Mudlet - Forum

Will MXP be a feature at some point?

MXP isn't much more than a buzz word in my view as I don't know a single MUD that makes use of MXP in any significant way. If people were asking for specific MXP features and come up with some significant data that those features are actually used/wanted/needed we can talk about it again, but I really doubt that this will ever happen as MXP is pretty much a dead and unused protocol.

I don't want it for that purpose.

I want to display mudbot/imapper produced maps and other output optimally. I can click on a room in 'map' or 'map big' and it will walk me there, or if I hover over the room it will display the room name.
When I type "map shrine list galleus" I am given a list of all shrines by that god (that I've mapped) and can click on any of them to path to it.

Fair enough though, for not wanting to bother with the MXP if it rarely gets used. I just hate how the last thing stopping me from ditching windows is mudding

We'll soon have our own mapper that can do all that and much more.

I'm rather surprised and saddened by the responses about MXP here. Currently there are well over 100 muds, according to TMC, that have server side support for this protocol. Some of the larger muds are Materia Magica, SlothMUD, LegendMUD, MozartMUD, and BatMUD.

There are also probably well over 10 clients which support it, including MushClient, Wintin.net, Zmud, Cmud, kmuddy, etc.

In my opinion and quite a few others apparently, this is a very well liked and distributed protocol.

SlothMUD makes vast use of this protocol. It helps out builders build areas much faster than normal simply by clicking different options while building a room or mob such as sector types or species. Player wise, MXP is used to quickly navigate from help one help file to another, or clicking urls to open up the links in their favorite browser when fellow players gossip or channel talk a url. We use this protocol in too many ways to effectively share how important it is to our game.

We keep track of who is using what client and what options that client has. This information is then directly used to point us in the direction of where our coding efforts should be placed next. Here is a brief listing of what is going on tonight and who is using what:

http://paste.pocoo.org/show/151163/

Im sorry about the formatting, posting this chart doesnt transfer very well but I think you guys get the point.

Anyways, I think you guys are off to a great start on your client but I hope you ultimately end up adding mxp. If you do, I would surely introduce your product to our players!

Please reconsider your stance on this protocol,
Splork

SlothMUD
text based rpg game
multiplayer free online rpg game

Also, if you guys ever need help testing certain features out please let me know. I have a spare port that I have used in the past to help several of the client developers test their protocols.

Hey,

Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully it'll be convincing to heiko. I'm of the opinion that it's necessary too

I'm going to throw in my vote for MXP too. It's part of several MUDs, big and small, as mentioned already. Even IRE are implementing it in their engine now.

If the general thought is "If you're clicking with your mouse, you ain't doing it right", I still think it should be included in the client. Just as it's included in pretty much any modern client today.

The more I work with MXP, the more I start liking it. I must say, it was absolutely horrible to get the initial server-side implementation working, but in my opinion it beefs up the MUD. Yes, the features are not really necessary, but they do enhance the game experience ever so slightly.

Also, when people talk about MXP, they usually concentrate on only one aspect, but the protocol has several interesting applications:

- click-able links. I'm guessing this is nice for newbies mainly. Avalon started out by just implementing this aspect.
- visual goodies: true colour, images, font face, font size. If you know how, you can make thinks look _good_ ...
- the server doesn't even need to know how to use it. If you want, you can use it client-to-client, only.
- scripting: Through MXP entities the server can directly update variables in the client. No need for regexp grabbing.
- If you'd want to do anything HTML-like over a MUD (and some time ago we talked about this), then you will end up with something similar to what MXP formalizes: It says what tags are just formatting (i.e. "open"), what are potentially dangerous ("secure"), how to handle HTML tags in an environment that never ends scrolling (auto-closing of tags, etc)
- it already _is_ widely adopted. Investing time and energy into this will affect players - which is one thing it has got over some other protocols.

Addition:
- also, with a coming spec, hopefully, mxp will have the possibility to request further information from the client (do you have 256 colours? what is the foreground colour? ... etc) which is great for us mudadmins that have to maintain a mudclient feature database.

Further addition:

With the coming popularity of the touch screen, at least among some groups of people (I am referring to the advent of several new models of multi-touch screen netbooks AND laptops AND full sized (24" and up) home computer screens, I have been toying with the idea of trying to take a lot of the typing out of mudding.

While a lot of that would be done with buttons and click-able labels that dynamically change to suit the situation, mxp support would take that even further, with many unpredictable (and therefore not possible to assign to a button) actions could be made by clicking on hyperlinks in the main screen.

I'm not sure whether the general consensus is that mxp is desired more than, or before, a mapping module. I know I myself am not all that fussed about the mapper, but I am also lucky in that being an IRE player I have access to mudbot. Players of other muds may not have a similar option and therefore rate a mapper higher.

However, keep in mind that MXP tags are most often used to denote the room title and prompt, and can make mapping those quirky, non-standard muds quite a bit easier. So maybe the two (mapping and mxp) ought to come hand in hand. It would definitely be a shame to build the mapper, then add mxp support and have to redo code in the mapper to accept mxp tags.