What is a Good Free MUD Client?

br00tus writes "With the advent of MMORPG's like EverQuest, old-fashioned text-based, free MUD's may seem kind of antiquated. Nevertheless, I've been looking around for a good, free (e.g. not ZMud etc.) MUD client that I can use on Windows and/or UNIX. Any ideas?" Uh, TinyFugue?

Comments

You are in a dark room.

[Anonymous Coward]

And you have been eaten by a first post.

~~~

Re:You are in a dark room.

[Anonymous Coward]

turn or burn.

Re:You are in a dark room.

[prp]

smell dark

Re:You are in a dark room.

[Luigi30]

The dark has sort of a Ford Prefecty smell to it.

Answered in post

[dopaz]

Why post an Ask Slashdot when its been answered in the post itself?

Re:Answered in post

[Anonymous Coward]

The real point of Ask Slashdot is making fun of the questioner anyway. This just gets that process farther along.

You light your torch

[Disevidence]

And you FAIL IT!!!

Re:You light your torch

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU FAIL IT! You have replied to the actual first post! Ha!

~~~

Re:You light your torch

[Disevidence]

You fail your failure!

FAILURE! HaHa!

Plus if you light your torch while in a dark room, your bravery stat drops 400 points. Thats a failure right there.

Re:You light your torch

[Anonymous Coward]

D'oh! I guess I do FAIL IT! Thanks for illuminating it with your torch. And what's with posting with the +1 bonus? Burning karma with that torch :)?

~~~

Re:You light your torch

[Disevidence]

Well i couldn't find my kindling pile in the room, because the room was so dark. So i had no choice but to burn my karma.

Re:You light your torch

[Anonymous Coward]

Stay warm! Time for me to go to sleep--there's a real world out there that wants me to work tomorrow!

~~~

Re:You light your torch

[Disevidence]

Nothing like a good old first post to top off your evening. Night!

Definitely

[Anonymous Coward]

TinyFugue

Telnet

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in my day we used telnet on 1200 baud modems, and we liked it.

Re:Telnet

[Anonymous Coward]

In my day, we didn't have modems. We had to make the modem noises with our mouth!

Re:Telnet

[Kedisar]

You mean you didn't use bongo drums?

Re:Telnet

[cgranade]

In my day, we didn't have modems. We had to make the modem noises with our mouth!
Not bongo drums?

Re:Telnet

[Anonymous Coward]

You had 1200 baud? We had to make do with Bell 103 and acoustic cups, that tried to push data through phone lines made from recycled barbed wire. And there wasn't any of this "multi-user" stuff--we had single line, single user BBSs, that were only up when the sysop was there to put the handset in his acoustic coupler. None of this schmancy fancy in-tar-net stuff. And we liked it.

Re:Telnet

[Anonymous Coward]

Well "back in the day" for me was with a 14.4k modem, but I also used telnet and it's all you really need for MUDs. Maybe that changed to SSH now though, dunno... haven't mud'ed since like 1996 or so. I still like to whip out a game of Rogue or Nethack every now and then though. :) And I hope maybe one day I'll be able to play some good old fashioned table-top RPG again (hopefully using the ol' crusty D&D boxed sets from the mid-80's... those were the best, *sniff*)

Re:Telnet

[Fizzl]

Ha! Infidel!

I code LPC by whistling 300 baud carriage down the line, whilst eating cereals and picking my nose!

Re:Telnet

[Gherald]

Nope, carrier pigeons!

Re:Telnet

[wo1verin3]

ugh children.

none of that tcp/ip bongo crap in my day. i walked to school uphill both ways in nothing my bare feet.

Re:Telnet

[kfg]

It really didn't matter much how fast my modem was. I still had to wait for the damned Selectric to type out each "screen."

KFG

Re:Telnet

[gerardrj]

You haven't MUDed until you've played on the actual console!

Re:Telnet

[Anonymous Coward]

You had feet?! In my day, we had stumps, and we couldn't walk, we had to crawl.

Re:Telnet

[fm6]

Five different moderators thought you were being funny. And maybe you were, but you make a serious point: why does anybody need a fancy client to play a text-mode game?

Re:Telnet

[MROD]

Telnet? Telnet?! How post modern of you!

In my day it was a trusty X25 PAD and Newbury glass teletype terminal...

PAD> call 0000496000001

To connect to the DEC 10 at Essex University, login as:-

[2653,2653]

and then type MUD or MIST.

Eeee-by-gum, they were t'days.

Kids today wouldn't know a real network if it came up and bit 'em. They're all spoilt! Spoilt, I say!

Re:Telnet

[Eye of the Frog]

I wish we had modems. Back in my day we picked up the phone and whistled at 100 baud!

Re:Telnet

[Prong_Thunder]

These days you might: telnet british-legends.com 27750 AOL don't know what they lost.

Re:Telnet

[djaburg]

Holy crap, I thought I was one of a rare breed of geek that remembers the PC stone ages. My first commodre VIC 20 has a 120 baud modem and I thought that was pretty damn slick. The 64 had the nice blistering 300 baud modem.

Re:Telnet

[Drey]

There's a few reasons for that.

First off, if you're on Windows, MS's telnet is total complete c***. If you're playing from a Linux system, then the shells are perfectly fine -- they support color, local echo, etc, without having to set any command line options. MS telnet can do some of them (local echo mostly, no color) but has to be done every time you open telnet (can't save the changes).

Second, a lot of folks like to automate simple tasks. Gold drops on the ground everytime you kill a monster? Write a zmud or gmud trigger to get the gold so you don't have to each time. To get to the healer you have to recall then walk 3S, 2W, 1N? Write an alias in the client to do that for you.

Finally, some of the clients support auto-mapping so you if you're the type to map or a particular quest really needs one to get by, you don't have to mess around with pencil and paper near your computer (and risk losing the maps too during a desk cleanup).

Re:Telnet

[theTerribleRobbo]

In the snow. Uphill. Both ways.

Re:Telnet

[that _evil _gleek]

Actually, its the truth. Some muds don't need clients, Diku's and ROM's, they
have a fair amount of client basic features built in. If you have a good telnet
it will do line-mode, and you the bandwith you need will drop considerably.
A fair amount of the client software out there doesn't do line-mode. So every keypress
is sent to the mud. I noticed mud users dropped considerably about when windows95 telnet didn't do linemode.

Re:Telnet

[djdavetrouble]

I am taking a stand and making a plea to stop these lame in my day jokes. If i have to see one more post about whistling the modem tones I'm going to .... wait wait i got one
in my day we had ummm whistle into an 8 track tape and send it by carrier pigeon good one right .

please lord let them moderate me as funny, i need this one. please. i've still got it. last week one of my 3. profit jokes got a 2 Funny. Week before i had a pretty good beowulf line, and combos seem to be in these days. I'm going to try for a 4 way combo joke this week, but its gotta be good. Maybe a 1.2.3 profit with a little beowulf back in my day in soviet russia will hit a homer. I need a 5 (Funny) badly!

Re:Telnet

[wo1verin3]

You forgot to welcome our bongo beating overlords.

Re:Telnet

[pclminion]

Back in my day we spliced a microphone into the phone jack and whistled...

Re:Telnet

[infinii]

"why does anybody need a fancy client to play a text-mode game?"

If you're a power player then you would understand why. Seeing as you're not and you probably havent even tried a MUD, I'll fill you in.

If you ever want to play multiple characters at once, these clients are very handy. Before clients were available, we old school types used multiple xterms to do this. With a client, you have full control within one session. Client's also give you scripting abilities so pc's can be programmed to perform actions based on events. Very powerful, and also considered cheating by most.

Johann@Apocalypse

Re:Telnet

[Kysh]

Well, the biggest need is separation of entry and response.

You have toGrue slashes you for 10 points of damage!
nYou attempt to bash Grue, but miss!ote that
JohnMary tells you: "woot, ding 14!"trying to type
amid the output of a MU* is an exercise in frustration.

Also, frankly, TinyFugue totally rocks. It manages multiple connections gracefully, it handles all sorts of input and output, it rocks for searching.
It just works really well. It has all the features anyone could want from a MU* program, and it's free, built for Unix, and works very well.

Re:Telnet

[Pommpie]

I actually think that, for gaming, Windows XP Telnet is a bit of an improvement. I mean, don't get me wrong, it still sucks more buttock than...er, a buttock-sucking vacuum...but it's a damned improvement over the old Telnet that might have been useful on your TRS-80 but is just really sad in the modern world.

But Windows XP telnet is bearable. Is the point.

Re:Telnet

[fm6]

And there are other telnet clients besides Microsoft's. You can even use an X terminal window if you want to go to the trouble of installing Cygwin. Still, Drey has a point about those other MUD client features.

Re:Telnet

[fm6]

I've played MUDs. I have to admit I'm not very good at RPGs, which is probably why I never graducated beyond Telnet mode.

Re:Telnet

[rifter]

Well "back in the day" for me was with a 14.4k modem, but I also used telnet and it's all you really need for MUDs. Maybe that changed to SSH now though, dunno... haven't mud'ed since like 1996 or so. I still like to whip out a game of Rogue or Nethack every now and then though. :) And I hope maybe one day I'll be able to play some good old fashioned table-top RPG again (hopefully using the ol' crusty D&D boxed sets from the mid-80's... those were the best, *sniff*)

Telnet is more than enough if you have a decent OS or a dumb terminal. The problem that drives people to mud clients is Microsoft Telnet. It truly, truly sucks and will send you crying for an old-school DEC terminal (which is more user-friendly and has better features) in seconds.

Now if you use Putty on windows or use plain old telnet in an xterm on Linux you will have all you really need for mudding and more.

Re:Telnet

[TygerFish]

why does anybody need a fancy client to play a text-mode game?

Mud clients are extremely useful in many ways. When you first start playing a mud and you don't know the commands well, a client can reduce a multi-word command you're expected to type in accurately once every few seconds to a few characters that you type in once, and as your experience in mudding increases and you end up in longer fights, a scripting a client can save you getting bored by hundreds of repetitions of the same command.

Better still, since mudding invariably involves long sequences of directions to get to places, you can program long pathways and save them in files for speed and safety in getting from point A to point B.

These are all basic functions shared by all clients, but better clients, like TinyFugue, can be used to automate things you do on your mud to levels where you save tremendous time and energy by allowing the use of techniques incorporating features of structured programming like 'triggers' ('whenever monks shout that , respond this !') and conditional execution ('if you have a potion in your inventory and your hit points go below a certain level, drink the potion.').

Essentially, once you've played a text-based mud for a while, you find mud clients indispensable aids to playing them and once you've used them, the sky's the limit, with the power the client gives you only limited by your own skills as a programmer; essentially giving you any degree of flexibility you desire from automating the login to actually creating an autonomous agent, or 'bot' which plays the game for you (mud administrators differ in the degree of automation they're comfortable with, be careful and check the rules, or just be careful. ;-D).

There is a large number of clients out there, but I personally recommend TinyFugue. Despite its sometimes cumbersom syntax, TinyFugue is a very powerful client that runs under Unix/Linux, either on your own box or remotely allowing you to play in a consistent way using any telnet client and it interfaces smoothly with the mud's own macro-engine if there is one letting you send commands spaced out in time so that the mud does the work for you.

If you use Unix, TinyFugue is it. It got me all the way to level 99 on Realmsmud and there's no reason it couldn't do the same for you.

.
X

Re:Telnet

[CakerX]

SecureCRT.

Nuff said.

unless you want to full screen mud, cause you are a h4rdc0r3 l00s3r like that, which there is putty for

Re:Telnet

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember making a very complex set of variables, scripts, and triggers to automagically make my character eat and drink whenever I got those annoying "You are hungry" and "You are thirsty" messages. It even kept track of the amount of food and water I had on me and would buy more food and refill my canteen for me whenever I was killing time in town waiting to heal.

Then a few weeks later I realized that no one ever implemented any affects for hungry and thirst, so I just masked those "You are hungry" messages and stopped wasting my money.

Of course, if I stopped scripted and just played the damn game I might have heroed :).

Re:Telnet

[Anonymous Coward]

Telnet works, but if you really want to have a better MUD experience, you need to get a client.

Gmud rocks for Windows. Has a wide array of configuration options.

For Unix, Tinyfugue is by far the best.

FYI, here's a great LP-MUD: asgard.aardmud.org:5454

Re:Telnet

[Carnivorous Carrot]

In my day, we didn't have computers, modems, or even terminals. We used pen and paper to play our dungeon games. And we liked it!

Actually, we loved it. A lot is gained but a lot is lost in a graphical 3D world.

Re:Telnet

[fm6]

We're talking free software here. SecureCRT costs $99!

Re:Telnet

[fm6]

I shouldn't complain at being modded up, but WTF is this "informative"?

tintin++?

[SweetAndSourJesus]

All my friends seem to like it.

check it out.

Re:tintin++?

