And yes, I'm sure that your engine provides lots of other nice functionality as well.  But the point I'm trying to stress is that the engine is a pretty small part of the overall mud.

One last point: I have no problem with people running commercial muds.  My interest here lies purely with the licensing issues of the Rapture engine (which was after all the original subject of the thread).  And if people don't want such issues discussed, posting them to a discussion forum is really not the best thing to do.

As CTO of Persistent Realms, we got that accomplished in a week and a half of my spare time. I'm the only coder who is contributing in the initial stage.

I'd have to say that working with Iron Realms has been an absolute pleasure. We have a fantastic level of contact with the guy who wrote the engine who has been able to clarify any issues we've had the few times we've had problems, and coding for the engine has been by far the easiest and quickest process for any mud I've worked with.

For the record: Working with the Rapture Engine has been an absolute pleasure.

- Leigh

KaVir:
Yes, topic drift.  Since we don't have the data to quantify the success of companies like Skotos relative to Iron Realms, it was more interesting to me to find out to what extent other businesses had survived on licensing vs writing their own without quibbling over the level of success.  I just didn't think that I deserved the gratuitous insult.

But VME still isn't quite like Rapture, is it?  Quite a bit beyond sockets is hard coded?

True, but if you've got 5 tasks to do, saying that it will take a long time to get them all done doesn't prove anything about whether it's better to do task 1 yourself or sub it out.

I agree that coding is only a small part of the job.

True, but $10,000 is also a pretty small amount of money when considered as part of startup costs for most businesses.

Many businesses would consider $10,000 pretty cheap to move your opening date closer by a month, and the royalties a cheap way of getting continuing bugfixes/development taken care of.

I wish them luck- any successful venture, hobbyist or commercial, can only help attract people to the community.

Stilton

Um...

Questions come to mind at this point.

Have any of the major players in the current arguments published philosophical or business-oriented papers regarding these matters? I'd be interested in collecting a bunch of links to pages all over the web where people can read full, unadulterated points without having pieces of them picked apart in an ongoing debate (one of the problems with the debate model, imho).

Also...there DOES seem to be a bit of a gap in the entire debate so far...

People who build commercial games want money. This is why they're "commercial" games. Because they want money, the implement parts of the game that use RL money as a means of advancement.

On the other hand, a game that is inherently unbalanced or creates major problems with the structures that use RL money will not be played. Games in general that are unbalanced and allow for social, material, or any other category of trend that players don't like will not be played. So it's in the creator's best interest to create a game that is balanced overall. The argument that "paying for MUDs is a bad thing"....most of you probably don't run out and wait at the door for HL2, nor do you pay for any of the other (in my opinion) limited FPS games on the market right now. But ask yourself: why does anyone?

Also: players who play commercial MUDs have more invested in a game than time. Time is an interesting commodity; those who have a lot of it rarely value it at all, and those with none of it eventually end up wanting it more than money. Money is an entirely different beast. For some ridiculous reason, everyone wants it, and all they can get, regardless of how much they have currently. But SPENDING money is where it really gets interesting; when you spend money, you expect results. Whether its the thrill you payed for at Six Flags, the screw you paid for doing its job, or the credits you buy in Achaea holding their worth and still be useful in 6 years (because Achaea is still around in 6 years, a rare thing for a MUD nowadays), you EXPECT results. So you do more to make sure you get the results you want.

Logos and his administrators keep the obviously destructive influences away from their normal pbase, and in turn the normal pbase keeps itself pretty happy by being a (relatively) mature group and finding excitement in their gameplay. How is this different from CS, UT2003, Warcraft, or any other game you pay for? Is it because it's not a one-time payment and then thousands of hours of fun? (Because it would seem that this could be the model you choose for Achaea....) Is it paying for the games at all? Is it the notion that time is worth more than money, or money is worth more than time? (Because both seem to be useful and allow for the acquisition of power on Achaea, maybe not equally, but that was never a debate as of yet)...

Instead of bickering, I would strongly encourage those of you out there who have a serious and vehement opinion out there to go publish your feelings and make points (even without valid references -- Kavir, we're not all engineers. You're allowed to have a gut feeling every once in a while...I think you actually did earlier in the discussion with regards to the feasibility of making a MUD profitable in 6 years) that we can all view. I'll volunteer to create the website and order the points of view in as objective and comprehensive a way as I can manage, and we'll be done with the #### thing.

Meanwhile, congrats to Iron Realms for being a business that didn't tank in the current economic setting. Hope we eventually see some OSS from you sometime soon so we can start increasing the overall quality of MUDs again.

-Visko

I’m just an ignorant yet often accused too vocal an old man and I’ve read this nine pages of combined rant, whine, intelligent rebuttal and scathing innuendo and I’m frankly amazed intelligent people miss the point so often. I firmly believe we are two different disciplines, hobbyist and entrepreneur and while I believe those who run graphical or text MU*s for personal profit are exploiting the children of today, but I actually applaud them for success at it since somebody has to. I’m even more impressed they stoop to share the plethora of administrative, qualitative and historical knowledge they’ve garnered over all the years with we, the deprived hobbyists.

Let me elaborate a tad before I ruffle too many feathers. I mean deprived in the perspective that we don’t work from analyst driven models of money making ideas, paid coders nor elaborate degrees and training in interpersonal social skills. I’m not saying all of you do, but you should and I applaud those with the vision to take advantage and make money, but you transgressed the hobbyist stage IMHO. Our, the hobbyist focus is perhaps a bit different in that we have a vision of a world and whether by kink, twist or persistence, hope to make that vision a place that attracts players who also enjoy our vision. That’s part of the challenge to us. Would I want someone to pay us/me to share that vision? #### YES! Do I care if they do? Nopes, as a hobbyist my over 30k hours in seven years online building and managing has the reward of seeing happy people, amazed at certain things, whining about others, but typically enjoying themselves. In my experience, even those that dabble in the realms of Everquest and Aechea eventually return home to our Phoenix after a while because it’s ‘HOME.’

Molly tried to explain but sadly she didn’t really articulate her issues well because of perhaps two different frames of reference, exploitive versus nurturing. I do share her views in most respects but I hope I’m articulating them somewhat better. Players play out of a sense of wonder at abilities given the medium, visualization or dream of reality substitution, or the illusion of another world where you can be that knight in shining armor or hero of the realm that real life circumstance has relegated most to only dream of. In a Mu*, we’re all equal to begin with, none of the social inequities that determine “which side of the tracks” you belong on, regardless of country of origin, upbringing or any of the other social stigmas applied. ANY application of affluence in real life taints that persona to a great extent. I’ve heard and believe there are “time” payment ways to compensate for lack of affluence in quite a few places, but isn’t time more valuable to reach the same goal and not equal to coins, the modern shortcut to notoriety? I wouldn’t really consider that a concern of entrepreneurs since the dollar is the bottom line goal, but it exists and something the valued hobbyists I know concern themselves with. I’ve often kicked someone offline cause they needed to get their buns to school. Silly of me, I know, but they are my kids and I’m not a Nintendo or Playstation game since I care.

Idealistic, altruistic too much, perhaps, but we are successful in our limited perspective and definition of ‘successful’ as are Molly and KaVir and Brody and Ntanel and Samson and quite a few others. I’m perhaps a bit jealous that I can’t earn money for something I love to do, but oh well, I’m happy with the other rewards and I get graduation announcements as well as personal notes from our players like we are all members of a family.

All obeisance and attaboys to Logos et al, I’m proud of you and jealous. I hope Rapture rewards you well and maybe perhaps you can contribute some of that amazing profit back to the rest of us to promote the hobby.