Client Survey!
For the last few years I've been use a MUSHclient which I wrote myself, and generally speaking I'm happy with the way it works - it has all the features I use, and I'm happy with the (fairly basic) look, etc. The code for it has gotten kind've muddled, though, over the last four years or so - it wasn't written with expansion in mind (my first big project), and because of that it's been hacked to pieces where I've added new features.
So I'm trying to rewrite it to clean things up, and add in some new stuff, hopefully making it more usable, for me and for other people, in the process. I've looked over the feature lists of some other MUSH clients, and found some things that are probably worth adding (though I doubt I'll use many of them) - but I'm not sure which are likely to be used a lot by other MUSHers.
And that's where you come in :) What MUSH client do you use at the moment, and why? Which features in it made you choose it over all the other clients out there - and perhaps more importantly, which features does it lack that you'd really like? What kind of look/feel do you like (links to screenshots helpful for this one)?
Any and all comments would be greatly appreciated. My hope is to write something that has most (if not all) of the features people really want and use. Later on I'll work up a list of the features I have planned for it at the moment, which may make it easier for people to spot if I've missed any they like.
Thanks for your help :)
Mike
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My ideal client... tinyfugue
My ideal client...
tinyfugue clone with unicode support and a different scripting language -- scheme is my personal favorite, or maybe lua -- I haven't looked at it, but it's used as a scripting language for a fair number of programs already.
I've never really used
I've never really used TinyFugue, but I know a lot of people (particularly those on *nix platforms, I think?) use it. I'll have to download the Win version later and play around with it a bit - anyone know if there are any major differences between the Win and *nix versions?
MU* Servers
Something else just occurred to me while looking at feature lists of other clients - what MU servers do the folks here use? I generally only play on PennMUSHes (and occassionally TinyMUSHes), so many features other clients have - like MUD Client Compression Protocol support - are pointless. Do many people play on MUDs or other platforms with those kinds of features/protocols? While I definately don't want to go out of my way not to support MUDs, I don't want to spend a lot of time supporting MUD-specific features if noone around here would ever make use of them...
I use more than one client.
I use more than one client. For some people this may not be their cup of tea, but different clients are better at different things, and I've never found a client that was great at everything.
For mush, I use SimpleMU, and for muds, wintin.net; I would use wintin.net all the time but it's input window is only one line (you can input more than one line at a time, but you just see one line displayed). SimpleMU, of course, has a anytime-resizable input window -- nice for writing long poses. Wintin.net has better scripting and a better GUI model than SimpleMU, more important features for H&S and PK muds (yes -- I play and build on those muds too).
For development, I do use TF, and while I admit I'm not an experienced TF user, it does seem to work quite well.
http://simplemu.onlineroleplay.net
http://www.wintin.org
http://www.tinyfugue.sourceforge.net
MUSHClient all the way, not
MUSHClient all the way, not only because it is an Aussie program (made by Nick Gammon) but i use the scripting features it has (it has support for Lua, VBScript, JScript and several other programming languages) in order to extend the functionality.
It also has a notepad window for sending information to the server, and has some nice network tracing utilities (such as viewing packets as they go between the client and the server) so that you can extend the functionality of the client based on what sorts of information the server or the client send back and forth.
I started with zMUD
I started with zMUD a while back, and while I sometimes find its zscript a bit annoying, it has almost all the features I want in a programmable client. I haven't made the switch yet to CMUD, and CMUD 2.0 will have Lua as an option.
I've grown to love the multi-state triggers of z/CMUD, and it would be hard to live without it.
One of the more complex systems I wrote for it was an autopilot for Into the Black's old HSpace system, which navigated to multiple waypoints and then jumped and landed.
While it's less important for a MUSH, the mapper module is fairly nice, but sometime persnickety to configure. On a large MUD, it was wonderful to use to get around. I've used it to map MUSHes too, though not a lot.
Of course, one of the drawbacks is that z/CMUD is commercial, not free. But I don't mind paying if I get value, and I certainly feel I have.