This article on Massively about the Hero Engine MMORPG development platform made me smile. Yes I suppose the fact that multiple developers can work collaboratively on the same server while seeing the results of each others work in real time is pretty revolutionary. At least for graphical MMORPGs anyway.
The concept is probably quite familiar to anyone who has ever developed a text MUD. I think that TinyMUD way back in 1989 was the first publically available codebase that shipped with content creation tools allowing anyone with the correct permissions to create rooms and objects. Later codebases such as LP and MUSH added more sophisticated scripting and world creation, but the essentials remained the same; you could log in a character and build the world around you, much as you can with the Hero Engine.
I’m glad that with the development of the Hero Engine graphical MMORPGs are finally catching up to MUDs and it’s not surprising when you consider that Simutronics, the company behind Hero Engine, first made their name with text MUDs such as Gemstone and Dragonrealms. It’s great to see a text game company bring their experience and expertise to graphical MMORPGs like this but I’m a little disappointed that this aspect wasn’t mentioned in the Massively article.
In the next couple of posts I’m going to look at some more things I think graphical MMORPGs could learn from their text MUD ancestors, and also at what modern text MUDs can learn in return.
bcdev.design.blog 