Re: Reinvigorating MUDs
Orrin's post echoed my perspective exactly on game builder tools. If you remove the coding / scripting, you end up with the same formula, no two ways about it.
Besides, I feel it's too easy to put up a clone-able game out there, call it a game maker, and lure people in with "you don't have to code to be a game designer". Most efforts in that respect have been south of mediocre, and they just waste people's time.
has been to focus instead on ease of content creation, and ease of customization of a good amount of out-of-the-box features. You can build a good-sized world (mobless) in a day using the open source Wesnoth map builder. To get a feel for the extendable modular design, you can look at actual spell & affects examples, quest examples, crafting examples, powerful mob scripts, etc. The world is stored in a standalone RDBS by default, and the documentation includes ways to point web interfaces to the db for building by non-coders.
In addition, the server works seamlessly with my web client, which is also available on GitHub.
Bottom line is, though, that this community is so small nowadays that I'm not sure any offering has the power to "reinvigorate". Which is why my own contribution is more targeted to people wanting to create text-rich realtime web games than old school MUDs that are happy with telnet.
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