[cdr]

I played on a fantastic MUD as a kid. It was based on the code for some other MUD, and the admins were unhappy about some things, so they decided to write their own MUD engine from scratch. They got as far as establishing a network connection to a client - all network code written in scratch from C - before they burned themselves out and quit, which pretty much killed the MUD too.

[cheschire]

There’s a lot to learn here. Many developers fall into this trap halfway through their careers. Spolsky would probably call these folks you’re talking about architect astronauts.

[Nuzzerino]

As someone who has (for several years) developed, supported, and operated my own dialect of a multiplayer game server engine (which includes an embedded physics engine), that sounds absolutely brutal. It took several years before I saw my first user and it was after I thought my project was long dead. Then it started catching on. You probably won’t see results if you expect more than that.

Hopefully they gained some appreciation for how much work goes into these.

[fragmede]

As the adage goes, you can make a game, or you can make a game engine. Choose one.