Hi guys, I'm still currently working on my Design Doc for my M.U.D Client Shadow Myth and have not decided which way to go yet.

 Is it possible to design my M.U.D with XNA - I know it wont be usable on the Xbox cus of fdata storage etc, but would it be possible to do it with XNA for windows?  I obviously will need to save data on a server (which ill prolly be using my other pc for since the game is just for hobbyist fun, i dont see the point in spending loads of money on an actual game sevrer)

 Thanks in advance for your responses

By M.U.D. I assume you mean the old-school text based games? If that's the case, and not to knock XNA and its capacities, there are probably lots of platforms which are specifically designed for that kind development. I'm sure one could create something within XNA that could serve that purpose, but it might be reinventing the wheel.

Nothing stopping you from doing it, but if you're going to go purely text based, I'm not sure there are a ton of benefits either. The network built in would be nice and yes, XNA does handle text being drawn to the screen but all the other stuff just seems like a lot of wasted API for a simple text based MUD. Interesting project though and I'm sure using the XNA framework would work.

Does XNA have UI widgets? If not then it would propably be a good idea to look at one of the extension libraries to XNA. With a decent widget library + XNA you can pull together a handsome mud client. Who knows maybe even hook some kind of 3d character view on it :).

rgs,

Tommi

No UI elements are currently built into the XNA framework so yes, you would need to look at some 3rd party libraries or other frameworks for that.

Mad Missile Man:

By M.U.D. I assume you mean the old-school text based games?

They're not necessarily text based. Graphical MUDs have been around for a long time; Habitat dates to 1985. There's usually a significant text component, though.

The big issue with XNA is going to be fonts. Since XNA primarily uses SpriteFonts for text display, and the content pipeline isn't available at runtime, you'll be limited to whatever fonts your game includes. I would tend to suggest that you're better off building the text and UI portions of your client in Windows Forms, and hosting XNA as a control in that form for the rendering part of your client.

Also keep in mind that the EULA for XNA GS 2.0 strictly prohibits text communication using their LIVE networking APIs (since all that LIVE data is encrypted and there are various laws/policies against that). In XNA GS 3.0 (and the Beta I believe) there is a flag that lets you send text data unencrypted which you could use, but since you can't use the Beta on the Xbox 360 and there is no redist for the LIVE networking APIs on Windows (for either version), you're pretty much stuck waiting for the 3.0 RTM before you'll be able to make any game relying on networked text transmission.