I'm very fond of this option as well. It's been implemented in 4D for years, and was more recently added to the tbaMUD release. Typing – in either one cancels your command queue.

Text is text, and most people aren't going to like it. I think the only way to get people to play MUDs is to attract people who in fact want to play MUDs, and the only way to do that is to have google lead to an easily accessibly MUD portal for the right keywords, and the only way to accomplish that is through a community effort.


It's more a result vs effort thing. I think the community as a whole would benefit from a free to use mud font given how easy it is to implement a VT100 map combined with MCCP, and if some font standard can be agreed upon it's easy to create better graphical extensions for clients that allow that.

Saying attracting people who want to play MUDs sounds to me like they already know what a MUD is, in which case they aren't going to have any problems finding a MUD portal. If you're talking about targeting keyword searches for more general terms such as online text games for example then yes I think that definitely has some usefulness. Have you approached TMC/TMS about it? Mudgamers is not quite in their league, but if you have some special SEO magic you want to try let me know.


I don't think it really needs a community standard does it? It's not that hard to make a custom font and I'm sure plenty of people have done it already. I remember The Fury did a custom font a while back, I'll see if I can dig it up.

It might be worth looking over at the roguelike games people, and things like Dwarf Fortre.... They've done quite a bit with custom fonts, and not just sticking to the old 8x8 size either.

@Scandum Post #54
I downloaded that font several years back and used it on my Visual Basic code base.
LOL, didn't know that was you!

The issue regarding text is that we can make things that look like MUDs but are supplemented by all kinds of graphical information. The work that Vassi has discussed in these forums is an example of this. Saying "text is text and that's that" is somewhat like saying "the news is in the newspaper and that's that". There is an awful lot that can be done by building on clients like MUSHclient to greatly alleviate the fact that it's a wall of text, with much nicer effects than what is possible with cursor control or even custom fonts. The point here is to go far beyond what is possible with only characters; custom fonts help but hardly win the battle much less the war.

If better approches are adopted, what are the chances it will be in different isolated measures by different isolated MUDs? Something to consider, if it is agreed this is likely, is a common endeavour to raise the standard.

I'm indeed talking about targeting general searches that would apply to MUDs. I'll keep the offer in mind.


I only know of one decent custom font out there, and I've already linked it. As far as I know the Medievia font is proprietary, never bothered to ask assuming it was. With a standard I meant it's tricky to create a generic mud font without the input of the community.


Do you expect everyone to start using mushclient or something? That's not going to happen. Do you expect every mud programmer to all of a sudden be capable of creating complex user interfaces? That's not going to happen.

As far as I can tell doing something relatively simple like creating a general purpose mud font is not going to happen either.

Well, I'm hoping that my widget framework project for MUSHclient would make it much easier to develop visual widgets. It would still be a good amount of work, but the heavy-duty management is wrapped up into predefined widget types. At that point, the issue is more about moving the data across in a useful format.


If only! Hahah… Well, Aardwolf offers a custom version of MUSHclient (really just pre-customized with plugins, etc, from what I can tell), which you can download from their website. I've never checked it out, but I personally love the idea of customizing MUSHclient to fit your MUD's needs and making it easily available.

I've checked out the aardwolf version of mushclient. Nothing fancy but very solid in terms of making the game more enjoyable with panels and windows.

Yes, from what I've seen, it's just multiple 'world' windows and notepads un-maximized and tiled together, no fancy miniwindow graphics involved. But that's not to say fancier custom clients couldn't be done…

Call me a reactionary if you wish, but I've always hatedascii graphics in MUDs. To my mind, as soon as you add any sort of graphical output it ceases to be a text game and instead becomes a graphical game with truly pathetic graphics - at a stroke it is transformed from a fine example of a genre to a terrible example of a different genre.

If you want to make a graphical game, great - but make a graphical game. Trying to emulate aspects of a graphical game using a text-based engine makes no more sense than using the latest version of the Unreal engine to display nothing but text - it's just not the right tool for the job.

Maps are good tools even in a text based environment to present tactics and concepts to a player that would remain lost otherwise. I don't think they have to be used to wow a player about how good it looks if it gets the intended job done. Also, using a map doesn't necessarily lose all of the elements (if not many of them) that muds have.

