[MUD-Dev] Custom Client or Plain ole' Telnet?

[Peter Harkins]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 01:13:46PM +0100, Matt Chatterley wrote:

> Simply put - do I go with a custom client, or implement a telnet
> interface?

> I've briefly sketched out the pros and cons of each, and my
> thoughts follow - but I also believe that many other people out
> there must have asked themselves this question recently, and I'm
> hoping to tap into that experience - have you chosen a custom
> client and regretted it later, or vice versa? Why?

At Simud we've basically combined a roguelike game world with a text
mud. We're playable through vanilla telnet[1] but we kick around the
idea of a custom client every year or so.

At this point, though, a custom client would be a major amount of
work because we didn't abstract away the game interface. Every bit
of code assumes it can just spew a line of text at a player object,
so there's nothing internally different between a combat action,
room description, chat message, or any other content that we'd
probably want to present in different areas on a client.

Being vanilla telnet has been really good to us, though. There's a
lot of code and time that would go into a custom client that a
volunteer effort like us can't spare. We also retain the potential
audience of hardcore mud players who will be buried with stiff
fingers still clutching their mud clients.

To boil down my advice: take a long, hard look if you have the
resources and experience to do a custom client. Whatever you do,
make sure you abstract it so that you can replace it if need be.

  [1] Some screenshots are currently at
  http://rincewind.simud.org:8080/features because we're having some
  hosting issues; http://simud.org/features is the URL this content
  will be available at long-term.

- --
Peter Harkins    -    ph at malaprop.org    -    http://malaprop.org
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