[swampdog]

Wayfar runs 4 10k room planets on about 300mb of RAM (mostly due to inflation, can be knocked down to about 150~ with reboots). I would also say Miriani and Star Conquest are mostly blind players - i have played both. My personal opinion is that fighting over the ~50-100 blind players is kind of a losing game, since there is an upper limit. The future of MUDs, such as it is, surely lies more in graphical games, especially on social media sites. You have a good point about the underlying representation: at no point does the player care whether you have a true 3d simulation of all your spaces, or whether you accurately simulate the interior room. It's more about the presentation to the player.