MUSH falls in the "Tiny" category of MUDs, which is to say that it's
derived from the original TinyMUD base written by Jim Aspnes at CMU
back in, oh, '83 or so. In general it's not considered to be very
good, and LPMUD, MOO, and some even newer things like DGD are much
better. They include their own languages (interpreted in the case
of LP and MOO, interpreted at run time but compileable in the case
of DGD) and are much more flexible in terms of the range of actions
they'll allow and the percentage of the world-rules you can rewrite
without hacking the server.
There are a few kinds of MUSH, the original, PernMUSH, and probably
others I don't know about. It's all very boring, though, since it's
not very flexible and certainly isn't what I'd build a graphical
system on.
There are of course graphical MUDs being built, BSX has been around
forever and uses a standard LPMUD with a mudlib that sends out
trapezoidal approximations in 16 colors (at least last time I saw it).
Other people are doing other things.
VRML doesn't quite work yet for MUD-building since it doesn't include
synchronous hooks to tie a client to.
Oh, a bio, since I haven't introduced myself yet. I'm James Waldrop,
a lot of folks know me as Sulam on the Net, and I've been working with
CMC -- computer mediated conferencing -- for about 6 years now. Most
of that work has been done with MUDs, although of course I've been doing
the Web with everyone else lately, plus this VRML stuff, and I work for
Ubique who is doing real-time conferencing over the Web. The main reason
I got interested in VRML is because I'm working with the Interactive
Media Festival to produce their festival-space in VRML with a bunch of
other folks.
Nice to meet all of you. :-)
James Waldrop (JLW3) \ [email protected] / Ubique, Inc.
Systems Administrator \ [email protected] / 657 Mission #601
http://www.ubique.com/ \ 415.896.2434 / San Francisco, CA