[shadowfyr]

All I can say about the subject is what my experience has been:

1. Most drivers only work well on *nix.

2. The one's that where hacked to work on PCs have to have the internals of the library rewritten anyway, in most cases, since they tried to *adjust* the code to work with the older FAT OSes, which didn't support the long file names (or the filenames contain/contained things that even the new Windows systems can't support). And this presumes the driver wasn't rewritten, like Dead Souls was, to only run on NT or higher systems (which back when I went looking for one was a no-go, since I had 98).

3. Database support is an addin, not standard, and its not supported by most libraries.

4. Finding a binary is nearly impossible, and compiling the driver yourself, especially to add things like DB support, is hit or miss. Sometimes it won't work at all, due to the translation code needed to convert between *nix and Windows being written for make file formats, or other tools, that *where* available 10 years ago, but which are no longer part of MS' compiler suites today, or worse, had enough changes made to them that you can't even import the make file any more.

5. There was never much of a "simple" example world for most of them, and when there was, it relied on code that usually got completely rewritten by anyone running the driver (see 2 above, for one reason this happened).

6. Its not as easy to create things in it, which meant you could *technically* do stuff that Diku and others can never manage, at least without compiling the driver, *even* if all you want to do is add a protocol layer, like MXP, and especially if you want to do something that doesn't lend itself to "standard" room/mob/object design. However, it also meant that you couldn't sit someone down for five minutes and have them coding areas.

Issues 1-5 is why I haven't bothered to try, even now that I have XP, to fiddle with one much. Issue 5+6 is why, on one hand, I don't want to screw with LPC, but also why I won't go with one of the "modern" ones, which limit what I can attempt. For one, trying to do anything interesting means a non-trivial steep learning curve, while the other, may just flat not let me do what I want.

In any case, the problem I think was simply that it was a pain in the ass to get working a lot of the time, but "also" that once you had one that worked, you couldn't use it commercially anyway, even if you wanted to. At least not without, apparently, the "owners" thinking you where bloody asking them to run your own WoW server... This day and age, if the MudOS or Lima people tried to babble something like $30k + a cut of the profit, it would take me a week to stop laughing my ass off. And even *then* it was absurd.