[Kaladis Nefarian]

This is also my client of choice - it stays out of your way (looks like telnet to the onlooker) and provides good scripting facilities. There is also a port to Windows (which thankfully looks NOTHING like Windows Telnet ;), Wintin.

Re:tintin++?

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to astroturf your own MUD client.

Yeah.

[Creepy Crawler]

Use TELNET with 'hotkeys', Use those keybinds for something.

Re:Yeah.

[endx7]

Don't forget ^R

MOD DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is a TROLL!

Even better how about a free 3D MUD client?

[llZENll]

Anyone know of any free 3d mud clients with servers?

Re:Even better how about a free 3D MUD client?

[Bryan_W]

Activeworlds seems pretty cool

Slow day today?

[gdavidp]

Seriously, who the heck cares about MUDs. Any way to filter out Ask Slashdot articles, they are so boring.

Re:Slow day today?

[bersl2]

Uh... preferences -> homepage?

Re:How to tell if you are a linux fanatic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, who would waste his time posting something like this?

mmucl

[mrseigen]

I saw it in the Debian list and it looks okay to me. Then again, I'm a telnet kind of guy.

TinyFugue

[noda132]

Tinyfugue.

And if you have trouble at first: It uses Emacs keybindings -- that means Ctrl-P to go to the last line typed, Ctrl-U to clear the current line, etc.

Re:TinyFugue

[Xua]

Try to "/load kb-bash.tf" or better add this line to your ~/.tfrc and TF will use bash keybindings for managing history and input editing.

Re:TinyFugue

[henriksh]

Ctrl-U to clear the current line

C-u does not by default clear anything in Emacs - it's the 'universal argument'.

Re:TinyFugue

[sammy baby]

Also, if you're looking for GUI goodness, there's a front end available for TinyFugue called Crescendo. Their main site is "closed for maintenance" (read - dead), but last time I tried the app worked pretty well.

Re:TinyFugue

[Tiny Elvis]

I'll vote for TinyFugue as well; I've done some cool scripts for mudding in it..

How about a mud advert:

Marches of Antan:

antan.dns2go.com 3000

a little different than your average mud.
or search http://www.mudconnect.com/ for antan

Re:TinyFugue

[Merk]

Hmm. In Emacs I never use Ctrl-P to go to the previous line, and no Emacs I've ever used uses Ctrl-U to clear the current line -- however that does sound like the Emacs mode of many shells I've used. Strange examples of Emacs keybindings though.

Re:TinyFugue

[Tyreth]

It's the one I used, though it doesn't seem to have been updated in the while.

I enjoy it because it's just a console client.

Tinyfugue

I don't know of any ...

[dzym]

I don't know of any really good free win32 clients. Zmud is the best, in my opinion, and I bought a license for it back in the 4.xx days. I don't even use 5.x or 6.x even though my license is fully upgradable because I detest eLicense.

I really liked mcl on *nix, by Erwin Andreasen, but he stopped maintaining it a while ago and I'm not even able to access his homepage right now. A cursory whois on the domain seems to suggest that he has abandoned his former "life". :(

tintin(++) is the old standby, of course.

Re:I don't know of any ...

[ekidder]

http://www.andreasen.org/. Still up.

Re:I don't know of any ...

[Arker]

I've got a really ancient version of Zmud... let me run over to the windows machine and check... 4.62 16 bit hahah. It works really well though, a great showcase for what you can do with objpascal/Delphi. When I was reduced to one box for awhile I tried to convert to tintin++, but even with a friend that was expert at it a lot of the things I did with Zmud using triggers and functions and the like just couldn't be replicated. Wound up running it under WINE. I agree about the newer versions though - and not just because of eLicense.

Re:I don't know of any ...

[platipusrc]

MudMaster and MudMaster 2000 are pretty good Win32 clients. Actually, I wish that MudMaster was available on Unix. It's basically a better version of tintin for the Windows console. MudMaster 2000 is a gui rewrite.

Re:I don't know of any ...

[0x0d0a]

I still use mcl.

Mcl development was stopped, and someone else took over a fork called "dirt", which I don't believe is in a working state yet.

Re:I don't know of any ...

[Erwin-42]

Err, I'm not dead yet.

Anyway, prompted by mention of this topic on Slashdot I finally got around in releasing a maintenane release of mcl, 0.53.00. It basically fixes all the ancient C++ code that only compiled with 2.95, and also makes the code work with Perl 5.8.0 etc.

Get it from http://www.andreasen.org/mcl/ as usual.

For a more modern MUD, non-text-only client, check out Papaya.

Re:I don't know of any ...

[lordmage]

I have an updated version. Erwin was helpful and we were able to update my MCL to Mandrake 9.1. If you are interested I can talk to Erwin about maintaining it.

Its a great client and his site is up:

http://www.andreasen.org/mcl/

Use it :)

Re:I don't know of any ...

[maharito]

I don't play MUD's as much as I used to, but when I played Achaea: Dreams of Divine Lands , I used ROAClient. It has a host of pretty decent features, like highlighting, triggers, and the like. I never used anything but the highlighting, but it seemed to me to be a good quality FREE Win32 MUD client.

Re:I don't know of any ...

[zoward]

Thanks Erwin!

Shameless plug

[Adam Wiggins]

Bah, who needs clients? This one was designed to be completely playable with raw telnet:

Blood Dusk MUD

'course it's mine, so I might be a little biased. :)

Re:Shameless plug

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I've got my own biased opinion too. I help run AlteredReality. I didn't catch this article soon enough that anyone will ever see this, unfortunately. We support SSH connections (on a different port), and a bunch of features in VT100-mode that are equal to or surpass the experience using a normal mud client. Most people actually play using PuTTY in Windows, or Terminal.app in OS X, or whatever term they prefer in Linux.

Also, I checked out Blood Dusk, mentioned in the parent to this post. I can't actually think of the last time I saw another mud than my own that had a decent VT100-mode, so that was nice to see. The skill system seems pretty interesting too. I'd have to say that I think our VT100 support is better, but I give Blood Dusk credit for some good ideas. People might as well check both it and AlteredReality out, right? Who needs mud clients anyway, especially when you can have a prompt bar, separate input and output text areas, and all your aliases and speedwalks and stuff built-in so you can mud from any computer without leaving data in your client behind?

MudMaster

[sjorgnsn]

MudMaster and it's GUI-oriented counterpart MudMaster 2000 are good MUD clients for Windows.

As for *nix, TinTin++ and TinyFugue are excellent, though the sites for those two escape me at the moment.

Free mud client

[Anonymous Coward]

Try searching at http://www.google.com - it's new but it's good

TF -- Definitely TinyFugue

[Vrallis]

I started out using TF under OS/2, and later under Linux. I tried others, but always went back. No GUI crap for me!

I used it for...far too many years. Try your best to avoid the black hole that is MUD addiction. It just about drummed me out of college. I still fight the urge to go back (I was a long-time player on Duris, as well as some GodWars muds), as the primary MUD I played on is still alive and kicking...as far as I know, at least. Fortunately I haven't checked in on it in almost a year.

Re:TF -- Definitely TinyFugue

[Anonymous Coward]

Heya I don't have account but its Belfor (I've played duris since beta), I've been on and off over 6-7 years. hehe mostly goodie guild, and was one of thr major people in the first undead guild, before we got an artifact and started a god war and made cython turn off the mud. OOPS..

Re:TF -- Definitely TinyFugue

[Salis]

Hah!

I played the original Sojourn like in 1992. I tried Duris after they split (bad move?), but it wasn't the same (and neither was Toril).

I was "Warony". Cleric.

FYI, the lead designer of EQ, Brad McQuaid, played Sojourn aka "Aradune" or something such. Ranger. EQ felt exactly like Sojourn...making it highly successful and extremely boring for someone who played the real thing.

Re:TF -- Definitely TinyFugue

[Vrallis]

Ahh..I recognize the name. I drifted back and forth. Probably the highlight of all my time there (laugh!) was being chosen by Golrith (leader of CBL) to take over the lead of their sister guild at the time, Warpigs. I even stuck through going to Basternae, then back after Duris came back up. Hell, I followed a couple of the admins out and helped do some coding on GreyHawk, but got busy and left before doing anything serious.

Re:TF -- Definitely TinyFugue

[Vrallis]

Yeah, the whole ordeal over Everquest was major news on Duris at the time. Everyone complained that the entire EQ game was a blatent rip-off of Duris and it's predecessors.

I never did play on Toril or Sojourn. I started probably a couple months after Duris started up, brought in by a friend who had played on both Toril and Sojourn before that.

Re:TF -- Definitely TinyFugue

[dlur]

I played Sojourn from around '94 to '98 quite heavily. I stuck with it when they split up into Toril and Duris and went the Toril route. Around '98 myself and some folks from Crimson Sigil left Toril and created our own MUD, ExileMUD. Since then ExileMUD has gone by the wayside and within the past two years we've revamped it and reopened ExileMUD as Homeland. If you're interested in checking out Homeland see my sig.

Sojourn is still around and has gone through numerous incarnations since 1992. Currently a nother politically motivated breakup is going on and Lloth/Miax will no longer be running the main Sojourn MUD. The imms have split in half and the MUD has split again.

Brad McQuaid aka Aradune was in my guild for quite some time on Toril. I've talked to him numerous times since he left Toril to create EverQuest. His main motivation for "ripping off" Sojourn was because he loved Sojourn so much that he thought it would be cool to bring it to the masses as a graphical game in one form or another. I've got quite a few old guildmates and friends from Toril that still work with Brad at Sigil Games working on whatever it is that they'll be releasing through Microsoft's distrubution channels.

Anyways if any of you are looking for a MUD that captures a lot of the gameplay feel of early Sojourn and Toril history then look up Homeland. We've also got quite a few folks from Basternae on our staff as well so there's a bit of that feel there as well.

Re:TF -- Definitely TinyFugue

[dlur]

Oh, BTW forgot to add this in there but I've used tinyfugue, TinTin++, zMUD, and MUDMaster. I still like zMUD best of all, but tinyfugue is a close 2nd. I still use both depending on what system I happen to be on at the time.

Also on Sojourn/Toril I played Motog, Wharog, Ghimok, Dlur, Ruld and several others. I also played on Duris for a while as Wharog with Jukahn/Shratz in his guild but I never really cared for the pkill aspect much.

Zoc

[Remik]

Use Zoc.

It's not just for muds, but it's great.

Re:Zoc

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Zoc -- that German hippie who makes it won't let it be used by any military agency -- read the license if you don't believe me. Hell, even the GPL doesn't get that political.

Secure CRT ownz anyways for 'doze

Re:Zoc

[fenix down]

Well, what do you expect? Let the damn Krauts get ahold of a stupid goddamn fucking telnet client and they'll be marching through Houston by Tuesday.

Fucker.

Re:Zoc

[Worminater]

But if you were to read the article, you would see thathe is asking for "free".

I was like "ooh this looks nice..."

and to notice that its basically just a 30 day trial... not free at all:-p

Re:Zoc

[Remik]

Hmm...I seem to recall a command you can enter to extend the trial indefinately with the only side effect being a nag screen...something like '/extend'...Don't quote me on it, though.

-R

MCL

[GenSolo]

For a good MUD client for UNIX, I'd recommend MCL. It's got the simplicity of telnet without the pain.

Portal

[Atragon]

A year or so back when I regularly played MUDs, I used (for windows) Portal by www.gameaxle.com pretty decent client, but with a few issues (multiple connections gave it fits.

AL MUD

[je56]

AL MUD is made specifically for Ashavar's Legacy, but I use it for all the MUDs I poke around in. Its a pretty solid client all around, plus its freeware and it has both Windows and console linux versions.

http://www.ashavar.com/client/

VT100 term with ansi color (ala Putty)

[BrookHarty]

I use to play the Battletech muse when it was out, it was one of my favorites. Turn based, not a real moo wich chat, but pretty good.

Plain color Ansi, was pretty fun. TradeWars was also ansi, we would chat in game also. Now its all IRC, which works for me, when Im playing a game, Im too busy to chat.

Macros for Tinyfugue

[Solokron]

Here is an excellent source for macros and links for Tinyfugue users.

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/1579/tf.html

good god please

[mrgreenfur]

go outside and find someone to talk to. (no girlfriend jokes here... .. mostly...)

i mudded years ago and found it eating my life away. spending hours so you can get better and better equipment is no way to spend your life.

please, take it from me, just dont start.

Re:good god please

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone is neccesarily going to have the addictive personality for them though.

Re:good god please

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. I only wish I could spend all my free time on MUDs. That would be nice... forget about the real world and all the crap, and get lost in another place...

MegaMUD

[wildchild07770]

Me and a few friends of mine got on a big MUD retro kick about a year ago and this program seemed to work quite well. It's trial software but is freeish enough to use, the biggest problem I saw was finding free and reliable mud servers. Anyway, check it out http://www.megamud.net/downloads.html.

Re:MegaMUD

[Remik]

I used this client extensively, but it is pretty much only good for MajorMud, and afaik is no longer under development by the creator.

-R

Just search google. Christ.

