[Kylotan]

I look forward to hearing about your future career in digging tunnels with spoons.

It's not just about what is possible - it's about how long it takes to get there!

Do you think the mud community is more conservative in this regard? In other areas of games and hobbyist game development, the problem seems to be more the other way - people are too quick to move to something newer and shinier. People start a mod based on one game, then another will get released and they'll flock to the new game and port the mod over, often never finishing it because they keep rewriting. (To be fair it's not just hobbyists that do this, either. 3D Realms and Ion Storm come to mind.)

How often has this happened over the years? I haven't really heard of there being a significant surge of any brand of stock mud since the Smaug days. A rudimentary sampling on Mudconnect.com suggests LP and Circle are the most popular, which suggests that there hasn't been much change over the years. (Incidentally, is there a good list of muds categorised by codebase, or by any other criteria? The search engine on Mudconnect is awful.)

It's useful for bootstrapping purposes to have a decent data set ready to play with from day one. And personally I would quite enjoy playing through all the old favourite areas with new rules and an improved interface.