KaVir,

I took a closer look at your code. Kudos–it looks like it will save a lot of people a lot of tedium. That said, I've personally decided not to add the snippet for now, not while one of the best UI's from MUSHClient looks like this:



Mudlet looks better OOB but I haven't come across a good custom plugin for it that would move me to drop work on my custom clients.

That's, like, my opinion. I realize that for many people designing their own GUI's is not really an option and I see MXP + your snippet doing a lot of good there.

By the way, I just added clickable elements (including inline images) to the Bedlam web app. It took about an hour. After a small rewrite, I think I'll just have the server send straight HTML for all but the most common tags.

Ah, you didn't want to create your own plugin?

MUSHclient allows you to create pretty much any sort of GUI you like, even fairly graphical ones like Runter's isometric map or Nick Gammon's 3D window. But someone still needs to create the plugin, and mud-specific plugins are still a fairly new concept, so if you were hoping to just pick up someone else's GUI and tweak it you might want to wait until there are some more advanced examples out there.

The snippet makes the process easier, and includes a number of other useful features that work out-of-the-box for a range of different clients. But it's aimed at using existing technology - if you're trying to encourage players to use your own custom client, there's no benefit in improving their experience with other clients, and adding the snippet could actually be counter-productive.

That's a very sensible way of doing it.

I don't really care which client people use to play my game, as long as they come pouring in in huge numbers and enjoy themselves tremendously :). My problem with plugins to existing clients is the problem of a control freak: I don't want to break my back to create a great-looking plugin just to have it sit inside a program that looks, frankly, dated. And since those are free clients, I doubt they'll ever catch up with what's considered contemporary design. I think as far as targeting desktop players goes, my time is better spent adding advanced functionality to the web-based client, which incidentally makes such things like inline images trivial. In doing so, I'm able to leverage the web languages and protocols I do know, instead of having to learn the ones that clients such as MUSHClient prescribe. It just makes more sense to me to go that way.

If anyone else is in my shoes and wants to try their hand at a web-based custom client, PM me. I can package up and send you what I have so you don't need to start from scratch.