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Old 08-15-2010, 06:56 AM   #63
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
Posts: 2,052
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Re: Developing from scratch

That's not a mud, it's not even a talker. Of course if all you want is a basic talker you could throw it together in an afternoon, even with a low-level language, but that's not what my posts were addressing.

The original claim I disagreed with was that a very specific established mud (that I won't name) with years of work could be "written from scratch in a few weeks".

My view can be pretty much summarised in three quotes from my earlier posts:

"Creating a mud from scratch can be an enjoyable and rewarding project, but there seems to be a common misconception that it will automatically result in a better game. In fact, the only thing it guarantees is more work. If your main goal is just to create a fun, playable game, I would suggest going with an established codebase."

"...people underestimate how much work it takes to create a fully playable mud from scratch. They'll often view it from a purely technical perspective, without stopping to consider that that's one of the easy parts. As a result you see quite a few people start work on creating a game from scratch, but few who actually succeed."

"Within the context of this thread, we're comparing "starting from scratch" against "using an existing codebase", therefore it makes sense to compare equal feature sets. If you want features X, Y and Z, you need to compare the effort involved in writing them from scratch against the effort involved in downloading and modifying a codebase that has some or all of those features built-in."


If you could tell me exactly what you disagree with, it would make it easier to formulate an appropriate response.
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