Hello All, I know there used to be various coders on this list from way back, while most people are probably not looking to do anything of this depth, I figured that I would make the post here since it does relate to my rom codebase. Please note: Allot of this post contains my own personal opinions based on my experience with muds over the course of many years so it's not directed to anyone.. They are just my thoughts..
----- Start of Post ----- I've had various ideas in the past on how I want my mud to be different. I had at one time tried to get ideas from the web but the problem I see is that everything regarding muds is so standardized that it's unbelievable. We have all of these great telnet clients like ZMud, Portal and tons of others. But no one has ever really developed one aimed at mud developers to incorporate into thier own games.. And then, we have various muds working to incorporate the use of mysql to do back end functions and such. While all of this stuff maybe sound good, I think the biggest problem is that in my personal opinion, these developers have missed the point.. General muds have worked great for years and there was never a need for this back in the mid 90's.. I have yet to see a mud with a playerbase of that size today who had even thought about doing this. Aardwolf has had in excess of 400+ players on at many times. I've never heard mention of them using a database. Why change what already works well. Hence, it would be nice if that much effort was put into a mud client that we have never seen. The great thing about graphical games is that stress is taken off of the server because players are given a specifically written client just for that game.. Like UO, Quake, and so on. It's beyond me why Smaug was the only mud I ever knew of that attempted anything close with the Realms Client or whatever. But if I remember, it was windows only. I, myself have been looking into writing a client that could connect to a mud and would also hold the majority of files that most diku derived muds hold in memory.. Meaning that the mud client would include the help files, general gaming notes, contain the motd and so forth all within the encryted files. The player downloads the client, logs on, the client checks for updates for new helps ect and downloads them in the background.. I think a typical mud can be expanded greatly if the server / client aspects were seperated. If you are familiar with the RoaClient and the set of c scripts that you can incorporate into your mud for sending the motd, boards, eq lists, who list, sound files and such, then this is what I am after. But I'm not just looking to have scripts, I'd like to offer an open source frontend/client as well. That's the only drawback about Roa, no source for the actual client and hence, it too only runs on windows. I see nothing wrong with doing this in terms of files client side. Some may say that it would make it easier for players to expose the docs or info contained within the files.. But It doesn't matter because even with RoaClient, Zmud and others, I can copy the text of any mud at any time.. It's ashame people do this but I know I've seen muds with 100% original areas that were copied and reused elsewhere. However, A specific client with it's own protocal/encryption could help stop this. I guess overall, I'm looking to do something more like UO and general 3D games in terms of the seperated client/server. I'm not looking to build a grapical mud. Although bmp, gif, jpg login greetings, motd's and map support would be nice. I'm just not trying to reinvent the wheel and worsen the system resource load due to external databases and everything else. The client should support all of this by issuing simple commands, not sending full files. Meaning that if the mud send the send motd, the mud client would do all of the work on the client side. The problem is that there isn't anywhere to look. I've thought about using the front end from something like Quake 2 and incorporating the text capabilities from the mud into it but Quake is a commercial product and it would appear that there would be too many issues using it along with a modified codebase like mine (Rom24) which has been in development for about 3 years now. Does anyone have any ideas or links to something like this or docs about this. I don't want an actual client, I would just like to find info on sending/receiving files and updating things client side. Encrytion of files and so on. There has never been any open source clients with overhead maps or anything of the nature being shown and updated 24/7 on the client side that I have seen. These are just some of the many things I'm looking to achive but just don't know where to start. Please post any of your ideas or thoughts if you would, Thanks Chris
