[MUD-Dev] Clients

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 11 Feb 98 at 22:08, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> At 09:22 PM 2/11/98 +0000, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> >
> >By continuing to build muds with conventional text Telnet interfaces, it
> >is certain that the hobbyist mud audience will not grow.  In fact it 
> >will likely shrink.  The only reason it has grown is that by sheer numbers
> >who have gain access to the internet.  Some have tried to compare this
> >with the text adventure game phenomenon.  I don't agree.  
> 
> Text adventure games had one major feature that MUDs lack: you could learn,
> play, and solve the average text adventure game in a week. Following this,
> it was largely an easter-egg search, finding the amusing things like the
> granite walls in Zork or the terrible Cthulhu-mythos puns in Lurking
> Horror, and within a matter of a month or two you exhausted the
> possibilities and were ready to move on. Luckily, a good text adventure
> game could be built (using an existing parser like Infocom's) in that
> period of time, so you could pick up a new one. 
> 
> In a sickening development, the complexity and development cycle of modern
> games have increased dramatically while the attention span of the average
> player has decreased sharply. Hence the drive toward games which can be
> learned in a minute, played in a day, and then discarded -- such as Doom --
> although networked play of games like Quake has strongly increased
> replayability. 

Are you sure they are not linked?  The shorter development cycles (in every 
design area, not just software dvlp.) and attention span I mean.  
Information overload?  One could view these persons with short attention 
spans as highly multi-threaded individuals.  Of course there is a good deal 
of overhead to multi-tasking and living at the speed of light.  And 
short-term memory caches get flushed rather than saved on context switches. 

Then again you could view them as modern day Boo Radleys, flitting from 
sparkly shiny object to more sparkly shiny object.  :P
 
> Solutions? Um... maybe these aren't problems. Maybe they're design
> criteria. ;)

Yes, they are criteria!

> >It's not a
> >text vs. graphics popularity contest.  It's largely an obscure-kludgy-unix-
> >command-line-babble interface vs. something more windows/lisa/x-like.
> >It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We'll do the interface like its
> >always been done and complain about the IQ of the rest of the I-net.
> 
> Well, you have to admit that the intelligence level of the average adult
> American has declined quite rapidly since the eighties.  There are thousands
> of ways you could point the finger on this -- drugs in the 60's,
> conspicuous consumption, poor school quality, television broadcasts
> (daytime talk shows being strongly blamed on this score), single parent
> families, rampant secular humanism, chemicals in the water and
> preservatives in the food (for all you black-helicopter-conspiracy-theory
> folks out there) -- but there's no one factor that really contributes to
> it, and it certainly isn't universal. (I came out rather well, I think.) 

I'd provide lengthy comment on this, but since I'm a member of a vast 
right-wing conspiracy, I'd have to kill you afterwords. :P

> >I know, most everybody has their servers running on *nix, yet the majority
> >of the mud playerbase use a GUI environment.  What's handy and familiar 
> >for the server-author, is an utterly alien turn-off for the average user. 
> 
> Anyone given any real thought toward building a server ENTIRELY under NT,
> with GUI server manager and administrative interface? It's a much more
> robust solution than it once was, and another thought would be that with
> the impending release of the BeOS for Intel we might be able to do
> something over *there* as well.

"Hi, my name is Jon.  I'm an NT user."  (All stand up - Hi Jon)  "I'm not
sure when I first became aware of this....family members were concerned...
Gates...peer pressure...Where do I want to go today?..."
 
> I wonder if you could build an effective MUD using ActiveX, ASP, and SQL
> Server. A lot of people seem to be trying to do one in Java. 
> 
> Hehehehe, VB-MUD. LOL

Take a look at the EmlenMUD client.  It's pure VB.  IMO, Owen got the 
client about halfway there (to where I want to go).  Remarkably the 
silouette(sp?) looks similar to my original dorky one.  Then I got
smart and had my daughter draw one, I'm graphically challenged.  

Aside: Any opinions on the best input device for graphical work?  I've 
heard positive things about sketchpads, but do not know really know the
criteria to use in selecting them.

All of my administration utilities server-side are written in VB.  There 
is good reason for this.  My server is backed by an RDBMS with an ODBC API
interface and VB handles this brainlessly and effortlessly.  The server 
itself is C++.  My first client used VBScript and ActiveX controls on a 
browser page. I've since changed this implementation to pure Java.  Why? 
Simply to learn Java.  VBScript suffers from the same limitations as 
JavaScript, that is there is really no functional difference.  Both of them 
are good "lightweight" browser scripting languages.  OTOH, I am still quite 
fond of ActiveX, conceptually. 

> >
> >Is there really LESS text in a Graphical mud?  
> 
> There sort of has to be, doesn't there? I mean, the graphics replace some
> of the text, but you are correct in that there will always be SOME text. At
> least until real time audio becomes feasible. 

No, there doesn't have to any less text.  Room descriptions and character
descriptions can be just as rich as any "good" text mud.  Then again, 
really, what's the literary quality on your "average" text muds.

"There is a sandy dessert lieing here"

"The midevil castle appers before you"

:P

> 
> Oh, yuck. Imagine a server that worked like those horrid laggy crackly
> internet phone things. You type and click to do things, but to talk you
> just yell into a microphone. Kill me now.
>

I've had some fun translating text to audio client side using the Creative 
Labs Soundblaster API.  Speech to text is beginning to improve.

> >Isn't this an unwarranted assumption? 
> >Are Doom and Diablo responsible for this?
> 
> I must say, Quake in my opinion *is* a MUD 

I heartily concur.

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