[CF-Devel] crossfire vs mud

[Mark Wedel]

Beno Attila wrote:

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      I come from a mudding background, and am used to having 100+ users on the
     
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      same server. Looking at the metaserver stats, there are max 2-3 people
     
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      online at a time on a crossfire server. I don't assume there is a
     
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      technical reason for it, right?
     
     
 Probably several aspects in addition to popularity:

1) Lag is probably more relevant for crossfire than muds, simply because of the
much faster action (a do or die battle may only be 5 seconds), and because much
more data is being transmitted.  Playing on a slow link more or less amounts to
death.

2) Because of the amount of data and additional calculations the server does,
the load a server can handle is also likely to be smaller than that of a mud. 
But to be honest, except for some bad bugs/maps, I don't know if the cpu or
network has yet to be saturated by most of the public servers out there.

3) Crossfire is likely to be much more playable on a solo server than other
games - as you mention below, most all maps are available, so many people may in
fact be players on solo servers or on private lans/whatever else.   Same
probably can not be said for muds, as you won't get much with just the server.

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      So why do all running servers have the out-of-the-box maps? Again, please
     
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      exuse me, I'm fairly new to crossfire, but fell in love with in pretty
     
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      quickly. :)
     
     
 As said:
1) Making maps is somewhat time consuming.
2) I think most of the developers figured there would be greater good in
contributing the maps they do to the common pool, increasing the size of the
set.  There may also be some peer pressure - if you do come up with a really
cool mapset, you'll probably get some people saying 'that is really cool - you
should contribute it to the main set'.

 There are obviously good reasons not to do so:
1) Non public maps can not be examined by other people, so people can't easily
find out how to navigate it/passwords/powers of customized monsters, etc.
2) differentation of servers - If my world looks nothing like yours, it means
each server has a new play experience.  Unfortunately, due to possible lag, it
may not be feasible for people to play your server simply because it would be
too painful.


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      So is it, for some reason required that you use the original maps? (I've
     
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      only seen one server that had EXTRA maps, but even that had the original
     
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      set.)
     
     
 No requirement.  Just a bit of work to come up with your own set.  Probably an
easier solution would be to start with the standard set, but move thing around. 
Maybe have characters start in navar city, move dungeons here and there, etc. 
Experience is still somewhat the same, but a bit different (as that tough dragon
at the end may now be a different type than people expected, etc).