[MUD-Dev] DGN: Question about MU* acronyms

J C Lawrence claw at kanga.nu
Wed Jan 9 02:19:06 CET 2002


On Thu, 3 Jan 2002 17:32:43 -0800 
Randolf Richardson <randy at inter-corporate.com> wrote:

> My question has to do with MUD and other acronyms: What are they,
> and how do they differ?  I don't know, for example, the difference
> between MUD, MUX, MUSH, MUCK, and other, and internet searches
> have come up empty for me so far.

Please see the rec.games.mud.* FAQs:

  http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/mud-faq/part1/index.html
  http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/mud-faq/part2/index.html
  http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/mud-faq/part3/index.html

The longer answer is, well, that it all depends.  They are different
designs and architectures for MUD servers, and as such tend to lend
themselves to, and have more generally been used for variously
different types of MUD services -- which really isn't a comment on
the nature or capability of the servers themselves, but of their
design features and what they've been most generally applied to.

  eg Members of the MUSH family have historically tended to be used
  for talkers, socialisers, heavy/consensual RP games etc.  But,
  that doesn't mean they are limited to that.  Some of the better
  and more challenging and technically demanding (of the player)
  BattleMech games out there is MUSH based.

Much like general purpose programming languages they can be used for
almost everything (MUD-wise), but the surrounding support code and
infrastructure is variously well fleshed out/supportive in different
arenas.  The big axis of technical differentiation in server design
tends to fall along lines like: soft code or hard code, disk or
memory based, free user programming, runtime morphic or runtime
static, single/multi-threaded or process groups, distributed or
single server, RPC layers/interfaces, template/object/class/module
based, and so forth.

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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