[Recluse]

For windows, the best free stuff out there is probably MudMaster or MM2K (the non-console version of MM). Other free ones can be found by putting something dumb like "windows mud client" into google.

For linux, I have never found any clients that will do everything I want them to do. As Michael implies, tf will do most everything you want. The two issues I currently have with it are no easily usable input buffer (/recall .... prints it, but doesn't rerun it...), and its ansi support doesn't do well when presented with muds which spew crap. MCL is probably the second most popular unix mud client, after tf. Non console... good luck. Sourceforge has a couple dozen projects in various states of undress.

-R-

Not sure about Multi-User

[dupper]

But for non-graphical RPGs, just stick to the rogue-likes, and you'll be happy.

Re:Not sure about Multi-User

[mercx]

> But for non-graphical RPGs, just stick to the rogue [nethack.org]-likes [adom.de], and you'll be happy.

Er... rogue-a-likes and MUDs are very different styles of games, with MUDs being closer to chatrooms set in a fantasy world. ...as such, they have very different ways of making you "happy", and one might not substitute for the other ;)

Just make sure you have a kill alias

[krambeck]

I run portal, it not too bad if you MUD supports some of the extra features

As mentioned...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using tinyfugue pretty much since I started mudding 6 years ago. I've always run it on linux, but I recently snagged the windows port for my laptop when I need a quick fix out and about. The windows port seems decent enough, but I can't copy/paste from that window which is mildly annoying. I'd rate it as quite a nice piece of software except for the fact that it has facilitated my wasting of far too much time on MUDs. (Last check of my total time spent online on my currect MUD addiction placed me at over 2200 hours there in less than 2 years. (3 months solid onlineness for 20 months of playing there isn't _that_ bad, is it?))

tkMOO-light

[hpa]

At a MOO system I run with some friends, we use tkMOO-light, http://www.awns.com/tkMOO-light/, with considerable success. Since it is written in Tcl/Tk, it runs on any system which has Tcl/Tk ported; they have prepackaged versions including the Tcl/Tk runtime for Win and Mac for download.

Re:tkMOO-light

[SkoZombie]

for an easy to use mud/moo client i totally agree. Its not overloaded with features and being in Tcl/Tk means its portable too. On a side not, when i found a bug with it and how it was handing certain commands causing it to lockup the display, the author replied quickly to my email and even organised a time to jump on the moo and talk to me about it so i could explain and demonstrate it.

Re:tkMOO-light

[endx7]

I do use tkmoo, and it's great on MOOs.

However, you probably don't want to bother to try to use it on your average mud. A lot of muds do colors differently (and sometimes color spans multiple lines, which tkmoo just pretends the colors aren't there at all in those cases). Also tkmoo apparently can't handle different newlines from the type MOOs use (sometimes you get an extra blank line).

It helps I don't ever visit anything mudlike except for MOOs.

Re:tkMOO-light

[Daniel Lange]

I've had nothing but success with tkMOO-light. It's small and easy to use. And as other posters ahve noted, the developer is rather helpful. I had a problem with it not recognizing the bold ansi tags a MUSH I play uses. I logged in to the tkMOO-light MOO and asked about it. The developer said he'd look into it for the next release and offered a quick script that solves the problem temporarily. If you're not looking for big super feature rich programs, go with this one.

tsop tsrif

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck all you LambdaMOOers.

Ah...mudding. How I love thee.

[AndrewGoat]

Ive been doing this mudding thing for 8 years now, and I can tell you right now that the only reason I do NOT use Linux is because of the fact that theres no good mud clients for it that I like. Im used to ZMud, and nothing else on Linux has the functionality. My favorite mud client that I used on Linux was SClient, its okay, but doesnt have advanced triggers. GMud is technically Shareware, but the guy who made it doesnt exist anymore, I think he fell off the earth. Its like Sclient, but Windows...and MUDS...just like Everquest, are the crack of true gaming geeks.

Now that's a good ask slashdot question

[TLouden]

I've had the same quest myself. I've found that you have to know what you're really looking for to find it. If all you want is telnet with macros that's one thing. A GUI with macros, pattern recognition, mapping, auto responders, a scripting language and more si quite another deal. Both exist and they're both free and useful. I prefer the second.

MUD clients

[E_elven]

Win: MUSHClient.
-- The only relevant client. XML storage,
full scripting in multiple languages,
triggers, macros, aliases.
www.gammon.com.au

Lin: TinTin++.
-- Only if you're too much of a pansy for
telnet.

Re:MUD clients

[ergonal]

Some more info on MUSHclient. Plugins: triggers/aliases/timers/scripts with their own "namespace". Supports JScript/VBScript/PerlScript/PythonScript. Is still being actively developed! MUDs are disappearing and a lot of clients either die off, or there's no new features added, not so with MUSHclient, the author still actively develops it, and he regularly participates in the forums on his site, and will actually listen to feature requests and bug reports. The only bad thing (for the slashdot crowd anyway), is it's not open source, and is nag-ware. Other than that it's a great client.

PS: Whatever you do, stay away from zMUD for win32. It's full of bloat and MUSHclient beats it feature-for-feature, and if it doesn't, ask Nick Gammon (author of MUSHclient) to add it!

Re:MUD clients

[ergean]

You should try Jaba Mud Client.
It's my choice after testing a few mud clients.
Don't go after what /. say, go after what you like.

Re:MUD clients

[Repton]

E_elven wrote: Only if you're too much of a pansy for telnet.

I've never understood this "Real men use crappy tools" philosophy. It is perfectly possible to MUD with telnet --- I recommend turning "scroll to bottom on TTY output" OFF in your xterm --- but anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be able to realise that MUD clients are better. Even if you just use TinyFugue out of the box, you still get basically the same interface as with telnet, but with a couple of lines separated off for text entry and better scrollback support.

(I get these same emotions whenever I see someone proudly claiming that they make their web pages in notepad... I want to go up to them and beat them with a stick until they realise that notepad is complete crap. Just because Microsoft doesn't give you a good text editor doesn't mean you can't go and find one yourself! Use gvim or emacs or ultraedit or just about _anything_ else...

Ahem.

Sorry.</rant>

)

Re:MUD clients

[dizzentive]

I second that. Besides, it's a lot better to run tintin++ since you can have multiple sessions, sooner or later you're going to run out of ttys to have every damn telnet on... ;)

Re:MUD clients

[Gogl]

Part of it is a tongue in cheek joke. Another part of it is the ego that comes with being a self-proclaimed "expert" at something. And one last part is actually legitimate: while in this mud-specific scenario I'd agree with you, there are certainly examples out there where the "better" software just obfuscates the functionality and makes it worse. I wouldn't say many mud clients have hit that point (I'd be tempted to argue that it would be a good description of Everquest, though), but it certainly has happened in other software domains (the first thing that comes to my mind is office applications, what with the damn paperclip and the automatic reformatting of everything and so forth).

Re:MUD clients

[jazman]

It's probably a geeky backlash to the management pretty gui point and drool interfaces that get all the development budget cos those same managers can't use a lightning fast text only interface with hotkeys left right and centre.

Case in point - our internal system used to be a VERY fast, efficient, text-only program, black/white, lots of shortcut keys, anyone who knew what he was doing could move through it in very short order.

Problem: what do you click on? Where do you drool? You can't. Management don't understand it, can't use it, so they think it's crap and only give development time to the fancy GUI that only has buttons you can click on, takes ages for those buttons to respond because instead of spending the time saving the text to disk it's redrawing millions of stupid GUI gadgets. But it's eeeeeeeeasy. You don't need a brain to use a GUI (hence the success of Windows). But anyone with a clue finds GUIs slow, frustrating and inefficient, hence the proliferation of Linux users here.

It's a sad world when the ones who make the decisions are those least qualified to do so, trusting their own judgement instead of that of the people they themselves have hired to be experts. It's not about Real Men Using Crap Tools, it's about Real Men Using The Most Efficient Tools. If you prefer a slow GUI point and drool MUD client, use one. If you want a lighning fast client that spends its time doing the job instead of messing about drawing pretty pictures, use Telnet. Just because Notepad is basic doesn't mean it's crap - if all you want to do is type and use basic editing functions and have no need of column editing, Notepad is perfectly ok and there's no point in paying for UltraEdit, learning Emacs key sequences, or constantly trying to remember what mode you're in in vi so you don't destroy your work by typing in command mode (although admittedly you'd have to be typing something pretty weird if it contained 1GdG without an a or i behind it).

Re:MUD clients

[beowulfcluster]

I used to think the same way when my mudding was ruining my college studies. Now that I've gone back to play a little again ('play a little' famous last words!) a few years later and decided to try a client (RoAClient, http://rhoneware.com) I can't believe how stupi^H^Hstubborn I was spending all that time manually typing in everything like going from point a to point b on a trip I make 10 times a playing session instead of using scripts for it.

I still think using triggers for playerkilling and such things is Bad(tm), but for the purely mechanical, braindead things scripts are a must for me now.

Re:MUD clients

[Ronin SpoilSpot]

I use Jaba too. Is it still being developed? The only page I can find that looks remotely relevant is in Russian with no English version. /RS

Re:MUD clients

[Ice_Balrog]

Don't dis Notepad. It was the best piece of software to ever come out of MS. Period.

Besides, if all you need is a simple test editor, why not?

Re:MUD clients

[Repton]

My point is that telnet is not the most efficient program. TinyFugue runs in an xterm with no pretty buttons. For the price of 'apt-get install tf' and about two minutes of setup (adding my MUD as the default world), I get something that works identically to telnet, except that it has two lines separated off for text entry, meaning I can see what I'm typing when the MUD scrolls quickly. This is purely better, with no disadvantages.

As to notepad, I find it frustrating for even basic editing. My fingers are too trained to vi and emacs. I might say that a Real Man should take the time to learn vi --- it's not very difficult. (and you can play nethack in roguelike mode to help yourself learn the movement keys :-) )

BTW, your example sounds like what the Wellington library system did recently. Their computer catelogue used to be a menu-based text system. It was fast and if you learnt the keys, you could navigate very quickly. But recently, they changed to GUI based around Internet Explorer. The advantage is that you can use the system over the internet. The disadvantage is the same as in your case... (I guess it was inevitable, though --- internet access to the catelogue is useful, the old system would not work over the web, and consistency of interface is a valuable goal)

Re:MUD clients

[jbarr]

Of course Notepad is crap. That's why you should use UltraEdit. Best $30 I ever spent in my life!

Re:MUD clients

[scrytch]

Seriously, I think most people who claim to have edited their web page in notepad really meant that they edited it with a basic text editor like emacs, metapad, vim, UE, PFE, whatever. Still, I long ago ceased to be impressed by people who consider it a measure of ... anything, really. If I had to work with someone so insecure they had to put me down for using Dreamweaver, I'd really consider either foisting off the webmonkey work on them or doing it myself without consulting just so I wouldn't have to get into such inane pissing contests.

When you can speak corba with netcat, i'll be impressed, but HTML was never a terribly hard problem, and it doesn't really ring my bell to try to make it one.

Re:MUD clients

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood this "People with two brain cells to rub together use crappy tools" philosophy.

In case you missed it: offer some logical reasoning for your assertion unless you wish to be labelled an opinionated dork.

Re:MUD clients

[Kadagan AU]

I have to agree about MUSHclient. It's also supposed to be the fastest client there is for win32. I've used it for years, and I'm quite happy. It's semi-free... unlimited use with the nag screen, but you really should go ahead and pay for it.

While we're talking about MUDs, you all need to check out Adventures Unlimited, the best MUD there is! Tell them Kadagan sent you ;)

Re:MUD clients

[Some Bitch]

Besides, if all you need is a simple test editor, why not?

Row numbers.

Re:MUD clients

[WeblionX]

I have no idea what you're complaining about. For HTML, Notepad is fine. Why do you consider it a piece of crap? Because it doesn't color code anything? Personally, I find Notepad to be fine for HTML, and no reason to switch to anything else. If I'm in Linux I might use vim, and what's different? No scroll bars but it colors text. I could understand if you're creating programs with dozens of pages of text, but really there is no reason to beat the crap out of people that use Notepad.

If you need to express violence that much, buy a punching bag. At least that can't sue you.

Re:MUD clients

[Tadu]

E_elven wrote: Only if you're too much of a pansy for telnet.

I've never understood this "Real men use crappy tools" philosophy

Actually, telnet wrapped with rlwrap to give you line editing is the thing I use all the time. It even gives you key bindings via .inputrc. Of course you don't have triggers or automapping with it, but the latter is beeing done better on paper anyway.

As for tinyfugue, the first thing I see of it: 1) it doesn't support non-ASCII characters in my locale (which happens to use UTF-8), 2) cursor up doesn't give me my last input line, 3) it sets the terminal to cursor positioning mode, so I can't scroll back using the scroll bar, 4) it doesn't exit when I press ^C suitably often. Sorry, nice try, but these things just have to work without any configuration at all.

