[MUD-Dev] Re: Text MUDs; in need of an (r)evolution?

[justice at softhome.net]

Sam Pointon writes:
> On 14/11/05, John Mauney <montyculligan at gmail.com> wrote:

>> So, do any of those who enjoy text based games agree? Do you see
>> other things the genre needs or could benefit from? I will assume
>> it has been discussed in this forum before the concept of
>> including graphical MMO concepts to the text MUD worlds, since
>> that has been attempted before.

> The point about telnet formatting is invalid, as there are some
> -very- fancy things that can be done with pure telnet, assuming
> your client is fully VT100 compatible (which, unfortunately, most
> MUD clients aren't). I would flag this as a problem in the client
> developer's court, rather than the MUD developer's. I must also
> disagree on the staticness of the telnet specification being a
> disadvantage - HTTP is years old but it's good enough for our web
> browsing needs, and it's the same with other specifications: the
> older it is, the more tried and tested it tends to be, with fewer
> wrinkles.

I strongly disagree.  While neither HTTP or Telnet have changed
much, the standards served by HTTP have.  Having worked with web
standards since around '95, I can honestly say that things have
changed drastically.

HTML 3.0 was extremely limited, compared to the more modern HTML
4.0, which itself is considered bloated and has lead to the
abandonment of HTML altogether in favor of a newer system... XML.
HTML is being split into many smaller targetted standards, XHTML,
XForms, CSS, etc.

It's my opinion that the web is the current "text" medium.  In my
spare time I've been modifying a copy of Mozilla to parse text from
a mud into DOM instructions.  This allows me to modify a web page in
real time using data from a TCP connection.  (I used Chatzilla's
code for reference)

This allows for a good semi-graphical UI, that is still mostly
text... My goal is to have a plugin for Mozilla/FireFox that would
allow you to visit a mud the same way you visit a web page.

 -- Kwon J. Ekstrom
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