Do I expect you to stop thinking about games as all-clients-playing-all-games and to stop reducing everything to the lowest common denominator? Well, I guess that's apparently not going to happen either. :rolleyes:
Look, I've tried to explain several times what the issue here is, but either we're not speaking the same language or you have no interest whatsoever in changing anything at all. No, I don't expect the entire world to start playing every single game with a single client. I do expect that if I provide a very rich experience with a customized client, that people will play the game with that client, just as they play any huge number of games (not just MUDs) with the client that the developers give them.
Did I say that every single MUD developer would customize clients in this way? Nope. Not sure where that came from.
So moving right along…


Chances are indeed very high that different MUDs will do things different ways. I don't view this as a huge problem, because different games will have different enough needs that developing a standard would be really quite difficult. There have been some efforts to create standards like with ZMP (see this forum section) but it's hard to test them at the moment. I suppose we'll have to see as we go along. For starters, I don't expect this to be a very common feature in the first place, so I'm not sure an elaborate standard will be terribly useful, at first at least.

(BTW, unrelated question, but are you French?)

I think it's important to draw a distinction between having a recommended client (whether that's mushclient with fancy customisation, or some other custom client) and having that client as the only means of connecting to the game. I'm definitely in favour of the former, but I'm not yet convinced of the latter. While I have got a fancy custom client with stat bars and icons, sound effects, a graphical map and hot buttons, I also use MXP for a lot of stuff specifically because it has good cross client support. With a compulsory custom client you risk losing established players who have a preferred client, as well as those who use screen readers. I've got some neat ideas for our next game that I will need a custom client to do, but right now I'm reluctant to drop support for existing clients.

In the end of the day, this is the crux of the issue. Some features simply do not make sense with the standard text-only interface, no matter what VT100 controls you use. And besides, if the argument is client limitation, then forcing VT100 is also limiting who can connect, and it doesn't exactly work with screen readers either!

I think the aim is to provide a game. The aim is not to provide a game that telnet can connect to. I don't give a hoot about telnet. I care about providing a coherent game and vision. Packaged appropriately, you don't even have to tell people to download the "MUD Client" that you've customized – you simply repackage the client and say "Download the CoolGame client here!" – and you're done.

MUDs as a plain ol' text-only genre are dying, and seem – especially on this site – to exist only as a means of expression for programmers who find it interesting and fulfilling to build MUD worlds. From this perspective, I fully understand attitudes like Scandum's (although he has something of a vested interest in a certain client as well). But if you're aiming to produce a game, you have no reason to limit yourself to some particularly arbitrary rules of "The Genre" – when that genre in question is dying or already commercially dominated by very few players.

Amen! :cool:

I'd also not be quick to toss out anyone from the community who doesn't meet those arbitrary rules.

There's been discussion about how MMO community doesn't want to associate themselves with MUD—But quite reflectively, and possibly more aggressively, the MUD community doesn't want to associate themselves with MMOs. I think it'd be easy for a successful mud to be thrown out of the community by developing a custom client with some neat graphical features. Especially if they require the client be used.

Sorry for the derailment. :)

It depends what features you are talking about. There are good reasons to use graphical interface elements, whether that's because they convey information better, are easier to interact with, or simply because they look shiny, but in most cases it's still possible to offer a text alternative.


If you'd waited a few weeks, you could have made KaVir's "MUDs are doomed" list for 2010 :wink:

More people than ever are online, and more people than ever are playing online games, so the potential new players are definitely out there. Last night for example I popped onto an old game that I used to play for a special event. They are a commercial MUD that celebrated their 20th anniversary this year, and last night they had over 100 players online which was a very good number for them. Plenty of those players weren't even born when the MUD first opened!


Indeed, and if we toss out text and telnet, what exactly does the "MUD community" represent?

More people than ever are online – yes, that is true. That doesn't mean that they're all playing text-only games via classic terminals. I find it interesting that you of all people make this argument, because you have taken the first steps toward removing the antiquated client mentality and replacing it with special clients; in your case, you wrote a Flash interface to MUDs. This is a recognition on your part – as you have stated several times – that the old client model is a barrier to entry and something to be done away with.


Text isn't being tossed out completely. But even if it were, who cares? This is the community that writes games that happen to be mainly text-based.

This argument ("but what would be left?") feels to me to be more grasping of the past than holding on to valuable features. Except for historical, cultural value, I see little purpose in keeping the past around for its own sake.

Is the point to make games that people like to play, or is the point to make text-only games that telnet can connect to?

I don't really understand the vehemence that seems to show up when people mention graphics, even as complements to and not replacements for text.

As a final note, dying does not mean already dead or pointless or that existing MUDs will all shut down for the year. It means that growth potential is very limited. That you cited a commercial MUD only reinforces, to me, the claim that the space is limited in growth and dominated by a relatively small number of large players. Expanding into the game requires changing the rules – which is exactly what you started doing with the Flash client, and what Vassi is doing with his custom client.