Re:MUD clients

[Razor Blades are Not]

My biggest problem with some of the HTML editors was that they used to muddy the markup with annoying things.
I haven't used Dreamweaver in ages, so I don't know if it does this.

I find that a simple document with most of the display directives in CSS files is far easier to maintain than a lot of embedded <font> tags and so forth that is often generated by many GUI-based editors.

When you can speak corba with netcat, i'll be impressed, but HTML was never a terribly hard problem, and it doesn't really ring my bell to try to make it one.

Agreed. But it's the people who use Dreamweaver because *they can't understand markup* that many people disdain. It is these people one wishes to dissociate from when one claims "real programmers use vi/emacs/whatever". In those days where everyone and their dog was in the dotCom boom and half of them thought HTML Programmer was a valid title, those of us with actual degrees and/or experience in actual programming must distinguish ourselves somehow.

Of course, some of us do it through being good at what we do, but others use vi.

Re:MUD clients

[Anonymous Coward]

Corba? Do you mean IDL? And, yes, I do, thank you very much, but my server is quite impatient with my wpm.

Re:MUD clients

[Anonymous Coward]

>I've never understood this "Real men use crappy tools" philosophy

dude, you are on /. ...
a lot of people here use linux
are you just begging for flames?

Re:MUD clients

[Repton]

Um. If you can't tell the difference between Notepad and vim, well, I worry about you... :-/

...

Ok, ok, I confess. I'm a vi fan. With every day that passes, I find it harder and harder to understand how anyone could cope without basic movement commands such as /, ?, f, F, ;, b, w, 0 or $, not to mention the various editing commands available. Most of the time I can move the cursor to where I want it faster than I could with the mouse, and as my hands stay on the keyboard, there is no downtime. And I'm not even a vi master :-)

But that's not the point. Computers are fast, these days. There's plenty of other lightweight editors around that provide more (useful) functionality than notepad does.

It's like I meet someone and they proudly claim to have sold their car and be commuting by bicycle. And this is great! But then I see their bike, and it's some old 1-speed... They might say to me "But I never go fast, and I don't mind having to get off and push when the hills get too steep". But for the small investment of learning to change gears (pretty simple), they could do so much more with your bike, and they would after a little while.

Anyway, last post from me (unless someone else says something I want to reply to :-) ).

(ps: Syntax highlighting doesn't matter, but I would hate to do any programming in an editor that didn't support auto-indentation)

better topic

[Dwindlehop]

What Good is a Free MUD Client? This would have been a much better Ask Slashdot.

Suggestion

[shadowkoder]

I don't MUD anymore myself, but when I played Armageddon (one of the best MUDs ever), I used Portal. It had a great cartographer system. Don't know if there is a Linux version, but defenitely a Windows.

Re:Suggestion

[TLouden]

I've use portal too. I loved it but the cartographer didn't quite work. The problem was really with the mud. going n,e,s,w didn't always get you into the same room. That's confusing.

Pay for zMUD

[useosx]

Damn it man! Just pay for zMUD, it's a great client. In fact, zMUD's built in scripting language is how I learned to script and got me interested in CS (waaaaay back when). Plus, Zugg, the developer is a great and deserves the money.

Re:Pay for zMUD

[polaughlin]

zMUD is a mere $25 and it is the best Windows client you will find.

Re:Pay for zMUD

[pdbogen]

I have to agree with the parent. zMUD has some awesome features, for MUDding. However, if you want to do anything else (MUSH, MUX) zMud is crap (No offense at all! It's just geared towards MUDding, and that's what it's good at.) For MUSHs and MUXs, TinyFugue far and away. Nobody has mentioned this yet, but there are Win32 builds of it!

Re:Pay for zMUD

[syukton]

Why do you get modded up for not answering the goddamned question?

Re:Pay for zMUD

[dizzentive]

I must disagree here. ZMud has about the slowest script engine I've seen to this day. It would indeed be a lot better to pay for MUSHClient instead, at least it's very lightweight memory and processor wise. You can run it without problem on a 486, and it's still fast. Try the same thing with ZMud and you're in for a surprise. Why settle for poorly programmed software when you can get something that somebody spent a lot of time and effort developing? Besides, isn't it fun to script in PerlScript or VBScript just because you can?

Re:Pay for zMUD

[guacamolefoo]

Look around and you may be able to find an older version of zMud for free. Granted, it'll be on the order of 5-6 years old, but I bet you can dig one up.

GF.

Re:Pay for zMUD

[arkanes]

zMuds decent, but it's only "good" in comparison with all the other available ones. And Zugg as a developer is a fucking moron, pardon my french. There's no professionalism there at all. I'll put up with crap like non-backwards compatible script syntax changes in minor version releases (with nothing more than a small note in the changelog) from a free application, but not one you're trying to sell.

zMud is a load of cruft that has a decent core and has slowly been layered on and layered on in the worst tradition of software development. New features seem to be added in a "whatever Zugg read about in Delphi Journal this week" manner, with no real consistency in interface. The database module is an excellent example - Delphi has a fantasticly easy database access libarary - it's famous for it. So what does Zugg do? He writes his own really crappy and slow one. Features are added when he feels like it and are left alone when he gets bored of them, even if they're broken, like the COM support.

Now, I have to be fair - zMud is far and away the most feature rich and the most technically complex mud client. It's got a decent UI if you ignore the crappy layout libraries and how slow the settings manager is. It's certainly quite fast, especially when you take the complexity of the parsing and trigger engines into consideration. It's easy to use. It's "good enough" for almost everyone. Basically, it's kinda like Windows.

Re:Pay for zMUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, Zugg, the developer is a great and deserves the money.

No developer "deserves" money, remember? He should release it as open source and charge for support services like everyone else is supposed to. Damn hypocrits. If this "Zugg" person can charge money for it, why does everyone give other businesses such a headache about it?

Re:Pay for zMUD

[SlashDread]

I did. I was quite dissapointed with the number of crashes. /Dread

Re:Pay for zMUD

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using ZMud version 3.62 (freeware) for as long as I can remember. Recently, I downloaded version 6.62 for a trial (free 30 day trial), and it crashes roughly once an hour. Sure, it's got all sorts of pretty bells and whistles, such as MXP/MSP/MCCP support which can really enhance your gameplay...IF the MUD you're playing has those features, and honestly, not many do (the one I play actually does, which is why I downloaded it in the first place).

Dread is on the money. It's not worth paying for ZMud. If you really wanna use ZMud (and your computer is antiquated enough), use the freeware version.

Re:Pay for zMUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Only Problem with Zugg is that he refuses to create a *NIX Version of the client because it has too many functions embedded into Win32 aspects.

I used ZMUD for a long time as a 'doze user, but now with Linux, I'm finding things harder to match it in power. The only one that looks promising is KMC.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/kmc/

Re:Pay for zMUD

[Anonymous Coward]

TinyFugue is far more powerful and expressive than zMUD. People who fail to understand this fail to understand TinyFugue. Granted, it took me a looong time to master TinyFugue ...

Re:Pay for zMUD

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard a lot of bashing of zmud so far and I wonder if most people are just judging zmud from experience with its free version 4.something. Zmud has grown a LOT and is by far the fastest in trigger parsing that I know of. I supports many features including vb script, or just about any other scripting language possible.

gMud

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't mudded for a while, but I always used gMud on windows. It has decent scripting/trigger/aliasing capabilities. It is freely avaliable for download. Do a google search.

Exaurdon!

Re:gMud

[Deathlizard]

I'll have to second this. when I was an Imm on a mud this was all I used. It's great because it fits on a floppy, so you could go to Computer labs in college and run it from disk.

Get it from here They have the binary and Source code from an eariler version there.

It would be nice if it became GPL'ed since the author basicially abandoned it. It was the best clent out there until zmud basicially started to copy it.

Re:gMud

[darkling]

gMud was always what I used. It was a clean, simple design, doesn't beat you over the head with features you don't use. Good stuff.

I wonder if any of the MUDs I used to play still exist...

ask google, not slashdot?

[bn557]

I mean, by the time the poster will have succesfully sorted through all tho flames and useless jokes, they could have just as easily used google, tried 9 or 10 things, and based the solution on their own preferences. No need for this.

P

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[TLouden]

Sorting through? Just set score filter to 3. Anyways, some people here might have some good comments or know of a client that's good but hard to find.

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster seems to be deciding if he wants to write his own mud client, and he's assessing the competition. (Hint: He knows what the competition is, but he wants to know what *other people* think of it.)

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, most jokes (no matter how lame) get modded up to 5. If a post is modded "Funny," it should be that: funny. If it somehow managed to garner enough postive moddage to get to "5, Funny," I expect it to be laugh-out-loud funny. Instead, what I usually see is the usual lame-old, same-old "Beowulf cluster" and "you insensitive clod" posts.

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[AsnFkr]

With the time you took to post that you coulda looked up a MUD and had a relevant post instead of a typical snivel.....of course the same could be said for me. But on the other hand, how productive is looking for a MUD any ways? ...I'm joking! Jesus!

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[bn557]

you make a valid point. I mearly posted what came to mind when I read of the topic. I've never had the urge to do a ask slashdot, but I know there have been lots of times that I've wished I had google available to me when I don't.

P

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[commodoresloat]

yeah but by that time, the poster could have been eaten by a grue!

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[Ralph Yarro]

Unfortunately, most jokes (no matter how lame) get modded up to 5. If a post is modded "Funny," it should be that: funny. If it somehow managed to garner enough postive moddage to get to "5, Funny," I expect it to be laugh-out-loud funny.

That's all very well in theory, but in practice the only way of marking a post so that people who can't cope with humour/attempted humour won't reply to it seriously is by modding it funny. Yes, that's absurd, but it's true. Maybe they're just trolls, but the number of people who apparently can't see obvious, lame, attempts at humour around here is scary. The modding system is currently the only defence.

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[TLouden]

If you don't like the humor, or how much it gets modded, then set the bonus for funny to -2 or -3.

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[Phlod]

Sorry man, I've done the Google search a LOT of times to try and find what this person is looking for (A good, free Mu* client in case you forgot), and Even if I put the words 'free' or 'freeware' all I usually get is links to major (crappy) DL sites like c|net, who have maybe 2 free clients that either are so new as to be barely above telnet, or old and no longer developed. I'm quite glad someone actually asked this question, and I hope someone has a good answer for him.
FWIW, Zmud *is* the best client for Windows, I own it, and I love it, in spite of the fact that the wazards on the mud I play are nazi's about using clients. Nothing that outputs to the mud is the rule. :P But colors have saved my virtual life many times.
--Phlod

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[Ralph Yarro]

If you don't like the humor, or how much it gets modded, then set the bonus for funny to -2 or -3.

Is there a similar fix for people who reply to the wrong post or am I just going to have to live with that one?

Re:ask google, not slashdot?

[TLouden]

yeah, the fix is to write yourself a script, or live with it, whatever is easiest.

Switch your source

[DWormed]

Forget that fancy-smancy expensive "European-Style" MUD. Go out back (or front, as the case may be), dig up some dirt, and pour some water in it. All the (almost) free MUD you could ever want.

Trebucket TK

[strredwolf]

Requires Tcl/TK, but has ANSI color, supports MPI, and is well supported. Also has web update.

Main page here.

Re:Trebucket TK

[KiranWolf]

Having used TrebTK for years, I still think this is one of the best clients out there. If you're looking for pretty eye-candy or idiot-easy use, this ain't it. But for portability (I use it on my Windows, Mac, and Linux systems) and features, TrebTK can't be beat. :)

TrebTK

[Malketh]

Trebuchet.
All you need is TCL/TK which (for those that don't know) is available for every major platform.

TF

[Llywelyn]

TinyFuge. If you are using Linux (or MacOS X) it is the best of the breed.

Why?

[Shadwell]

Why is this even on the front page? Why not try Google, Freshmeat, Tucows or Versiontracker?

Re:Why?

[TwistedGreen]

Slow Sunday night? *shrug*

You're right, though. Despite what people say, there is very much such a thing as a stupid question. I'd define it as one that could be easily answered with a minimum of thought and/or effort on the part of the questioner.

Re:Why?

[J23SE]

Because it allows people like me, who haven't ever experienced anything MUD related, to get a glimpse of the fun that could be had. For many like me, a large appeal of slashdot is being introduced to a variety of activities/news/interests/sites. I'm willing to wager that most of the people that saw the story and are now going to check out a MUD would not have initiated the search by themselves.

Re:Why?

[br00tus]

Why? Because I did check Google and Freshmeat (do people still use Tucows?). For one thing, as I said in the article, MUDs are somewhat obsolete in the face of MMORPGs like Everquest. I know ZMud is a decent client, but it is not free as in beer or speech, after a 30-day trial it conks out. As far as Google, it recently discontinued archival of the rec.games.mud groups, so that answers that question for one.

