This article on Massively about the Hero Engine MMORPG development platform made me smile. Yes I suppose the fact that multiple developers can work collaboratively on the same server while seeing the results of each others work in real time is pretty revolutionary. At least for graphical MMORPGs anyway.
The concept is probably quite familiar to anyone who has ever developed a text MUD. I think that TinyMUD way back… Continue reading
I’ve talked before about how I think more commercial muds would benefit the whole of the mudding community and in this article I’m going to look at some of the options mud creators have for commercialising their work.
In a subscription model all players pay a regular fixed amount to access the game. Players are usually able to play for free for a limited time before deciding whether to subscribe. This… Continue reading
I thought I’d try recording some screencast videos to demonstrate how to use the scripting functions of the client. This first video covers creating aliases and using a variable for targetting. I’m not sure about the sound quality so I think I’ll try and improve that for the next one! Any feedback or suggestions for future video topics would be appreciated… Continue reading
FMud is a simple web based Flash mud client.
A running demo, feature list and installation instructions are available on the FMud project page.
Released on 11th February 2009.
The first thing I want to say is that there are plenty of high quality MUDs out there that are run on a non commercial basis. Now that’s out of the way, I believe that were more MUDs to go commercial, even on a relatively modest scale, it would benefit the MUD community as a whole.
As I have said before, I believe that MUDs offer unique gameplay opportunities beyond… Continue reading
I don’t usually post personal stuff on this blog but I wanted to share this.
Emily Rose Adcock was born at 15.55 on 15th November by cesarean section. She was a week overdue and weighed in at a rather hefty 8lbs and 15 oz.
The strangest thing was that Suzy barely… Continue reading
I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that can be done to enhance the visual appeal of MUDs. This may sound a bit odd given that a MUD is all about text, but the text can still be presented in ways that are are more visually appealing. This is particularly important if you want to attract players new to MUDs who may find the look… Continue reading
FMud is a simple web based Flash mud client.
A running demo, feature list and installation instructions are available on the FMud project page.
Released on 7th November 2008.
I believe that MUDs’ greatest strengths are also their greatest weakness; namely that they are quick and cheap to setup and run. While this means MUDs can offer some of the unique gameplay I mentioned in my last post it has also undoubtedly lead to an explosion in the numbers of mediocre games. New players discovering MUDs through a major listing site such as TMC are presented with huge… Continue reading
In my last post I asked what MUDs can offer players that they can’t get from more modern graphical virtual worlds. In order to answer this question we need to look at what makes MUDs unique.
The single biggest difference between MUDs and other virtual world platforms is the relative ease with which MUDs can be developed. While producing a quality MUD is still a large undertaking, the number of… Continue reading
