[MUD-Dev] Clients

[Katrina McClelan]

On Tue, 17 Feb 1998, Travis Casey wrote:

> Why?  I mud from a variety of locations, and don't want to get used to
> using an interface that I won't always be able to have.  If that
> interface can only be used on some muds, I'd be even less likely to
> want to use it.
> 

That's one of my problems in general with clients and the issue of telnet
is bad.  I'll be the first to agree that telnet is a very silly protocol. 
However, it's supported on almost any platform without extra downloads or
such.  The solution I'd eventually use, and that I have mostly implemented
is a [psuedo] terminal server, terminfo, and lib curses.  Yes, curses CAN
be used on multiple "terminals" from within the same program.  I actually
have the starts of a nethack like game over telnet for multiple players. 
I got bored with the whole thing (mostly because the game system was
stupid; the project was more a matter of getting menus to work over telnet
sockets than it was to have a good game), so I didn't finish it, but you
could log in and go through a character creation sequence that was all
menu driven.  I suppose that curses limits features to text, but with full
screen manipulation of it, it's still quite versitile.  Particularly if
you use ncurses and expect (partually dangerous) the the receiving client
supports colors in some way or another (doesn't have to be vt100 with
ncurses).  The only real downside to this is character mode is required,
and that sometimes locally handling text requires that you retransmit it.
But if you're considering web based clients, character mode isn't THAT bad
:)

-Kat