AJAX MUD Client

[Constablebrew]

I was inspired by the interface of uni.xkcd.com and thought that a great MUD client could be built with JavaScript using AJAX to get updates from the server. Infact uni.xkcd.com has a small simulation of original the adventure game! (First type "look" then "go <direction>".)


I was wondering what others thought of this and wanted to get some feed back before dedicating time to the effort.

• What drawback are there to using this platform for a client?
• What challenges would have to be met (client and server sides) to make this usable?
• Is this something that people would want to use, or are existing clients superior to this platform?

[Raudhrskal]

Well, there are many ajax terminals already. Making an ajax terminal launch a secured (chroot, no-call-to-outside-stuff, restricted, etc) telnet to 127.0.0.1 or a textmode mud client might be easier.

I did set up something like that using ShellInABox once, and Crat's using Anyterm, I think, for DS Demo access.

[quixadhal]

Making something like this that would be a framework for individual muds to use for connecting to their own game would be pretty cool.  I'm less sure it would work as a generic client, simply because too many muds out there are vastly different from one another.  Some don't handle telnet properly.  Some require very good ANSI support with full screen controls, others expect UTF-8 character sets.

The annoyance of MUD clients is that they're expected to look at a text stream that has embedded tokens for some things (color, etc), but no clear markers to tell you that one bit of text was the room description, but another bit of text was a rock falling on your head.

Most MUD players spend way too much time setting up a maze of triggers and things for the muds they play, to try and organize all that data.

If a toolkit were available to make a clean-looking client connection that looked like that site, the game server devs could use it to make their own custom client that knows what their game does.  So, it could color things, or organize things, properly.

[Constablebrew]

Well, there are many ajax terminals already. Making an ajax terminal launch a secured (chroot, no-call-to-outside-stuff, restricted, etc) telnet to 127.0.0.1 or a textmode mud client might be easier.

Moving forward and taking advantage of the power of the web browser is the key reason for wanting to make an AJAX MUD Client. What I have seen are simply re-creations of existing command line terminals and their limited capabilities or seek to tunnel through TCP/IP to telnet by going through the webserver. (So really the webpage is not connecting to the MUD, but the server that the page is from is connecting.)

MUDs that would want to use the web browser as the client, allowing improvements on existing muds from simple things such as allowing clicking on an exit to go that direction or click on an object to look at it or pick it up. More advanced and new features such as allowing profile pics for characters, so looking at a character will show the portrait. Using the browser as a client will allow the beloved text input interface to be preserved while introducing more modern capabilities that are universally supported. MUDs will have to code specifically for these capabilities and will also have to retool communications to work over TCP/IP.

That is the direction I was thinking a project like this should take. I am interested in working on the client, but I don't have plans on developing a MUD server. That is part of why I'm here, to see if any MUD Admins would be interested in adapting their mud, making my effort worth while.