[shadowfyr]

Think I will throw in my two cents here and say that Hephos is right. The client makes a difference. Damn near everyone, except the purists who like "simple", who have ever tried Mushclient won't use anything else. Why? Because you can practically code a fracking mud using its script system, once you get around some of the quirks in how it handles certain situations. Mind you, that is an exaggeration, but one recent discussion has been to make a sort of single player "mud" as a plugin, which could walk the player through the steps of setting up the client to connect to a mud, configuring triggers to handle things that happen from a mud, etc. All possible because of recent additions to the debugging capabilities, specifically the "world.simulate" function, which sends data through the client as though it was being recieved in a packet from a server. The few things that bug the hell out of me is a) no GUI support, for things like specialized windows, etc., b) MXP support is limited, so more than one font, or inline images is not possible, and c) while some people have worked in the path search algorythms for one, no one has had the patience to actually code a mapper for it.

I would also like to add on option I think could help, even if it was just a support dll. A Scene Description Language based render engine. Yeah, I know, I know, its not a 3D game, but a text game. But... If you are going to use images at all, it doesn't make sense to me to rely on hundreds of megabytes (or gigs) of static images, or even what is almost certainly going to be gigs of image based texture data and mesh data, when the one thing that makes muds superior to graphical ones, supposedly, is that you can change things on the fly and quickly design new areas. Sure, it still takes a bit of time, but its a lot easier to alter the "color" or "size" of an object, or add a few extra bits to them, using primitives (or prims as SL calls them), than to spend hours adjusting the "shape" of a curve in something made for DirectX or the like. And still images... You definitely have to pay someone for, since that is as time consuming, and poorer quality a lot of the time.

Point being. Why use something that requires paying an expert to do it, and/or which you can't change when you *need* to? I really don't think either "standard" option for adding graphics makes much sense in a game designed to be changed "on the fly".