Texy-based muds, assuming they use rooms and well written descriptions take a LOT more time to create than a graphical game. Now if they use an ASCII grid type map then I agree their quickly created.

I beg to differ, Fizban. Writing a graphics engine is no easy task, even assuming you use libraries somebody else wrote for you like Ogre3d or the SDL. And of course, just to make a fair comparison, if you use artwork as varied and diverse as you are requiring the descriptions to be, now you have enough artwork to make a small team of people busy…

Most games re-use a lot of graphics in different areas. Muds on the other hand often require their builders not duplicate room descriptions. More or less this leads tio graphics taking more time perhaps at the start but taking remarkably less time later on.

Well then, many people here have created MUDs, some of which would surely fall under your criteria for description-based games. Since writing such a MUD takes "a LOT more time", surely then, you could create a few MMORPGs for us? :wink:

Since you mentioned work later on, here's where your argument starts to have trouble. Let's say you want to add a new spell. Everybody has to write the code. The MUD coder needs only throw in a few lines of text to describe the effect. The MMORPG people need to add the new artwork. That's quite a bit more work than just a few lines of text, especially depending on what exactly you're describing!

As for reusing graphics: well, somebody still has to go in and place all those objects, the furniture, the decorations, etc., and new mobs will still need all-new artwork and animations.

And, well, there's extremely strong empirical evidence to suggest that your claim is wrong. If you were right, there would be many more hobbyist MMORPGs out there than MUDs. As it is, there are very many hobbyist, one- or two- person MUDs out there, and very few non-commercial MMORPGs, most of which have whole teams working on them.

I think the MMORPG requires a lot more experience in specific fields related to gaming that muds do not. This might end up being why more people create MUDs as hobbys than graphical games moreso than anything to do with the time each requires. Something can be harder to do, and faster to do if you know how and be less popular because of the difficulty level. ie. Many more people know C than are graphical designers. I'm still not sure I'd say MMORPG's really take any more time to make. Though I suppose regardless the point was that muds 'do' take an immense amount of time. Writing even just 200 paragraphs (Which is probably a rough average of the amount of text in an average 100 room zone) takes a good deal of time. So does balancing the stats on the objects and mobs in the zone.

One thing to consider is that most MUDs are written as hobbies, in developers spare time. Likewise, most MUDs are developed by one or two coders.

An MMORPG on the other hand is developed by usually a handful of core developers as well as a dozen or two more coders, artists, musical composers, and 3D modelers. This team can spend years working on an MMORPG (even one that isn't “ground breaking”) as a full time job for a few years.

If most MUDs are anything like the ones I've worked on, progress is slow. People like to chat, goof off, change, and then re-change things.

Another interesting metric I don't feel like looking up is the difference in lines of code between a large MUD and an MMORPG, both including and excluding the MMORPGs numerous graphics, sound, networking, and other libraries, as well as the gigabytes of textures.

There may be people out there who could create an MMORPG relatively quickly, but I think the demographics, and a quick eyeballing of sourceforge, suggest that in reality, it does in fact seem to take a lot longer for an MMORPG to go from design to beta than a MUD does.

What.

I have attempted to make a number of graphical mmo's and i can assure anyone who doubts the masses of work involved to actually give it a go and just see, using a number of off the shelf products like Realm Crafter, Multiverse and even a more scratch based way using Dark Basic. Muds for the most part are orders of magnitude easier to set up, create, customize and all those things.

For those who dont know about MMO engines, Realm Crafter and Multiverse are akin to the stock mud engine, they come with some pre-made assets you can use in the game to get you started. Using the tools is easy enough, but after putting in about 400 hours into creating one zone i sort of got dispirited with the amount of work involved in creation content for 5 game levels.

Given the immense amount of work a single Oblivion mod takes with a fully featured construction set already built plus all the graphic models you can stand already available, I have absolutely no doubt that building an entire MMO is a huge amount of work. Impossible for one person to do on their own. You need large teams to pull one of those off. A text MUD simply can't compare in the volume of work.

I think there is actually atleast one MMRPG that was started to be developed by only 2 people. Take a look at http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg.... Of course it isn't like Oblivion in graphics but you can definitely argue that it might be possible to create a 3D mmrpg if you have an artist that can supply the graphics. That doesn't mean that creating a 3D game is simpler than creating a text game though :).

HAHA take a look at the developers page, it has over 100 names listed including the things that they completed, EL Developers Allthough EL was started by 2 guys, it most certainly wasn't brought to the stage it is at today by those 2. Many many hands have gone into making EL the game that it is today. I have played EL and its an ok game, currently i have been playing Archlord, its a bit of a WoW wanna be, other than that its actually pretty enjoyable.

Split from here

Thanks Davion.

Speaking as someone who has a license to a commercial MMO dev kit, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that MMO's take vastly more work than a MUD. Almost everything that has been stated as being needed for doing a Text game, is required of a MMO.

Game balancing (skills, stats, objects, mobs).. check
Dialogue.. check
Quests.. check

Yes, you don't have to write a description. No, instead you need to fire up a modeling program to work out a mesh for the character. You have to be careful to keep it within the polygon constraints for the engine.. and still look good. You have to create textures.. bump mapping files… animations.. rigging.

For world generation, yes there are now WYSIWYG-like middleware that makes this easier, but you still have to spend countless hours manipulating the land, ensuring the gradiation is not too steep for the engine to allow characters to move across. You can spend hours just perfecting a single snow capped mountain.

Oh, then there is musical scoring… sound effects.

On top of all that, you still have to code your game logic.

MMOs easier/faster? I wish. If that were the case my license for the stuff I have would not be being wasted.. and for the record the software I have is *not* multiverse or any of those. It's actually quite a high end setup.

And thats the killer, as you move up from easy tools like MV and RC the time needed to complete something rises exponentially. I am glad to know that i am not the only person here who has dabbled in pictures and seen just how much work is involved an for you it was probably a lot more.

I think that a lot more people than you think have looked into graphical games, if only quite briefly… :wink: I even started writing my own 2d graphics engine about seven years ago before I realized it was kind of silly…

What is really fun is that the tools do make it deceptively appear easy on the surface. I mean the world builder for what I have is like a very souped up version of God-mode on games where you can terraform the land. It's just how does this option react with this shape with these settings and this texture & terrain type with these attributes set. Freaking nuts, and over time, yes you could get to where you know all these things, but it is still painstaking work.

I've not ruled out doing the graphical thing. I have a music/sound artist lined up if I ever get into a position where it's needed, as well as concept artist. Unfortunately, likely will never happen… unless I win the lottery…

I agree, the tools make it look really easy on the surface, but to make even a part of a small zone takes much more time than it does to make a similar sized mud zone. As much as i would love to make the game i have designed on paper it is never going to happen. At best if i really feel motivated to do something like this, would be that i join an open project in some role. The trouble is that most of the open projects require people with graphical arts skills and coders experienced in 3d engines. Not really in my skills list.