Theoretically, I could have downloaded 30 MUD clients, many wanting me to download PERL for Windows, or TCL/TK for Windows, or GNOME for Windows, or whatever, just to look at it, but I figured I would ask here. Have people here rallied around a Windows MUD client that is free as in beer and as in speech, that doesn't need a normal user to download Cygwin, TCL/TK, PERL and so forth for Windows, compile it and so forth, that is still actively updated? If so, I haven't seen it. That confirms my suspicion - that there is no good, free (as in beer and speech) MUD client for Windows, or at least one that you can download that doesn't require you to transmogrify your Windows box into a UNIX - I'm better off just using a UNIX then anyway.

You're assuming that anyone using Google or Freshmeat will find what they're looking for. I didn't. So now I'm asking as a last resort, before I possibly even begin writing one (that is beer and speech free) myself, if I have the spare time to do such a thing.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a feeling you were more likely to read this if I replied directly to one of your posts.

Gmud is an excellent client for Windows that supports triggers, macros, and all of the other extras that we know and love. It is shareware, but never expires. Make sure you set up the font, size, and word wrap, or it will look strange.

If you need something truly free (as in beer), old versions of Zmud were freeware. Personally, I'd choose gmud or purchase the new Zmud--it's worth it.

If you find something better than these two choices, let me know.

Re:Why?

[Favonius]

Mud-master is a great free one

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it is a question asking for opinions, and not just asking for the name of a mud client.

Sure he could find 20 mud clients and try them all, but asking here would get him posts listing reasons why people use the one they used.

Why did you even click on this story to read it if you are not interested in Muds, mud clients and discussions regarding mud clients?

Re:Why?

[GregoryD]

If you do, May I suggest 2 muds?

Ancient Anguish and 3 Kingdoms.

Ancient Anguish is a medievil based mud and has been around since 1991. Its has hardcore coding standards and probably is the best RPG type game I have ever played.

3 Kingdoms is another old mud that is very well coded. While its not up to Ancient Anguish standards it allows more creativity because it has 3 realms. Chaos (pretty much anything goes, Simpsons, Waldo, nonsenseical things), fantasy(you know what RPG's are usually based on) , and science (cyborgs, earth future/present)It has TONS of quests.

www.anguish.org

www.3k.org

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quests do not make a MUD, playerkilling does. Once a quest has been done by one person, either a) everybody knows about it, or b) the MUD has a rift in its players that the information doesn't travel across. The second option is bad, because it means there're politics issues with the players that will eventually drive people away.

Re:Why?

[FinalMidnight]

Write one? Been there. Done that. With a good friend of mine back when MUDing was the thing I liked to do most in the world. I'd give you the source code if you were particularly keen. It had some neat features. Obviously not as developed as Zmud. Thats been through a few more revisions. Cheers.

Re:Why?

[toriver]

Why is anything on the frontpage? Why does Slashdot need a news section? As you point out, anything can be found using Google or whatever. And there are plenty of dicussion forums if you want them.

Sheesh.

Re:Why?

[Balinares]

Hello br00tus,

I'm working on exactly what you're looking for at the moment. I had the same problem as you, and so started to write a client for my own Unixy use. I expect it to go into beta within the coming month, hopefully, at which point I'll post the project to Freshmeat.

Right now it supports most ANSI color codes (and if you could point me to a good reliable source for all the codes in use I'd be much grateful), SSL, telnet negotiations, and I've made room for MCCP, MCP and MXP so that when I can get around to coding them it doesn't take too much time.

If you're still interested by the time the project makes it to Freshmeat, please feel free to get in touch with me. My FM username is the same as here on Slashdot, so no worries about missing the project in question when I post it. Since I'm more of a MUSH person myself, and you seem to be more knowledgeable about MUDs, your input, feature requests, etc, would be VERY valuable. Thank you.

Re:Why?

[crazymennonite]

Anguish rules :P

Re:Why?

[lordmage]

Muds are obsolete? only if you have no imagination. I dislike EQ and others compared to certain MUDs as to the amazing ability of the best monitor in the world: Imagination.

MCL for Windows.
ZMud Free for Windows (They have a free version up)
mushclient for Windows
gmud for windows

You can get help from others when you use these.

Re:Why?

[lordmage]

Slight mistake.

I meant MCL for Linux.

Mud Clients are a dime a dozen. Those listed are the most used.

Tintin++ and tinyfugue are archiac versions of what MCL is.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the world would a normal user not already have Cygwin?

> that doesn't need a normal user to download Cygwin,

Re:Why?

[Jouster]

That's easy.

man 5 terminfo

Having coded CoolMUD, which does some really nasty things with Telnet negotiation and terminal control, I can assure you that you don't want to support the full range of capabilities of all terminals. It will drive you mad.

Best of luck! But you should probably take a second look at zMUD; hell, zMapper alone is worth the price of admission to the zMUD world, as if the scripting language weren't reason enough to use it.

Jouster

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

>So now I'm asking as a last resort, before I possibly even begin writing one (that is beer and speech free) myself, if I have the spare time to do such a thing

Haha. I had you pegged in post 7082156.

For what it's worth from an AC, I say go for it. You'll learn a lot, especially if you bother trying to add your own scripting language.

Re:Why?

[Jouster]

The zMUD beer is cheap, and it comes complete with the brewer and all of his assistants waiting to help you out of the bar after a long night. Don't get me wrong--I'm an associate member of GNU, and I use Linux on almost all of my boxes. But zMUD is, bar none, the best MUDding software out there. And Zugg (who works with his wife, Chiara) is the most dedicated developer I've ever met.

Oh, and for extra points--he's switching over to PHP and MySQL soon. He's a nuclear physicist. He used Perl back before it was cool. He wrote his own copy-protection engine, which was actually pretty effective. His geek cred is pretty far up there; isn't it worth taking a second look to see what he's really offering?

Don't accept the RMS screw-the-business-case mentality. This is a single developer, not a monolithic corporation, deriving his living from just a few software products he writes by himself, and the end product is far cheaper than the cost of developing a replacement. On a personal level, it's worth supporting him, and as a business case, you really can't justify producing an alternative on any cost basis that I've ever heard of.

Just something to think about,
Jouster

Re:Why?

[Balinares]

Three thousand two hundred and thirty six thanks to you for the contribution! I'm peeking into the terminfo man page right now. I do not intend to make the project able to emulate any terminal in existence, note; I just want to make sure that it'll behave correctly on any MUD/MUSH/MUCK/MOO you'll throw it at, even if it doesn't make use of all of the server's potential. Which is already no small task...

Right now, it behaves (silently) as a pure vanilla telnet Virtual Terminal, and only expands its capabilities as requested by the server, because only MUD-type games assume telnet capabilities -- none of the others act as telnet peers whatsoever, none that I know of anyway. And since the project is somewhat MUSH-oriented, MUD-type extensions are not a central concern at the moment (which is why input from experienced MUDers is much appreciated, BTW).

Note, zMUD doesn't run on Linux, so the second look I'll definitely take at it will, hopefully, suggest some good ideas, but in itself I fear it will still remain useless for my own use. That, and, of course, zMUD is way too MUD-oriented to be practical on MUSH/MUCK/MOOs, and they're the primary target of the project. Hopefully, if I design the code right, it should be possible to eventually add any MUD-oriented feature that one could wish for without interfering with the MUSH functionality. We'll see.

Thanks again for your answer!

Other programs..

[Anonymous Coward]

Another that comes to mind is SimpleMu, GUI based M** client. Not bad, licence req. for the extra goodies, but useful in it's own right.

That being said, gimme raw 'net when coding MUF for the sheer grottiness of it all.. (1 1 + -1 -1 otell ...)

Um... Everquest?

[Mustang Matt]

It seems like if you want 3D you should play a game. If you want text, you should hop on a mud.

Re:How to tell if you are a linux fanatic.

[Anonymous Coward]

A microsoft employee paid to conduct psychological warfare on the Linux community?

Clients?

[God of Lemmings]

Darn newbies! In my day we had to drive 75 miles to the nearest university to use telnet on vt320 and vt52 dumb terminals and send color codes by typing out the control strings manually, and that was only if you were lucky enough to get one of the 6 terminals in the whole school that would be free for use, and we were lucky to have them!
One you got on, then you had to sit and wait hours until a slot became free for you to log on, and then the lag was so bad that you had to wait 5 minutes between commands for the other side to catch up, and that was the way we liked it!

Re:Clients?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Darn newbies! In my day we had to drive 75 miles to the nearest university to use telnet on vt320 and vt52 dumb terminals and send color codes by typing out the control strings

Hah, I am reading this discussion from a vt320 terminal ;P

Having been arch on Kobra MUD (http://kobra.et.tudelft.nl/ or telnet to kobra.et.tudelft.nl port 23) for about 5 years, and currently busy developing my own mudlib (DGD based, but aimed at running the large lpmud based codebase that exists) I have also tried many mud clients..

TinyFugue seems to be what suits my needs best, it is usable from a text only console (or the vt320 terminal I am on now), is fast, doesn't get in the way for online coding (yes, I still do use ed at times for quick fixes etc) and.. I can install it on my server, use ssh (putty) to logon to it from anywhere, and have my own set of macros/scripts available for playing.

It is rather relavant if you are going to use the client purely for playing, or if you intend to do online coding with it as well. If the later is the case, you should look at a client that allows disabling all triggers and keybinds with a single command, and allows redifining whatever character it uses to recognize input meant for the client and not the mud (the / character in TinyFugue by default)

Another thing to keep in mnd is how much ansi/vt100 compatibility a mud requires.

Many mudclients like TinyFugue, zmud etc, do not support things like clear screen or 'home' control characters, and as a result those muds that try to present a 'fullscreen' text interface will not work well with such clients. Luckily (??) such muds are rare, and in virtually all cases, such features are optional.

(The mudlib I am currently developing supports this to be able to present a 'fullscreen' interface for playerbase administration and similar tasks, but does not use it in any gameplay related things. you can take a sneak preview of what I'm building by telnetting to 62.166.9.189 port 2000)

Re:Clients?

[LucidityZero]

...and send color codes by typing out the control strings manually...

WHOA!! FLASHBACK!! Thanks! Hadn't thought about that in years! :)

My opinions.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have toyed with a number of clients, but one thing that often gets overlooked is how compliant they are with VT100, extended ASCII, etc... You should check that out when trying out your mudclient.

I myself use mudmaster for the mud I play (www.necromium.com) but it's got many flaws. My version is a bit older, but it sometimes fails to do bold-gray correctly and some of the screen codes (like moving cursor) is screwy/missing.

Zmud is ok, although make sure to switch to a standard IBM fontset and make sure that your "normal" color isn't something wierd like green. Oddly enough, when MUDs send certain ASCII characters to Zmud they don't show up. I used to have a list, but I remember mud coders complaining about the missing character (I think they were arrows of some sort).

tintin is still a favorite but quite old. Beware the old trigger exploits that let people trick you into typing things you never inteded. Newer versions fix this with ways to set your triggers better.

SecureCRT/CRT is not a free client and not a mud client, but it's got the best VT100 support I have yet found. In fact, it tends to follow the specifications for VTxxx better than any mudclient. In fact, if you can you should avoid mudclients. Some muds let you set actions, aliases, and triggers for you. Most have string completion/name completion and other key goodies. If you really do need fancy stuff many clients like SecureCRT can do scripts and such for you.

Anyway, that's just a few of my thoughts.

MUSHclient

[FroBugg]

I only do a tiny bit of MUDing, and spend most of my time on MUSHes and MUXes, but I've had wonderful experiences with MUSHclient http://www.mushclient.com

Re:MUSHclient

[kcurtis]

As a side note, though you can use MUSHclient for free, you have to wait about 30 seconds when you start it up.

Alternatively, you could cough up $20 to avoid the wait. Plus, the $20 goes to someone who has developed a kick ass alternative to zmud and gmud.

MUSHclient supports tons of scripting, triggers, aliases, macros, etc. I highly recommend it.

SimpleMU for Win, TinyFugue for Unix

[mstrcat]

SimpleMu can be found at: http://simplemu.onlineroleplay.com/ It has a free version and a paid version, with only marginal differences between the two. I used the free version for two months to make sure I liked the program enough to buy it, but after that had no problem paying the license. One of it's pluses is that the keyboard shortcuts are similar to TinyFugue. TinyFugue has been a unix standard for ages, availible at many locations. I've yet to find a good KDE/Gnome port, but the good old text version is more than adequate.

What was that game?

[spudchucker]

The one where you had to "eat mushroom".

Re:What was that game?

[Anonymous Coward]

I distinctly remember having to eat mushrooms before I screwed your mom... and it was certainly no game..

Re:What was that game?

[Graspee_Leemoor]

In MIST, which was kind of an update to the original MUD you had to "eat mushroom" to get to the location "Cloud Nine".

graspee

that's why...

[Mulletproof]

Because slashdot feels the need to prove their oldskool worth enough to ignore the other "searchforityourselfyoufreakinidiot" alternatives, I suspect.

Kmuddy

[Anonymous Coward]

Kmuddy (for KDE) is one I like.

What's a MUD?

