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KaVir · 08-02-2010, 07:42 AM

There always have been (and always will be) some people who are more interested in taking than giving, shamelessly pushing their own agendas at every opportunity, and offering nothing but scorn and insults to the achievements of their competitors.

But equally there are also those who contribute back to the community, whether through advice and suggestions, offering community resources, developing public protocols, sharing design concepts and code, or even releasing fully functional mud servers and clients.

I don't really see any change in that respect, but I have noticed a change in terms of the sort of things the community is working on (and sharing), and overall I think it's pretty positive.

For example, Mudlet and MUSHclient are both actively developed clients that have been made open source, making them more accessable to people who wish to do further customisation - and both clients have been introducing significant support for graphical interfaces.

Then there's MudStandards, which (at least until it was ruined by a couple of bad apples) was making some good progress towards open standards for the benefit of all muds - it looks like development has gone underground, but the end result should still be something that'll benefit the community on the whole, and their wiki may also prove a valuable resource in the future.

Then you could take a look over Tyche's list of , some of which are pretty young. These have avoided the restrictive licences of the past, and at least one of them has been used as the basis for rather nice-looking commercial mud.

And of course there are things like the Intermud chat networks, which improve communication between mud owners, allowing them to better interact and share ideas.

Then of course there are newer sites such as WGFriends, which attempts to bring together different genres of online game, and is even working on a browser client that mud owners can customise to their individual games - once it's complete I think this'll be a great way for muds to offer a download-free graphical interface to new players, and it could even help push muds into the browser market.

Overall I'd say I've got a pretty positive feeling about the direction muds (in general) are heading. Competition may be stiff, but muds as a whole seem to be adapting and evolving, and I'm really excited about some of the things I'm seeing.

08-02-2010, 07:42 AM	#61
KaVir Legend Join Date: Apr 2002 Name: Richard Home MUD: God Wars II Posts: 2,052	Re: The "Health," of Muds There always have been (and always will be) some people who are more interested in taking than giving, shamelessly pushing their own agendas at every opportunity, and offering nothing but scorn and insults to the achievements of their competitors. But equally there are also those who contribute back to the community, whether through advice and suggestions, offering community resources, developing public protocols, sharing design concepts and code, or even releasing fully functional mud servers and clients. I don't really see any change in that respect, but I have noticed a change in terms of the sort of things the community is working on (and sharing), and overall I think it's pretty positive. For example, Mudlet and MUSHclient are both actively developed clients that have been made open source, making them more accessable to people who wish to do further customisation - and both clients have been introducing significant support for graphical interfaces. Then there's MudStandards, which (at least until it was ruined by a couple of bad apples) was making some good progress towards open standards for the benefit of all muds - it looks like development has gone underground, but the end result should still be something that'll benefit the community on the whole, and their wiki may also prove a valuable resource in the future. Then you could take a look over Tyche's list of , some of which are pretty young. These have avoided the restrictive licences of the past, and at least one of them has been used as the basis for rather nice-looking commercial mud. And of course there are things like the Intermud chat networks, which improve communication between mud owners, allowing them to better interact and share ideas. Then of course there are newer sites such as WGFriends, which attempts to bring together different genres of online game, and is even working on a browser client that mud owners can customise to their individual games - once it's complete I think this'll be a great way for muds to offer a download-free graphical interface to new players, and it could even help push muds into the browser market. Overall I'd say I've got a pretty positive feeling about the direction muds (in general) are heading. Competition may be stiff, but muds as a whole seem to be adapting and evolving, and I'm really excited about some of the things I'm seeing.