Monday, October 29, 2007

Only around seventeen years too late?

I was researching late last night for some possible source codes that I could work off from for Anarchy MUD, and I stumbled into something that could either make or break my project: TinyMUD. Apparently, about seventeen years ago, James Aspnes developed a MUD that allows all players, and not just administrators, to create items and rooms. Later derivatives improved on this, allowing more control over the world (such as being able to destroy items and rooms as well, adding recovery methods for deleted work, creating a system to limit power to certain players, and even allowing universal game rules to be changed (like Nomic)). The more I researched it, the more I've discovered games that had the same exact characteristics of Anarchy MUD. Every characteristic was present in another game somewhere.

Except for one.

As flexible as all of these games seem to be, I am yet to find one that incorporates the modification and deletion of player characters as a feature. This might be my only saving grace. It is also, in my opinion, the most interesting characteristic, so I'm not completely dismayed that everything else has been done before. If anything, it might make programming that much easier, if I am able to use the source code from a TinyMUD or TinyMUD-derivative game. I will be doing some more research, however, to make sure that I am indeed doing something at least partially original.

Ingenuity is hard work.

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