[pair-a-noyd]

I've heard of them.
With all the slashdotting and urpmi'ing I just don't get around as much as I used to..

Re:What's a MUD?

[pdbogen]

Technically? Multi-User-Dungeon.. Text-based Everquest. (Don't flame me)

More complete answer? It varies. As someone above pointed out, they range from Role-Play Only (I.e., no code.. glorified (if even that) chat room) to Hack-N'-Slash (Everquest without pretty pictures). Also, a lot of times the word "MUD" includes MUSHs (Multi-User-Shared-Hallucination/-Simulated-Hell), MUXs (Multi-User-eXperience, IIRC), MUSEs (Multi-User-Simulated-Environment), and MAREs (Of which there is precisely one, but I don't remember what it stands for). There are only a handful of MUSEs still around, and I am fairly certain they are all social and/or educational, and sparsely popualted. Of MUSHs there are two predominant varities, Tiny- and PennMUSH. Tiny is more geared towards pen-and-paper-type RPGs converted to electronic form, whereas Penn happens to be slightly more suitable for space-based sci-fi games. Much like the Republican and Democratic parties, there is really very little difference to the two. For TinyMUX, the only one worth using is Brazil's MUX 2.0, and it only stands out if you're using it to play a World of Darkness game (Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, etc.). MUDs vary, and I am not very educated on them. Generally they're a lot more like videogames than their four-letter counterparts. There's also MOOs, which are sort of like the bastard child of a MUD and a MUSH. I don't know much about this last type, either.

Re:What's a MUD?

[pair-a-noyd]

Very informative, thanks.
Sounds like many years ago we played a text based star trek game over 300buad modems, it was like two people playing battleship.

20 something years ago it was fun..

Re:What's a MUD?

[transient]

Don't forget MUCKs. Speaking of which, any former Qwesters around?

Re:What's a MUD?

[arkham6]

Yeah, used to be in the weehawken CC before they closed it.

Re:What's a MUD?

[Daemonic]

The ORIGINAL MUD is still available online.

Best accessed with telnet, of course.

Re:What's a MUD?

[kale77in]

If a video game is like a movie, a MUD is like a novel: The video card, as the saying goes, is your imagination. This means there are fewer limits to the world (and the self) you can describe: words are cheap, while polygons require an expert to arrange them.

For people who are more writers than gamers, MUDs are unlikely to ever be surpassed as an immersive medium for self-expression: you get a body to express yourself with, but everything is still expressed in text...

JMC

[Anonymous Coward]

JMC is probably the greatest free mud client for win32 i've ever used. Its got everything a person could need. If you need it to run under *nix, it has no problems running under wine.

Interesting..

[Fizzl]

I just started gobbling a MudClient together just last week.

Peek at it here.

No. It's not playable. Just wanted to show it to my friends that I got the ansi colour scheme more or less done :P

...

In fact. The escape sequence parser sucks, as does the whole idea how I parse it through down onto the screen.
Already re-coded most of it.

TinTin++

[melkor]

tt++ is the way to go for a *nix client.

You really should be using it to play on my mud, which has been around for the last 9 years. It's at mud.theuw.net 5000

Since I've got a low usernumber you clearly should listen to my advice :)

This is about the dumbest slashdot news item ever.

[Photar]

I mean seriously, the guy asks a stupid question, the editor even seems to think theres a simple answer. I mean come on people.

Unless of couse the whole thing is just some kind of in joke then of course I feel like a complete idiot for not getting it.

Moderator points should work on the articles themselves not just the comments.

hmm...

[fredopalus]

Hey, man. PuTTY works good enough for me.

Telnet

[shichi_no_bushi]

telnet! or even better! a serial connection right to the server.

oldskool

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use TELIX to dial into Iglu and then run tintin++ from the main prompt.

Honestly tho, I use zmud. I paid for it waaaay back in the day and upgrades are still free. Zmud far outstrips every other client I have tried.

Shamelss Plug: www.sojourn3.org

Re:Oh cool, I always love these threads....

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day, my (8-bit) computer didn't even have a modem, so I couldn't MUD. Instead we played D&D. And we liked it. ;)

in my day

[SHEENmaster]

we hooked a 300 baud modem to a dumb terminal and dialed into a server with the games we wanted to play, all the while laughing at those chumps that paid for their own computers.

Granted "my day" wasn't that long ago and everyone else have 486 and pentium desktops that cost less than my transcontinental phone bills in my pursuit of 20 y/o MUDs...

Re:in my day

[GenericJoe]

And then there was the radio shack guy who tried to sell me terminal emulation software for my vt100.

and setting the more off on all those MUDs because I read faster than 2400 baud...

Permanent Death and Dark Sun

[Shihar]

I have a zMUD version from 1996. I swear it is still out there somewhere. Search around for it. It is pretty powerful, pretty stable, and free. I do not suggest the newer zMUDs unless you plan on doing some hardcore mudding though.

On the MUD I play we actually recently had a thread on MUD clients. They must have listed off each client out there and why they liked it. You can see the thread here http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=47 33

There are a lot of MUDs out there. I think people miss out on the best ones though. There are a lot of EverQuest style MUDs where you just run around hacking and slashing. There are also a lot of MUDs with strict role playing and no code. That is play acting. The best compromise in my opinion are the RPI (role playing intensive) permanent death MUDs. Permanent death in my mind sets the RPIs out ahead of all the other MUDs out there. Permanent death combined with strict RP and a slick as hell code is just a kill combination that, in my mind, can not be beat. There are two MUDs like this. On is ArmageddonMUD http://www.armageddon.org/ and HarshlandsMUD http://www.harshlands.net/. I have not played on Harshlands MUD, but I highly suggest Armageddon MUD.

Armageddon MUD is roughly based off Dark Sun. The world is brutal, the RP is intense, death is permanent (no resurrections of any kind), and the environment can easily kill you. There are no newbie zones or stock anything. If you like role playing, a brutal desert environment, or Dark Sun, then this is the MUD for you. It has a very active community, high player numbers, and a great message board. If you are looking for a full RP permanent death MUD, nothing beats it.

http://www.armageddon.org/

To filter Ask Slashdot articles...

[st0rmshadow]

Preferences > Homepage > Exclude Section > Check 'Ask Slashdot'

Mud Clients

[DrackenFireBreather]

Being that I've played a few MUD's over the years, I've found that nothing like a Linux/Unix shell account and (T)he k(I)cki(N) (T)ickin d(I)kumud clie(N)t (TinTin++)can beat the features and quickness for those wacky text base games. Although Zuggsoft's was a good client when I happened to use in on occasion (Back when Win 3.11 was still predominantly used on school computers), it just doesn't beat the speed of TinTin. On the other hand, I've heard that WinTin is a good Win32 client based on the TinTin code, though havn't used it myself, if it's anything like it's cousin, I'm sure it's a decent client (even if it is on a windoze platform). All in all, it depends on what kind of client you're looking for, something with lots of eye candy, use the windows ones, but for the pure speed and transparentness, use TinTin hands down.

Re:This is about the dumbest slashdot news item ev

[MavEtJu]

the dumbest slashdot news

It's "Ask Slashdot", not a news item.

Do you want to play again? [N/n]

The only client I'll use

[Kindgott]

I've been on MUDs since around 1997 and experimented with a few different Windows and *nix clients, and the only thing I use anymore is tintin++ on *nix or wintin95 on any wintendo boxes I may be using at the time. They're very low on the "bells and whistles", as the windows port is basically the terminal version with a simple interface added, and the *nix version is meant for use in terminal windows.
They're not low on features, as you can easily add triggers, variables, aliases, and such.

Here's a link for each client:
tintin++
Wintin95

Hope you find them to your liking.

The Open-Source Mud Client: PUEBLO!!!

[Psyonic]

I quickly checked over the comments so far, and I am utterly amazed that no one mentioned Pueblo. I have played the MUD Abandoned Codex for years, and I have had great success using Pueblo. It supports TinTin, and has many cool features. I suggest you all check it out, and keep up the MUD'ing!

Re:The Open-Source Mud Client: PUEBLO!!!

[saffista]

Pueblo was my favorite client 10 years ago and I was disappointed when chaco stopped supporting it after Win98. Now I see that it is available as an Open Source project. Good deal!

Try Simple MU

[katarn]

Trhy Simple MU
http://simplemu.onlineroleplay.com/

It even takes into account some of the "TF-isms" for those of us who are old Tiny Fugue users.

MUDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please tell me, what is a MUD?

Re:MUDs?

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"Can someone please tell me, what is a MUD?"

Wow! That's an excellent question! I suggest you submit it as a story for "Ask Slashdot"!

graspee

KBtin

[Anonymous Coward]

Try KBtin, created by a guy from The Two Towers

powwow

[psocccer]

I use powwow which is a derivative of tintin I believe. It supports aliases, actions, and all the other good stuff, but I found it too limiting without using external scripts to handle database lookups, so I embedded a perl interpreter in it and I maintain a branch based on powwow 1.2.5 called perlwow, which also supports using any perl modules installed allowing you to pretty much script anything that you can do in perl.

Re:powwow

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it is derivative of cancan.

Re:powwow

[psocccer]

I knew it was somethingsomething, heh. Another good list of various clients, is here . It lists most Win32 and *nix based clients, along with ratings, descriptions, and links. I know a lot will recommend zMUD, but if I ran Win32, I think I'd try JMC which is no cost and scriptable in JScript, VBScript, tcl, perl, and supposedly others.

Re:powwow

[Avenel]

I also use powwow (and some of your MUME scripts too ehehe)

Re:powwow

[Anonymous Coward]

powwow was derived from cancan and nothing else. cancan was inspired by tintin (tintin... tincan... cancan) but was written from scratch by Mattias Engedegard!

Yeah, for about a minute

[geekoid]

Went from 300 to 1200, I remember it like it was yesterday:
Look at this new 1200 baud modem we got.
Cool.
~hooks it up~

Wow its fast
yep
~1 minute later~
I can't wait for one that goes faster.
Me too.

Re:Yeah, for about a minute

[Anonymous Coward]

The one negative I noticed about that upgrade was that I could read at 300 baud. At 1200, I had to start paging.

Tintin98

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally used tintin98 for my *NIX shell client. It's basically an improved tintin++ with a split screen for commands. I'm not sure if it's still being updated, but I know you can download it here.

powwow

[Anonymous Coward]

I strongly recommend powwow (powtty is its windows cousin). No frills, and hands down still the best *nix client out there. Made originally for MUD MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth), powwow, a UNIX client based on cancan, is available from: this page. powtty is available from this page. All these clients are free and open source.

(g)MUDix or Crystal

[Leo il Leone]

I'm a big fan of minimalist mud clients (at least in appearances. More room for text) so I've gone with gMUDix (or MUDix for the console version). It has all the trigger/timers/paths/macros/alias/etc features. Occasionally I use Crystal as it's even more minimalist and reaches the goal of, basically, a telnet client with a command input line (so the scrolling text doesn't make you unable to see what you're typing). They're both very good and very free. Depends on what you need.

Pueblo Updated!

[arcadesdude]

The newer, less buggy version of Pueblo :) http://pueblo.sourceforge.net/pueblo/

gnome_mud

[Ashcrow]

Check out gnome_mud for Linux/Unix. It's very similar to gMud.

Re:gnome_mud

[Oskuro]

For those of you who care, the bugs in the connection wizard in the 0.10.x have been solved in CVS, and 0.10.3 should be released sometime soon.

For Windows...

[tellurian]

For Windows there is SimpleMU

What a coincidence..

[jjhlk]

After reading User Friendly all weekend, I decided it would be fun to find some text-based game to play. I decided on a mud.

I've been searching for the past hour or so.
My criteria are:
Powerful Scripting (perl or python)
Simple Scripting (triggers, aliases, etc.)
Text Based (or mostly so, just a simple layout)

I think I'm going to try using Lyntin. Either that, or TinTin++ or maybe TinyFugue (I liked it except for input - my input was always broken up by incoming mud text). Lyntin looks really nice, though.

I use VI!

[raehl]

You insensitive clod!

Re:I use VI!

[Professor Bluebird]

Though I wonder if anyone actually used Emacs to connect.

Re:I use VI!

[scrytch]

> Though I wonder if anyone actually used Emacs to connect.

Indeed. mud.el and rmoo.el (no links, you know how to google). Mud clients are simpler than IRC clients -- there's no protocol to speak of on most MUDs, and MCP is reasonably simple -- that it's a basic programming exercise to write one in [insert your favorite language here].

Personally I'm a fan of tkmoo (google for it), which is specialized for MOOs and supports the local editing conventions, as well as other goodies like the MacMOOSE browser/editor. It's kind of quirky, and probably not the most well-suited for combat muds unless you like writing your own trigger library from scratch, but since you can script it with tcl, it's really a good deal more friendly to program than tf and its weird macro interpreter.

Re:I use VI!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is your own fault. It's people like you who make life complicated. Always resisting change, dang burnit.

maybe before that question...

