This year, the Lands of Aethar (SMAUG) was retired after a 15-year run. I decided to immortalize it by converting the whole world into HTML and throwing it on a conventional webhost. Check it out, I'm interested in hearing what people think of this very unusual medium for exploring a SMAUG-built world.
If you want it to look nicer, what you can do is start the MUD, go into it with MUSHClient, and copy+paste the room IN HTML.
C+P in HTML button in Mushclient realistically recreates the color output so you can have it look exactly as it would if you were connected to the game.
That might even be a cool thing to do with a running MUD, to give people an idea of what it was like.
Indeed, although you might want to leave out some of the secret locations in that case, otherwise people could use it as a way to safely map out your world ;)
You'd lose out on the benefits of dynamic descriptions though (if you used them of course), which would be a shame if you were trying to show off the mud. Maybe you could get around that by allowing the viewer to configure various options.
25 Sep, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Wouldn't it be easier to have some kind of simple 'spectator mode' for the MUD, so that people can wander around without having to do anything, and get the real experience? What advantage is there of putting a live MUD on a web page as a static experience? The main one I see is that you don't need anything other than a web browser, but that seems like a relatively small advantage compared to the problems (such as the one KaVir mentioned).
I don't know, it's probably easier to scrape a webpage for various purposes than run a bot on a running server. Not that I can imagine what you'd scrape it for, but still.
The Lands of Aethar