[MUD-Dev] MUD Protocols?

[Bruce Mitchener]

Neil Edwards wrote:

> Hi, I have currently been looking at some sites that have some
> useful MUD protocols like the MCP (compression) and MXP. Is there
> any other popular protocols that a new MUD should be aware
> of. Obviously this all depends upon the client being able to use
> these protocols so are they even worth doing? Does everyone use
> zMUD? :)

A lot of people don't seem to use zMUD. (But a lot of people seem to
use it as well.  It depends on who your audience is.)

There are lots of protocols that see varying amounts of usage.  A
lot of the protocols get community-specific usage. (MCP (not the
MCCP that you referred to) being common among MOOs but not many
others, while MSP, MXP, etc seem more prevalent with Diku-style
MUDs, etc.)

Phil was kind enough to point to the page in Agora which lists the
majority of the protocols that I've heard about or seen.

One thing that it doesn't mention is that Andrew Wilson has been
doing a plugin for TWin (http://tchat.research.att.com/) for his
tkMOO-light client (http://www.awns.com/).  (Personally, I think
that's one of the most exciting bits of news that I've heard about
MUDs in over a year.)

But, what things are you looking for in a protocol?  Are you looking
to provide client-based UI like some of the things that tkMOO
supports via MCP or like TWin provides?  Are you looking more for
marked up text, clickable commands and so on like Pueblo and other
things provided?

Responding to some of the other comments from another poster:

Matt Owen wrote:

> I wont disagree that compression is a good thing, but in order for
> your MUD server to be accessable to all people on all platforms,
> your baseline really should be plain vanilla telnet style
> connection (by this I mean, open up a socket and squirt 7-bit text
> down it, nothing more). Anything above that should be optional and
> user configurable by the player once they are in the game.

That's why MCCP implements compression through telnet option
negotiation. :) For things like Pueblo support and other more
advanced client features like MCP, that's usually handled post-login
or by a trigger string appearing in the login screen.

> By having this baseline, you can then be sure that even Windows
> users (for whom text based applications are a deep mystery) can
> connect to your server with no more effort than clicking on a
> telnet:// link on a webpage.

One thing that definitely helps here is to use an internal markup
language and then translating that to plain text, pueblo markup,
custom client stuff, and so on.  That's the approach that I've seen
taken in ColdCore for Cold, in JHCore for MOO, in some unreleased
work from a list member in Perl and Python.  I'm sure that that's a
common approach these days though.

Cheers,

  - Bruce

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