[penguin7of9]

one should ask the question of "what's a good MUD"? I'm not trying to be cynical here, I just have never found a MUD that I wanted to spend any significant amount of time in (well, unless you consider /. a MUD).

Re:maybe before that question...

[Saib0t]

Well, to put the obvious directly out of the door, I'm a coder on the mud I'm going to talk about.

That said, Hesperia has been started because we (the admins) were getting tired of always the same rehashing of standard stuff, the same abusive/moronic/powerhungry so-called immortals, the lack of challenge, ....

We started a brand new mud in 1996, took 2 years to get it past the beta stage and it's been online for 5 years now.
Unlike your average MUD, we spent a considerable amount of time paying attention to world details, every "area" is unique, all mobiles and objects have unique description worth reading and you'll find reference to plots of an area in other areas. There are plots that you will follow throughout hundreds of hours.

Not only do we have a good background storyline, we also have quite a number of unique features, ranging from original spells & skills to coaching lines, sailing, gambling, automatic quests, mutations at high level (it's really fun to sprout an extra head or a tail, or become afflicted with "uncontrollable flatulence"). We have made the game a challenge, so it's not necessarily for your average mindless hack&slasher.

But most importantly, you won't find moronic imms, we REALLY listen to what players feel and want, we spend countless hours working on the user input and I think it shows, we get very positive user feedback from them. The price to making it nice for people to feel at home and have a challenge is that most I-want-it-all-easy types of players stay away from Hesperia, but as a result, people you find there are friendly and knowledgeable, most are willing to give a hand because they have been through the hard parts too.

I know I'm not objective, but I think ours is a good mud. At least it's one I still enjoy playing (as do others) and paying for...

Re:maybe before that question...

[beowulfcluster]

or become afflicted with "uncontrollable flatulence"

I play games to forget about real life, you insensitive clod!

Telix Memories

[__aanonl8035]

I remember when I first found out about muds. My internet connection was through a BBS and so I remember setting up macros and triggers through my BBS communication program (Telix). I lost a lot of time to that first mud (Isengard) Later on, I got a shell account and had TinyFugue. I remember the author of TF said he would never do a windows port because of the development tools and insufficiencies of the OS and that got me interested in UNIX. Then I heard about this automap feature in a program called Zmud and I was hooked. It was a long time ago now. I feel like I have gotten over playing in a fake world where you rewards can be taken away at a whim (though is that so different then the real world?)

To try and stay on topic, Tiny Fugue is now on windows. I would go with that, but man that automap feature of Zmud was so handy. You just clicked on a room on the map, and it would automatically move you around at light speed... go E, go W, go D

If you like MUDs

[OmnipotentEntity]

Try Medievia.

I can't believe this wasn't posted yet...

___________

Re:If you like MUDs

[Drey]

I think you meant Mercthievia. Hope that helps.

Obviously, the best MUD client is...

[tmark]

Emacs !!

Client

[Sandnor]

Well, if you are stuck in win32 land like some of us (Don't ask) then I would recommend Simplemu. It's not exactly free but the eval client will run a good long while with just basic features (No spell check in basic). I wouldn't nessicarily call it a mud client so much as a mush client, but for what the average player on a mud does, it should more then suffice. Binding your fav commands to a few f-keys should help fight the grey ooze. The programmer's put a lot of efort into making it a nice client, so check it out.

*Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been associated with Simplemu or Onlineroleplay.com. I just really like the client.

Try Moops or GMoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Moops was/is a nice client for Windows, available at http://www.beryllium.net/moops-en/download.php.

GMoo is a client for Linux, available at http://www.gmoo.net/.

I both like them very much as MUD clients.

go here for text games!

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, want text gaming at its best?? point ur telnet clients to telnet://bbs.hydrochronic.net or goto http://www.hydrochronic.net for more info :)

MUDs still rock

[extremecs]

And they don't charge you $19.95 a month to look at crappy graphics either. You want real RPGing? The mother of MUD links: http://www.mudconnect.com The granddaddy of free MUDs: http://www.game.org Very cool free MUD clients for winblows: http://rhoneware.com/RoAClient -and- http://pueblo.sourceforge.net/pueblo/index.php Nifty clients for *nix, besides Tiny? http://www.kmud.de/ -and- http://xpertmud.sourceforge.net/features.html Most wicked cool fantasy MUD, IMHO? Small user base but awesome code: http://atp.pedia.szote.u-szeged.hu/~atp/index.html #

yes, learn how to use apostrophes properly

[Anonymous Coward]

you git.

Thoughts On Running a MUD Server

[rimu guy]

My first experience of the 'Internet' was a MUD on a 300 baud modem. It often took an hour or so of trying before I could connect to the local ISP (city council actually). And they eventually banned users in the MUDs since they were too bandwidth intensive. Can you imagine?!? 300 baud!

Anyway I happen to have a Linux Virtual Private Server kicking around with more bandwidth than I know how to use (and root access of course). And am thinking about what better use for it than hosting a MUD server.

Can anyone recommend a good MUD server? And is there such a thing as a pre-populated ready to go world?

Re:Thoughts On Running a MUD Server

[Anonymous Coward]

SMAUG

http://www.game.org/smaug/

Realms of Despair rocks. Of course now it'll be overwhelmed and crushed into nonexistence by MUD-happy slashdotters. Bummers.

Re:Thoughts On Running a MUD Server

[Aractor]

Personally when I spent some time kicking around and toying with the idea of running a mud, I used the ROM codebase or the 1stMUD codebase.

Both have a decent set of ingame building tools, and both can be played on right from setup...Also stable as hell.

Re:Thoughts On Running a MUD Server

[NiteTrip]

Why host a mud, me and some friends hve been building and coding our own mud based on circle code, drop by. Its not playable yet but we've been working since january and could use some extra builders/coders! sorinmud.dynu.com port 4000

Re:Thoughts On Running a MUD Server

[Anonymous Coward]

drop me a mail at bart at bartsplace.net, I may have something you are interested in. It will not allow you to run a mud instantly, but it will allow you to run one of the many fully developed game libraries for lpmud on a more modern, and technicallly superior system.

Re:Thoughts On Running a MUD Server

[Anonymous Coward]

A REALLY good NEW MUD Server written in JAVA - run it on ANY machine. CoffeeMUD (just do a google search!). It has a built in WEB EDITOR - no more telnet editing needed! Very easy to administrate!!!!! Plus, it comes with capabilities to IMPORT most other MUD Codebase areas, AND it comes with a FULL pre-populated MUD world!!!!

MMC!

[Anonymous Coward]

I used MMC the entire time I was addicted to a MUD. It's perl based, and pretty darn nice.

http://haali.cs.msu.ru/mmc/

EQ database?

[bucky0]

I was wondering if people had suggestions for a mud client that could be modified to have a Equipment Database. The mud I play on (hexonyx.com:7777) involves swapping EQ in and out, and the current client I have doesn't have a built in way to modify it, or a way to script it.

any suggestions?

Holy teletypes, Batmat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, TinyFugue?

Indeed! This is the finest MUD client you can't buy. It does scripts/triggers/regexp/you-name-it. It beats the hell out of TinTin++ for almost anything IMNSHO.

I've never agreed with Michael on anything before, so this is new to me.

Java Mud client

[Anonymous Coward]

A good one written in java and extensible
http://www.buzztroll.com/software/btmu d/

Grue's beware!

[MikeFM]

Careful who you try to eat - some women slap really hard.

I agree!

[acidtripp101]

I just lost my gentoo install due to a poorly configured kernel (oops!) so I decided to go back to my old standby of FreeBSD.

This meant, however, that I also lost my favorite mud client (kmuddy... if you use linux, it is a very decent mud client) due to the fact that there isn't a fBSD port that I could find. After looking around, I decided to install gnome-mud.

It is great! Everything I hated about kmuddy is fixed under gnome-mud. Works GREAT!

Try Real Life.

[raehl]

Comes in 3D with integrated surround sound and both voice and tactile command recognition.

Re:Try Real Life.

[Snoopy77]

Try real life. Comes in 3D with integrated surround sound and both voice and tactile command recognition.

Whoa, where can I donwload it?

Re:Try Real Life.

[j3110]

Do you really want geeks showing up on your doorstep in full chainmail, a sword, and the amulet of Yendor? I think you should very much encourage them to keep their fantasies stored as harmless electronic and magnetic charges far, far away from this "Real Life". I mean, have you ever actually been to a LARP (Live-Action Role Playing)? It's definately not pretty. I know a guy who ended up getting stitches in a hospital. I guess he thought he had more hit points than he actually did. That's ok, he eventually did end up back at town center, and all his digits were intact and functional after seeing the healer. I think he gave up adventuring though, and he now works answering other adventurers' questions about these magical devices that help in the creation of scrolls at Lexmark.

Now, do you really want us role playing geeks to invade real life? You know these people that role play are usually the ones that right your software. Next time you check your X11 log for the last error to see if it's complaining about the mouse or display modes and all you see is runes, you'll learn to appreciate the fact there is a time and place for these fantasies. I personally don't want to have to describe my problem on the mailing lists using Quenya.

Re:Try Real Life.

[Jugalator]

If you can't see the mental picture j3110 is trying to give you, this picture might help. :-)

Re:Try Real Life.

[newr00tic]

Comes in 3D with integrated surround sound and both voice and tactile command recognition.

Yes,Yes,Yes.. Still, the real question remains:

..does it come in pink?

Re:Try Real Life.

[AresTheImpaler]

Yes,Yes,Yes.. Still, the real question remains:
..does it come in pink?

no, the real question is.. does it run linux?

Re:Try Real Life.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Real Life, but some script kiddie named "Neo" keeps fucking with the server.

And the last LAN party I went to, half the systems were infected with Agent Smith virus.

Real Life 1.0 was actually pretty good, but some of the noobs couldn't handle it, so the Architect nerfed it.

I'm not giving up, though. I heard that the server is going to get upgraded any day now with bitching new features, maybe even tonight or tomorrow!

Re:Try Real Life.

[skinfitz]

I still find it a little laggy.

Re:Try Real Life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and I'm low on hit points. Can anyone spare a cure?

Re:Try Real Life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but everyone else is a twink, and the immortals never respond.

Plus, they haven't implemented respawn yet. Bastards.

Re:Try Real Life.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know these people that role play are usually the ones that right your software.

This is funny on so many levels.

Re:Try Real Life.

[TiggsPanther]

Next time you check your X11 log for the last error to see if it's complaining about the mouse or display modes and all you see is runes...

Sounds like a standard error log to me. ;)

Re:Try Real Life.

[mo^]

Anyone out there wanna try and debug my "get laid" macro. Still having trouble with the "Slap" and "drink over head" errors. Not to mention the unbearable timeouts

Re:Try Real Life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, tried Real Life, found it was vastly overrated. Once thay have a decent config program in place for it, it might work, but at the moment you have to spend to much time trying to get it configured right

Re:Try Real Life.

[absolut_kurant]

Great graphics, non-existant plot.

Re:Try Real Life.

[leighfwarren]

you can literally see the BO.

Re:Try Real Life.

[zoeblade]

Comes in 3D with integrated surround sound and both voice and tactile command recognition.

You managed to get real life to execute a command via voice recognition? How'd you manage that? I can only use the voice recognition to talk to other people.

Re:Try Real Life.

[(trb001)]

...and both voice and tactile command recognition

Apparently, you haven' been married very long...

--trb

Re:Try Real Life.

[mdielmann]

Reinc takes forever...and the character selection phase is buggy as hell.

Re:Try Real Life.

[sharkey]

Do you really want geeks showing up on your doorstep in full chainmail, a sword, and the amulet of Yendor?

Why not? Remember, those who live by the sword got shot by those who don't.

Re:Try Real Life.

[Pentalon]

You know these people that role play are usually the ones that right your software.

Right my software? If only, but it's still fantasy.

Re:Try Real Life.

[nycsubway]

Sometimes they can't tell the difference between the computer world and the real world. Or as happened in The Blue Nowhere by Jeffrey Deaver. Very interesting, and very scary.

I don't know how true the book is, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to have some nut running around who thinks he's getting points for killing people. There are certainly plenty of nuts out there without giving some of them ideas of how to do it.

Re:Try Real Life.

[j3110]

Sorry, I've been writting(not righting) code for days straight, and haven't used English in a while. That part of my brain is choked for blood flow.

Resolving TinyFugue Compile Problem on RedHat

[rimu guy]

FWIW, if you're building TinyFugue on RH8/9, you'll get a compile error inside the openssl code. Just bung #define OPENSSL_NO_KRB5 1 into src/config.h

-P
MUD Server Hosting Anyone?

Text Adventure...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is an oxymoron.

GMudix

[|<amikaze]

A friend of mine swears by Gmud32 for windows, and Gmudix for linux. They seem to have pretty powerful scripting capabilities.

Re:GMudix

[jak163]

I second gmud for Winblows and I would suggest kmud for Linux.

