On 02-09-12 07.34, "Shane P. Lee" <tacodog21@YAHOO.COM> wrote: > 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. There are some "free" servers out there, I know that EQ came down hard on the free servers, but that backlashed on them since the admins released the free source code for the EQ protocol, which of course wasn't the desired effect. When I was active in Ultima Online there were free servers there as well, I don't know what they're called, but it's probably some sort of developer server license, or maybe totally freeware? I am not all that well versed with the actual server-side software aspects of UO. > 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). If you have a server for an MMORPG you probably have it outsourced somewhere in a real server environment. Number one, you're shelling out hard cash to actually promote, sell, and operate the server, and because you charge money from your users, you have an obligation towards them in the form of upgrades, uptime, bandwidth, and support, I hardly think that you would want to place that kind of investment under your living room sofa with the old pizza cartons and beer cans, do you? > 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 don't think that you would want to use DIKU for a graphical MUD in the first place, since it is totally different in structure and layout than a graphical mud, espcially considering that you probably need to stream data from the server to the client in the form of coordinates and the likes, and correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think that the socket and comm stuff in DIKU would suffice for that task. > I hope Alex doesn't get upset at me for sending this, as it really > belongs on another list, perhaps MudConnector or something. I'd say it probably belongs on the Kanga MUD-Dev list. :) I suggest you subscribe there and just lurk. An excellent source of ideas, problems, and discussions relating to MUD's and MMORPG's. Warm regards, /Torgny -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | 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/ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 06/25/03 PDT