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Old 08-18-2008, 01:30 AM   #2
Ide
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Seattle
Posts: 361
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Re: Why so few Mud Making Programs/Websites?


No.

Yes and no. More complicated to build a mud that couldn't be successfully emulated by running stock DIKU? Yes. Otherwise, sure, something like Mudmaker would work.


There are many codebases you can simply download and run without really any coding knowledge at all -- Smaug, Circle, ROM, Dead Souls, to name a few. You could strip out the zones and write your own content -- to create really interesting zones you probably would have to learn to script them, but that is many orders of magnitude simpler than learning how to write a codebase in C or really any other language.

You probably could even add skills, spells, and races by simple copy and pasting of the source code, duplicating existing code and changing some strings and numbers around. Some codebases let you add these things with an on-line creation editor as well, so you don't even have to touch the source.

Anyway, I would venture that no one has created more programs like Mudmaker because the codebases already exist, and people just download those and modify them cosmetically. These stock codebases are simply mini-Mudmakers without a fancy GUI to interact with them. Heck, there are even codebases with such GUIs -- look at CoffeeMUD for example.

Finally, some advice -- if you don't think you have the time to learn a programming language, do you think you have the time to design, develop, and run a mud?

Don't mean to be harsh here, but what are your goals for this project? Maybe you're aiming too high. You could look at things like modding existing cRPGs or writing IF for a project whose scope is more manageable yet still mud-like.
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