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Old 02-27-2018, 06:10 PM   #15
shevegen
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Posts: 63
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Re: How long do you build?

I have been playing LPC muds and also building, in a ratio of about 8:1 or so ... give or take.

That is, for, say 8 hours playing, I would have also had about 1 hour of coding/building/hacking.

LPC is unfortunately very old. It's somewhat acceptable to write content in it but way too
cumbersome. It was modelled after the time of the early 1990s and it shows, catering
primarily to C/C++ hackers.

The content creation stage was quite a lot of fun though. I remember helping in the one
or the other LQ run too or trying to run LQs created by me primarily. Reallife interferes
a lot but so does LPC. I don't even advocate modern-day "scripting" programming languages
per se, mind you - specifically tailored and SIMPLER domain-specific languages would
be nicer to be had, doing away with the type system but also being closely to the
game's language/parlance itself.

I quit mostly because I quit playing MUDs; not necessarily all voluntarily since others
ruined the game via code changes, which I always found to be one of the "best" way
to kill a MUD. Just take away the fun with code changes ... then people quit when
they don't want to partake... and then others quit because they are suddenly deprived
of interaction opportunities that they once had before.

I think if I were a few hundred years ago and would start from zero, I'd try to create a
LPC-like MUD, but without LPC, and without mapping the LPC model 1:1 in regards
to "room" objects. I'd more focus on scene, scenery, roleplay, storytelling, interaction,
world building, - in about that order. Combat and PvP can all play a part too, but it
should not be about the primary "content", largely because when it does, it all
degrades to a "kill bla" and who has the most XP/features/numbers/PK-nukes.

Biggest problem is when you have an admin who does not understand this.

LPC also has this outdated model of "wizards" and "players. This is hugely unfair.
It is an apartheid system - there are those who can change the code, and the
others (the players) are the voiceless pets. Of course this depends a lot on how
you want to run a game. You could easily put rules to prevent abuse ... guess
on which MUD this was not to be found.

The players are almost always universally great. There may be a few exceptions
every now and then, but by and large, they made MUDs great.

Text-based MUDs are a bit of a fossil from a fossil era. I think they could do
fine but it takes a lot of decidation and motivation to keep things running
in a good way, without regressions.
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