[MUD-Dev] MUD client popularity

[Ammon Lauritzen]

Travis Casey wrote:

> I've known several people who used zMUD or another mud client on
> Windows, not because they wanted the extra features, but simply
> because Windows Telnet was so incredibly bad.

Was? It's still a good deal away from usable in most
circumstances. I actually registered zMUD by way of thanks for
having helped me through those times when I was stuck on a windows
machine, though I rarely actually use it, favoring TinyFugue.

> At one point, I started work on creating a set of LPC functions
> for a MudOS mud to use for terminal manipulation, including things
> like centering text, clearing the screen, setting and reading the
> cursor position, creating scrolling windows on the screen, reading
> cursor keys, etc.

One of our administrators has written a full-screen text editor
(reminiscient of pico or some other simple dummy-proof editor) as
well as a visual character-mode map editor in LPC, both of which are
used quite heavily. We've looked into writing a simplistic in-game
client that may be toggled on and off by players currently exiled
into the world of raw telnet, but the plan keeps getting pushed back
in favor of more pressing issues.

Anyways, the big disadvantage of doing funny things to people's
terminals is readily apparent when they attempt to invoke the
full-screen editor from within a line-mode client. It goes nuts and
becomes impossible to quit elegantly. While some mud clients support
character mode, most do not, and even those that attempt support
rarely do it well.

So, we are kind of stuck in a situation where most people will
connect normally with a client in order to flap and blah and play
and such, then will have to switch over to a generic telnet
application in order to build. There are some terminal programs that
support line-mode, and this seems to be the most useful for those
who have them, since it saves the need to switch programs, in
exchange for simply having to turn line-mode on and off.

One of these days, we will write the client and will also probably
attempt to port vi or some slightly more useful editor over, but
alas, we just don't have the time or manpower to do so in the near
future.

Ammon

--
Ammon Lauritzen
http://simud.org/
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