Some of you know the saga of my machine woes. For the sake of brevity I will leave it at I have a new machine. It came loaded with Vista. The old machine is half damaged, so being lazy, I thought I would download the evaluation copy of CMUD rather than fool with moving over my registered copy of zmud.
First let me say that CMUD looks slick. It does seem to send faster to a mud at least for me on my antiquated dial-up connection. I see a lot more potential for trigers and aliases. Now I do not use such heavily, but i do use a lot of aliases and 'little' triggers. It took me a bit of time to build a few of them. Also my annoying GPFs when i switched mud engines in a session or even between session is gone. I decided I liked it - at first.
Yeah, ya knew I would not be be writing this otherwise. First let me say one thing. I love Zuggsoft's service. I adored Zmud. But honestly when you label a software as a 28 day trial or an eval software. It should not be BETA. And CMUD is decidedly Beta. Perhaps include only things you are pretty sure work in it with a disclaimer. Maybe extend the time period. Let people play with it free until you have it stabalized, then upgrade it and activate the 28 day eval.
The main issue is that it is Beta. There are lots of things that are unfinished, yet to be done and in the works. That is cool, that is what beta testing is about. But that means it is not ready and therefore I cannot possibly decide whether I am willing to pay for it.
I will skip the obviously not ready stuff like help files, the foibles with multiplaying and redraw issues. As I said Zuggsoft is great in that respect. They answer, look at issues. Publish lists of known issues, have the forums etc.
First in zmud it was a pain to set up global classes and individual classes and load and unload stuff. It was easier to replicate the same scripts over and over under each character than it was to set up a mud class.
It is very easy in Cmud, too easy. From the looks of the forums novices and midbies to coding concepts have no idea where packages are being saved. Actually, much as I like and am impressed by the software so far, I have to admit if I were a complete novice or new to mudding the software would overwhelm me. Perhaps a very basic primer for the new mudder is in order. Including such things as how to set up a group kill trigger and how to set up a variable that pulls from a list.
Second, ok I lied I have to say it. It handles multiplaying poorly. I do play on a mud where multiplaying is permitted and characters may be in the same party. So when my tank dies and I have a mage leeching, I log off the mage and log in the cleric for a res. But now if I quit on the mage, both windows are closed. I am sure this will be fixed, but that pretty much renders the software usless for me on my main mud. I need multiplaying to work smoothly.
Ok I'll admit it I like being able to skin it. Sigh What can I say even old time green screeners like some style sometimes.
Now for the other thing Gamers have to be the weirdest group when it comes spending money. They will think nothing of shelling out $40.00 for a starter pack for an online game plus money for each month's play. But I have already heard complaining and whining in the communities in which I play about having pay for a mud client. To you guys I say Suck it up. How much do you drop on a single game? Now isn't a decent helper or client worthy of some of that, provided the fee is not too high. Anyway I will stop my ramblings for now.
*edited to correct the god awful typos that occur at 3:00. And more to come. Am now breaking the newest build.
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05/24/08 11:43 PM
Summer!
[ From member: Ssolvarain ]
Latest Comment Posted: 09/06/08 01:08 AM by Fizban