Zugg Software :: View topic

Newbie Joined: 15 Nov 2004 Posts: 8

While I was a bit disappointed to learn that there would no longer be free upgrades for life with the new cMUD, I can understand the reasoning for it. I love zMUD and look forward to getting in on cMUD. However, I had on important question, will our 2 yr free upgrades start counting as soon as we pay for the software during beta, or will it start counting from the day the first official non-beta release is sent out?

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2006 8:11 pm

It will start on the day you purchase CMUD, whether it's the beta or any other version that you buy. Our special offers are all driven by the purchase date.

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2006 11:43 pm

I understand your decision to provide upgrades for 2 years when purchasing a product. I think it is fair that after 2 years, if I want to take advantage of these new features you have added to the product, that I pay an upgrade price. This also gives you incentive to add new features every 2 years to entice users to upgrade.

I am also happy to pay money for a product still in beta as a contribution to its continued development. You don't have the capital of larger developers and these contributions help cover your development costs

However, your decision to time limit upgrades of beta software means running the risk that the free upgrades cease before the product is out of beta. If I purchase a product in beta, I expect a free upgrade to the next available 'stable' release, so that I am able to enjoy the features of the software I purchased without the bugs it initially carried.

My understanding is that zMapper was first released several years ago. Since the version currently available for purchase is still in beta, does this mean the product has never been out of beta?

If their was an earlier version of zMapper that was out of beta, shouldn't customers should have the choice between purchasing the stable version with less features, or a beta version with extra features.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

There will be a public version of CMUD well before your 2 years runs out (there should be a public version of CMUD well before the end of 2006, therefore there's no way your 2 years would have run out).

In the instance of zMapper, the product failed to generate enough interest/revenue therefore never made it to a public release.

There's only one example where there's a bit of a grey line, but I think Zugg will answer it as I have: In 2 years time when CMUD is 'public' version 3.2 and Zugg starts working on the beta versions running up to the 3.3 release, you might have downloaded the 3.27beta but then your contract expires. At this point you will need to revert back to 3.2 (which is why we install beta software to a different directory) or renew your contract in order to be entitled to the rest of the beta versions and the 3.3 'public' version once it is complete.

Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2006 3:58 am

That's reasonable. In this case I am happy to support zMUD as this is a stable product and I have no doubt that cMUD will become stable within the next 2 years.

It is a shame zMapper didn't develop sufficient revenue because it had the potential to offer some very powerful features. Perhaps zMapper was a little too ambitous and tried to encompass too many untested features in its initial release. Perhaps users were waiting for something more stable.

There are many MUD clients currently available that offer strong scripting support. What differentiates zMUD from its competition is its strong mapping ability and I believe this is the direction MUD clients will develop in the future.

Hopefully cMUD Pro will succeed where zMapper didn't.

Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2006 7:47 pm

You'll also see a lot of the zMapper technology come over into CMUD-Pro eventually. I have a *lot* of plans for the mapping technology, because I agree that this is one of zMUD strongest features. I think you comments about zMapper are mostly correct, and it also wasn't marketed very well. In CMUD you will see tighter integration of "modules" like this, and an easier way to learn what modules are available and buy them if they cost money.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

Four separate mappers have been developped for the MUD I play, alone (in the last two or three years), perhaps in part because zMUD mapper was sooooo difficult to get working properly with our MUD (a DikuMUD). I have more or less succeeded now by overriding certain parts with #TAG or simulating MUD output in order to get the zMUD mapper to recognise things. But I've written lots of scripts to accomplish this. However, I'm sure that due to changes in this MUD recently (ability to change the colour of your prompt and of room descriptions), it would be somewhat easier for someone to get it most of it working.

However these other mappers have various features that even zMapper doesn't have as they are designed for our MUD - they work as proxies between a MUD client and the MUD server. A few of these features, though, Zugg has already said he wants to put in CMUD-Pro. But I think all four have better graphics and more readable maps than it's possible to do _easily_ with zMapper. And they are free, and three of them are open source (and those three run on Linux as well as Windows). Of course, there are many things possible in zMapper that are not possible in these too.

So CMUD-Mapper has some catching up to do. Zugg, pm me if you want some links to them.

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 4:07 am

Definitely send me some links or screen shots.

The challenge in zMUD and CMUD is that the mapper must work on *all* MUDs and not just for a single MUD. That's a lot harder. Also, I've found that even when I put features into the mapper, many people don't even know that the features are available. Just look at all of the posts asking for stuff that zMapper already does (they just don't want to buy zMapper). So, there's no perfect solution, but I agree that there is a lot of work to do, and I have many plans for this. But the main CMUD client must come first. I've been burned in the past by putting years of effort into something like zMapper that nobody ends up caring about.