Look and Feel

[Vadi]

I... don't think Lusternian combat reaches that scale either. Myself, I don't see it being that much of an issue with MCCP going as well and all of the lag the server would have from such an amount as it is.

[KaVir]

With any GUI, though, you'd have to dedicate a channel to send update information to clients. For every graphical update (changing the value of stat bars, rewriting information to a window, sending widget placement coords) you'd have to tunnel packets to the client somehow.

In most muds, every time the server sends you output, it sends a new prompt with your health, mana, etc on it. With MSDP, it only ever sends those values when they change - and it only sends the specific values that have changed (as opposed to the entire prompt). So that's actually going to be a pretty big saving, if the player can just switch off their prompt.

Equally, in most muds with an ASCII map you need to resend it every time the player moves or types "look". When you factor in all the ANSI colour codes as well, you're talking a fairly big chunk of data. But my graphical maps only need a sequence of index values (to determine which graphical image to draw), and a new sequence is only sent when the map changes. So once again, you're talking a pretty big saving.

If your primary concern is performance, then a carefully designed GUI could actually reduce the amount of bandwidth used by your players.

[tsuujin]

If you designed your mud from the ground up to be used this way, it'd be fine. I mean, you'd still be mandating that certain widgets be used (such as a prompt widget if you're not going to update it after each bit of text) but even that wouldn't be major. The problem would come with updating games that already have millions of lines of code to use such a system (which is just what I assume would happen, I didn't even think about from-scratch games)

[KaVir]

Most muds have tens of thousands of lines, the larger ones have hundreds of thousands - I've never heard of one with millions.

But size doesn't matter in this case. GUI support is handled at a low level, where most muds work in a very similar way to each other, and my snippet can be added in a matter of minutes.

[Heiko]

Many of the big and successful MUDs care about their users very much and they are going out of their way to provide GUIs, custom clients, newbie helpers etc. because they have understood that this is vital in order to get new players.
The smaller MUDs should look at the big games and question their policies. The times have changed. It's not so much a problem to get new players to try out your games, but it's difficult to raise enough interest in the game for them to come back and become a regular player. Somebody told me that e.g. WotMUD does not want to support ATCP or GMCP because they don't like the idea to help users with making good maps of their world i.e. they are reportedly totally against sending room IDs. I'm fairly sure that those MUDs that continue the old "our players are potential abusers" way of thinking will soon disappear and their users will move to more user friendly places.

[KaVir]

Many of the big and successful MUDs care about their users very much and they are going out of their way to provide GUIs, custom clients, newbie helpers etc. because they have understood that this is vital in order to get new players.

To be fair, some muds have been offering custom clients for a long time now. What's relatively new is the idea of building a custom GUI for an existing client like Mudlet, using an open protocol. This lowers the entry barrier significantly, putting a custom GUI firmly within the reach of any mud that wants one.

Of course there are muds that really don't want a GUI. But some do, and if they can be shown how quick and easy it is to create one, I think we'll see more GUIs starting to spring up.

I was talking to a mud owner yesterday who told me he'd love to have a custom GUI, but doesn't have enough manpower to build one. I've heard much the same view several times before, and I think it's going to take a while to dispel that particular myth.

The smaller MUDs should look at the big games and question their policies. The times have changed. It's not so much a problem to get new players to try out your games, but it's difficult to raise enough interest in the game for them to come back and become a regular player. Somebody told me that e.g. WotMUD does not want to support ATCP or GMCP because they don't like the idea to help users with making good maps of their world i.e. they are reportedly totally against sending room IDs.

I was chatting with another mud owner recently who was also opposed to giving out vnums. I don't know why it bothers some people, but there are other ways to generate maps - and even without a map, there's still other useful information that could be included in the GUI. I think once they start playing with energy bars and icons, they'll find their attitude starting to change.

I'm fairly sure that those MUDs that continue the old "our players are potential abusers"
way of thinking will soon disappear and their users will move to more user friendly places.

It's not just mud owners who oppose graphics though - I've heard the same from players as well. I think some people actually feel threatened by it. Of course there used to be much the same attitude towards ANSI colour, and it took a while for perspectives to change, but these days muds with no colour are relatively rare and often perceived as somewhat archiac. A decade from now, perhaps we'll view muds without GUI support in much the same way.

For the record, slightly over a third of my active players use some sort of custom GUI.

[Junq]

a late comment...

Apology for the spam but you're speaking of something similar to the mission statement behind Blowtorch for android. I think it's coming along pretty nice. Coupled with a nice tablet and maybe swype...

I also agree with the general consensus that it is all quite possible in Mudlet already. I'm learning to do some pretty sick things for my custom Tears of Polaris gui

[KaVir]

Apology for the spam but you're speaking of something similar to the mission statement behind Blowtorch for android. I think it's coming along pretty nice. Coupled with a nice tablet and maybe swype...

I don't think so. BlowTorch is a nice client (I use it myself), but the interface is much like any other standard telnet client. It allows you to configure quite a few things, and the button sets are an inspired feature, but that's the extent of its GUI support - and it's all controlled by the user, not the mud.

As a mud owner I can't instruct BlowTorch to draw energy bars, icons, maps, avatars, or anything like that for my players. The most I can do is identify their client, and perhaps suggest they switch to UTF-8 so that I can improve their display with unicode characters.

[Vadi]

I believe you can finish it fully though: http://forums.mudlet.org/viewtopic.php? ... t=30#p8478

[KaVir]

I believe you can finish it fully though: http://forums.mudlet.org/viewtopic.php? ... t=30#p8478

Was that supposed to be a reply to my MXP comment on the other thread? If so, the answer is that I did spend several hours trying everything I could think of, but I made no further progress, so in the end I decided to cut my losses and give up. I've got too many other things I need to work on - my snippet has eaten up all my free time for the last couple of weeks, and progress on my mud has suffered badly, which in turn has caused my playerbase to shrink.

Perhaps I'll take another look at it later, but for now the links "sort of work", which is enough for the most important bits (equipment and creature names).