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Old 08-20-2011, 08:29 PM   #19
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
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Re: Need for a new MUD engine?

Standardisation may make browser clients more appealing. But they're still many years behind in terms of features.

Should they somehow catch up, there's nothing preventing existing muds from offering their own customised browser clients.

The development overhead is obviously zero if the mud has telnet support already. As for the overhead of adding support, well, the value of that depends on who the engine is being marketed at.

A prospective mud owner looking to start up their own codebase will weigh up the pros and cons of each option, depending on their needs. If they plan to support a websockets client, they can already use any codebase, so that won't be a selling point. However if they wish to support established mud clients, and you've removed support from the engine, that's likely to be a deal breaker.

This isn't a choice between "X" and "Y". It's a choice between "X" and "both X and Y".

Where do you think those players are going to come from? The people most likely to try out a new mud already play muds, and most of them have a favourite client.

In fact the biggest road bump a new engine faces is one of familiarity. Unrestrictive licences, clean code, advanced features, etc, are all nice to have, but the main reason people pick a certain codebase is familiarity - it's what they're used to, either from playing, or from running previous muds. Drop support for established clients as well, and you make the situation even worse.

It is not obsolete, it's widely used and supported, and IMO it's well-suited to muds. It can already handle whatever you might want to do with websockets - including graphics and sound.

It sounds like you want to drop it because it's "not cool enough". If you wish to do that for your own game then fair enough - but recommending someone else drop support for advanced mud clients just because you think they're not cool, when the engine is already going to struggle to attract an audience, is really not very fair.

Mud owners can already provide their own websockets clients if they wish, they don't need to drop telnet for it.

Keeping everything server-side would be a killer for smartphone mudders though. It would also block people on older computers, and prevent players from customising their interfaces.

There are no benefits in dropping telnet support, only drawbacks.

Sounds are always played client side. Your web browser is just another client.
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