Be careful what you wish for...

[Throttle]

Originally Posted by Halladar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That certainly sounds plausible.

But how do you know this? What is your source of information?

You could read about it back when it happened. Also, I grew up a mile from Copenhagen University where DIKU was conceived and I started playing DIKU MUDs at 12 or 13. I've worked with the codebase and been part of some of the first established MUDs.

I already knew about the race and class structure similarities. Personally I never played Torilmud, so I can't vouch for the rest of it.

But it seems to me I remember reading during the court case that parts of the database were lifted directly into the game. Things like what NPC's said and including quests. I never read exactly what these were but my impression was it was things like "You've ruined your own lands, you won't ruin mine." or "Natural selection at work."

I've seen the DIKU source code first hand and the only thing I ever noticed being identical to any aspect of EQ was the echoes for social commands like /chuckle and so on. A MUD codebase really is barely applicable to a graphical engine.

You may be right. Parts of that story sound pretty fishy though. The TorilMud folks just out of the kindness of their hearts let a large multinational corporation develop a game based on their work? Which incidentally was a branch of another groups work?

Well, as far as I've been told (I played Toril before and some time after EQ was developed) he basically asked if they would let him use the MUD as inspiration for a game he was creating. He didn't tell them that he wanted to almost copy their game for his genre-defining, multi-million production. Also, since Toril is based entirely on the Forgotten Realms setting, they may not have been legally allowed to claim ownership over it.

Exactly how do you know what you say?

You can read about it on the wikipedia and in various places, especially if you know some of the names from back then. I also remember the case, and there was plenty of discussion about it on any given DIKU-based MUD at the time.

Also one other thing, "Since DIKU is 100% text-based, the source code would not even have been compatible with a graphical MMORPG to any relevant extent."

I totally disagree with this statement. At least as regards this particular game. It pretty much is a text based mud with a gui and some very rudimentary collision detection.

Trust me, it isn't. A MUD is programmed to output information to a telnet client, and everything is coded to deal only in text. The concepts are strikingly similar, but the game mechanics are not even remotely so. Some things will necessarily be roughly the same, such as basic combat rolls and how the game interacts with character files, but this is true for pretty much any game that involves online play through a client and combat against NPCs. MUDs do not have actual movement, for example, and operate on a chessboard-style grid where certain commands basically just teleport you into the next "room" which is no more than a room description pulled from a text document and some rudimentary flags for such things as weather and north/east/south/west exits. Combat runs on an automated turn-based premise similar to D&D. DIKU and EQ really do not share many similarities below the surface.