I decided to start a new thread with this one, hope no one minds. So far, I have yet to find one single "free" graphical MUD. Mostly this is due to bandwith issues. Most impls have no problem shelling out $15 to $35 a month for a basic shell account with one or two telnet ports, but the bandwith for real-time graphical MUDs is much greater, and thus the sysadmins charge a higher price, if they allow them at all. And then there's the privacy issue. No one wants their uber-kool, high-tech source to fall into the hands of some geek who's ftp-ing around and grabbing everyone's source code on the server, so they generally try to buy a private server where they are the only clients. Of course, a really popular game (Arch-Mage springs to mind) tends to have several games running on several ports, which is extremely expensive as well (hence all the extra advertising). One way to handle the extra costs (IMHO) would be to design and sell a graphical client, which the user MUST use to connect to the game. You could store all the graphics, sounds, ect. in cache and that itself would cut back on bandwith. Of course, from what I understand from the DIKU and CircleMUD licenses, you wouldn't be able to sell the client if you used a DIKU or CircleMUD source. I hope Alex doesn't get upset at me for sending this, as it really belongs on another list, perhaps MudConnector or something. -FIRE __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! News - Today's headlines http://news.yahoo.com -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | | Newbie List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/circle-newbies/ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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