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Old 04-07-2008, 12:57 AM   #4
Threshold
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Home MUD: Threshold RPG
Posts: 1,260
Threshold will become famous soon enough
Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?

Well, don't hold back. I find the history of our little community very interesting and would love to wax nostalgic about it and ponder the twists and turns of its evolution.

When you say proprietary, are you referring to the fact that LPC (or more specifically, LP mudlibs) had restrictive licenses and were therefore not suited to most commercial uses? Otherwise, I'm not sure what is any more or less proprietary about LPC than python or perl or any other language.

About the only thing I know about LUA is what I have seen from a handful of graphical games I have played when I poked around the install directories. From your glowing description, it sounds pretty powerful. I will have to read up on it more in the future.

Well, at least I know it was nothing personal when they quoted me the same thing. Maybe they came down in price a bit for you at least. (This is from memory, I may be off slightly in the details). When I spoke to the people at Skotos (that is who owns the DGD license), they wanted a minimum $100,000 for one game, with some maximum number of players that I do not recall. And that was not a one time fee. That was an annual fee.

The amazing thing is, they were actually serious. I asked the person I was communicating with if what I really needed to understand is they did not really want to license it, and instead wanted people to make muds under the Skotos banner. He was quite insistent that they really did hope to license DGD, and that this is what they thought was fair. Unbelievable.

As far as I know, they never successfully licensed it to a single person. So maybe they should have rethought that.

But that gets to one of my points. Dworkin wrote DGD, and I definitely don't blame him for selling it to Sokotos, but that was certainly a bad development overall for the LPmud community. I often think things would have been VERY different for LPmuds if DGD had remained a GPL product like it was originally. I worked with DGD once for a few months on a mud project, and I thought it was quite good. People definitely could have used it to make some excellent MUDs - commercial or non-commercial.

I think you are definitely right. I find LPC extremely easy to use, and the ability to make massive changes to a game without needing a recompile or a shutdown is just great. But I could not see myself making a new game using LPC. There are a lot of things about it that just get on my nerves now that I have spent a lot of time doing MUD programming in a different language. And the shame of it is, its not like LPC is going to improve or evolve with the times since its development is basicaly dead.

The game we are currently programming does not use LPC, but (without giving up any details we are not yet ready to talk about) the language we use is similar in many ways. It is a widely used language, however, with international support and a design that was intended for massive commercial use from the beginning. It is also under constant development and improvement.

So with all of that said, why then did DIKU not suffer any of these same problems? Is it the fact that once you get into the nitty gritty of coding for DIKU, you are working with C code and learning C? I can see how that has a lot of inherent and widely applied benefits outside of mudding. That is certainly true, but I don't know if that would really affect a mud designers decision when choosing to make a mud. Maybe it would though. I don't know.
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