MUD stands for Multiple User Dungeon. It's ASCII based, so no graphics. Well there are graphics after a sort.
You can see the map and that is sort of a graphical interface. Why would you play a Diku MUD? I play one at work to pass the time. I usually have 3 or 4 terminals open and when the boss comes by, all he sees is me typing away at a text terminal like a mad man. Secondly, a lot of blind people play MUDs and there's a lot of support for what they call VI, or vision impaired users.
Another reason to play one of these is from a MMO hobbyist viewpoint. Why does WoW use the '!' for quest givers? What do people mean when they say 'that mob cons too high for me'. Why are there corpse runs? Where did the class 'trinity' come from? Where did raids come from, and a lot of other cool--I guess you could call it MMO history--kind of things. Clans too.
Diku MUD is as old as 1990 and you canread more about iton Wikipedia. It was created by Danes. There are many, many more MUD engines around these days.
If you are an armchair dev, you can put your money where your mouth is and launch your MMO today. Well, you'd have to build content but the software is free, and Linux servers, a VPS, are very cheap, some a $1 a month. But you could build it and see if you could attract and retain players.
There are all kinds of MUDs out there, from survival MUDs, to science fiction, fantasy of course, Terry Pratchett stuff and so on.
I play on Aardwolf MUD, Edgor a warrior. It's one of the more popular MUDs and has about 300-400 players on every day. Come look me up.
You can see the map and that is sort of a graphical interface. Why would you play a Diku MUD? I play one at work to pass the time. I usually have 3 or 4 terminals open and when the boss comes by, all he sees is me typing away at a text terminal like a mad man. Secondly, a lot of blind people play MUDs and there's a lot of support for what they call VI, or vision impaired users.
Another reason to play one of these is from a MMO hobbyist viewpoint. Why does WoW use the '!' for quest givers? What do people mean when they say 'that mob cons too high for me'. Why are there corpse runs? Where did the class 'trinity' come from? Where did raids come from, and a lot of other cool--I guess you could call it MMO history--kind of things. Clans too.
Diku MUD is as old as 1990 and you canread more about iton Wikipedia. It was created by Danes. There are many, many more MUD engines around these days.
If you are an armchair dev, you can put your money where your mouth is and launch your MMO today. Well, you'd have to build content but the software is free, and Linux servers, a VPS, are very cheap, some a $1 a month. But you could build it and see if you could attract and retain players.
There are all kinds of MUDs out there, from survival MUDs, to science fiction, fantasy of course, Terry Pratchett stuff and so on.
I play on Aardwolf MUD, Edgor a warrior. It's one of the more popular MUDs and has about 300-400 players on every day. Come look me up.