BuzzTroll Mud

[grid_guy]

A cool Mud client written in Java http://www.buzztroll.com/software/btmud/

TinyFugue + Screen

[Spleen]

I've tryed windows clients, but I always have gone back to TinyFugue when satisfying my addiction to Leviathan (leviathan.betterbox.net 1691). The only feature that other clients offer that I have not found with TinyFugue is an automapper.

I tend to be the type of player who never likes to sign off. Since my characters age doesn't really mean anything, this is ok. I run TinyFugue in a Screen, and then I can attach from anywhere and just continue where I left off. Try that with zMud or MushClient.

wtf

[$0 31337]

This is Slashdot, not Dear Abbie. Go out and write your own damn client.

Built in Telnet Client?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just use Terminal app in OS X and run the included telnet client. Works great.

(And if anybody's looking for a great MUD, try hypercube.org port 9000)

TinyFugue

[RebelWithoutAClue]

is great, but unfortunately, a few versions ago, cygwin broke tinyfugue.

KDE Mud Client

[serps]

If it's a graphical MUD client and you're using KDE or Windows, might I suggest XPertMUD. It can be extended using Python or Perl, with multiple windows, triggers, macros and so forth.

Is that you 'AC' ?

[ErnstKompressor]

I am becoming a fan :)

Re:Is that you 'AC' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is I, scourge of the Apple threads, and G4-800 TiBook owner, but don't tell anyone--it'll be our little secret :).

~~~

RoA Client is the best I've seen

[Anonymous Coward]

For windows, that is.

Similar functionality to zMUD, but it's free. Most of the players on my (non-RoA) MUD use it now.

I personally use Tinyfugue, but then I don't actually MUD much anymore. There are better clients out there if you MUD a lot.

Re:RoA Client is the best I've seen

[Astrorunner]

indeed. Using it now. It's not as refined as, say, zmud, but once you get over some of the oddities, it's fine. Even supports compression natively.

Google knows not.

[Anm]

To all those recommending google, since when does google have a good-ometer? It gives you hints, and might even come up with a list of all MUD clients available, but usually it is the product/project pages and not reviews.

As for freshmeat and version tracker, yes they have ratings, and for that they are good place to start. But when you get to niche software like this, the best place is to ask the community surrounding the niche.

While slashdot readers do overlap, you best answers will be from more focused mailing list (or, in this case, those you meet in the MUDs). The same could be said of most Ask Slashdot questions. But, then again, if we did that, we'd never ask slashdot dot.

If you're going to reply "ask google" to every "ask slashdot", then please just edit your slashdot profile to ignore the section. We don't need your comments or your moderations.

Anm

Re:Google knows not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google returns results in large part due to what other people link to. If many people are linking to a specific website/product, it likely means they use it and like it. Asking Google does work.

Re:Google knows not.

[Anm]

Yes, I understand this. This is exactly why you get the product pages rather than the reviews.

Re:Google knows not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you need to refine what you're asking Google. Once you get your initial results back, use the '-' option to prune out companies or various things that you don't want to see. For example, way-back-when, there were tons of people that inadvertently had Winamp-generated playlists of their mp3s on the net. So if you were searching for mp3 files, it was generally a good idea to add "-playlist" to your query.

MUD Client

[Annatar2]

Speaking as someone whose been MUDing for well over 5 years now and has graduated to coding the games rather then playing them I've always liked and enjoyed Pueblo. It's a nice little client and as far as I know its still free and available at http://pueblo.mozdev.org/downloads.html
Though I'm not 100% sure if thats the newest version out there. I'd heard some guys at Sourceforge were continueing development.
I highly recommend it. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of some of the pay Clients but its good and solid, especially if you're writing code in notepad and copying it in all the time.

SELECT * FROM IDIOT_SLASHCODERS ORDER BY UID

[Anonymous Coward]

What dumbass forgot to strip sigs from metamod???? Anytime I see some fuck I hate (by their sig), I metamod them unfair for spite. CmdrTaco: "Oh let's keep this anonymous by not posting the nick. Hehehehe, I am so damn smart. LOL." Fucking cock.

Re:SELECT * FROM IDIOT_SLASHCODERS ORDER BY UID

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does it matter? You can always find the message's author if you really want to.

Re:SELECT * FROM IDIOT_SLASHCODERS ORDER BY UID

[Anonymous Coward]

It matters because the sig is always there and is blatantly obvious. It is too much trouble to load context or click on the comment # link of every post to find out who wrote it. But if I see some fuckwads sig.......

I like gmudix

[Anonymous Coward]

It add the features plain telnet misses, that's enough for me.

My client of choice :)

Damn Trolls

[Drakantus]

You try to bash a sewer troll, but you miss and tumble forward onto your face.
You dodge out of the way of a sewer troll's mistargeted kick.
43H 94V 1999X 0C [you:Perfect] [troll:Perfect] Exits:ESW>
You miss a sewer troll with your slash.
A sewer troll claws YOU extremely hard.
That Really did HURT!
26H 94V 1999X 0C [you:Fair] [troll:Perfect] Exits:ESW>
You feel ribs crack as you are kicked in the chest by a sewer troll.
A sewer troll's kick knocks you back a few feet and you fall to the ground.
A sewer troll loses its balance and tumbles to the ground.
22H 94V 1999X 0C [you:Fair] [troll:Perfect] Exits:ESW>
You miss a sewer troll with your slash.
A sewer troll claws YOU very hard.
That Really did HURT!
A sewer troll bites YOU extremely hard.
You are mortally wounded, and will die soon, if not aided.
-6H 94V 1999X 0C Exits:ESW> Someone massacres YOU with their claw.
You're dead. .....................

Re:Damn Trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

In SovietRussiaMUD YOU claw TROLL extremely hard.

PuTTY

[Caged]

While not a MUD client in of itself, I prefer to use PuTTY on the Win32 platform simply because its' light, quick and supports ANSI colours. Yes, zMUD is the primary MUD client for Win32, however I have always found zMUD to be clunky and buggy since its 3.x days.

My 5 cents

YEah I know this is either flamebait or a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it things like this make it on AskSlashdot, when things that I find more interesting [besides for the bad telnet humor] never seem to show up. Every AskSlashdot I've ever posted has been denied. Anyways, sorry for the rant and/or troll/flamebait. Night all

JMC r0x0rs my s0x0rs

[!ramirez]

Jaba MUD Client is a great client - fast, flexible, and pretty much all you could want for just about any kind of MUD, including PK.

Shameless plug time:
Everwar is quite simply the best PK mud out there. Check it out if you like alignment-based playerkilling with an emphasis on teamwork. Immortal staff is friendly and helpful, and usually online. And it works great with Jaba. See for yourself.

Zmud, and Anomaly

[MaverickUW]

If you're willing to use an old 16 bit version of Zmud, those are all free directly from the site. So yes, those are free as in beer and free as in speech.

As for games, there are quite a few popular ones out there. Sure nowhere near Everquest amounts of players. But since when is Everquest about actual RolePlay? With advances in coding, a lot today's Mu* are much closer to the tabletop RPG experience.

A great example is for anyone who has ever played Last Unicorn Games version of the Star Trek: The Next Generation Roleplaying Game. Anomaly TrekMux (their webpage), which is almost codebase started based off of this game, but with an expanded code base to support a full 24 RP scape with Several Episodes a month. The game actually has an open house coming up the 25th and 26th of October with episodes that random guests can join in with pre-made characters just for the purpose if anybody is interested.

Really, Mu* are not dead, and for those who actually understand what RP is, still won't be dead for a while.

Back in the day... x1488

[Anonymous Coward]

I used zMUD. At the time, it had some really cool automapping, alias, and trigger functions. It was free, and I was very close to buying it (once I worked up the courage to send cash through the mail). The triggers worked most of the time, and as far as I know only glitched when the data that came streaming through was blipped. The automapping barely ever worked, though probably for the same reason.

I bet it's much improved now.

On the other hand: the reason why I never paid for it was because within a couple months my parents confronted me, claiming I was addicted to what I called "the game". I was. I claimed I could quit any time, I just didn't want to. The high-rent culture didn't help the need to play daily.

I quit cold turkey. And realize now that it was not the most effective way to spend my time. You've only got one life, and no matter what you believe in, there's no justification for spending it MUDding.

Mud Client

[jaofos]

DOS:
http://www.mud-master.com
Windows:
Click the MM2000 link at above site

Linux:
MCL
perl or python scripting abilities, couldnt ask for more :)

MUD is NOT MSN-Chat (tm)!

[newr00tic]

rogue-a-likes and MUDs are very different styles of games, with MUDs being closer to chatrooms set in a fantasy world.

Man.. Don't even dare to similate MUD with chatrooms. To the parent poster (and anyone else, ocourse), I'd rather explain that MUDs are very similar to the Zork/Infocom games.

Yes, I know, it's still not quite the same, but closer than a chatroom..

Note; I had no intent to flame your post, but this is how I see it..

Re:MUD is NOT MSN-Chat (tm)!

[mercx]

> I'd rather explain that MUDs are very similar to the Zork/Infocom games

My bad, that is a much better explanation.

In my defence though, back in my college MUDing days, when camping for respawns it often reverted into a chatroom, except you could "kill the trolls" and "take it outside" :) .

Tibia

[Jugalator]

You might wish to try Tibia. It's a free MMORPG, with some extra features if you wish to pay. If you pay, you can create guilds and get your own house for example. Otherwise, you can only join guilds, and be allowed entrance on paying members houses. The game is looking something like this. Lots of creatures available for all difficulties too. They should keep you busy. The server also has quests you can take, and there are a number of separate "realms" for you to play on.

try papaya

[yaiba]

try this http://www.gtk-papaya.org

Re:try papaya

[riggwelter]

Papaya really is an excellent client (and I don't just say that cos I'm involved with it - it works the other way round...), with all sorts of features you might find useful, such as using web cache servers, so you can avoid firewalls at work, and connection keep-alive facilities, so you can leave yourself on all night to improve your connect times (gawd, I'm sad...)

It has a plugin infrastructure, and comes with a large set of base plugins, and a test plugin to aid third party plugin writers is also available, the base plugins include support for the MudFTP protocol, and the Turf protocol.

And it's available for Linux (pre-built for SuSE, or source), FreeBSD (it's in ports, although apparently that version's quite old), and for Windows.

So, check it out!

ALClient

[404notfound]

The Ashavar's Legacy client works pretty well -- small, packed with all the essential features, and not much else. The creator is pretty receptive to new ideas as well: two things I suggested got into the client within weeks.

Re:How to tell if you are a linux fanatic.

[Anonymous Coward]

and you sir, are a hell bound heretic! turn or burn.

Re:How to tell if you are a linux fanatic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, who would waste his time making paintings? Who would waste his time making songs? Who would waste his time making free software?

The two best I've seen..

[Favonius]

are Mud-master and Zmud. I personally use Mudmaster to play Necromium (www.necromium.com). Mud-master is much better in my opinion because it's free =)

SimpleMU & Savitar

[Bilby]

I tried a few, but have currently resorted to just using SimpleMU. Perhaps this is because I MOO, rather than MUD, so I don't need much beyond a semi-decent telnet client. But it works ok, for what it does. I use Savitar on the the Mac, which is also simple but effective.

However, I guess most people would be after extra functionality.

That's nothing...

[Argyle]

Back in my day, I used to dial up the school mainframe with a 110 baud acoustically coupled modem with a teletype.

"clackety, clackety, clack" for hours on end.

Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[peripatetic_bum]

this isn't as simple to google and I would like to hear your reponses.

Thanks!

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually use zMUD, which has a free(old) version, though the new versions are definately better, with a good mapping program, and easy scripting and configuration. Another good free windows client is Gmud, which is free, and offers some basic aids, such as macros, though doesn't have all the bells and whistles that some of the other clients have.

As for MUDs, I recommend ROM(Rivers of Mud) at http://rom.org. They have a great MUD, and source code and help for making your own MUD if that's what you want.

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Alter Aeon..... www.dentinmud.org

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to ask ! ? Nanavaent.org 23 (or port 3000 or ssh or www) is of course, 16 years of continuous development and still growing strongly.

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone suggest a client with a built in spell checker ! Nanvaent.org even ! *runs of and shoots himself for spelling the mud name wrongly*

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

kingdoms.se 1812

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Aha! Kingdoms! Pah!

igormud.org 1701 (or default telnet port works I think)

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally Arctic. I'd still be playing if it weren't a completely retarded thing to do with my time.

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Dragons' Star of course... hard core sci-fi, served on ice... http://www.dracon.net

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

www.dartmud.com

Port 2525

Best Mud ever!

Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Biased-opinion-powers, activate! I vote for the one I help run, AlteredReality. It's kind of funny to be mentioning it in this article, since it might actually be a better experience without a client. We have a VT100-mode that provides a constantly updating prompt bar, separate output and input areas, and other fun things like command history.

telnet ar.static.net 4000
ssh -p 4005 ar.static.net

n/s

[U R TEH SUX]

n/m

Choosing like Deep Blue

[AllenChristopher]

Ah, the do-it-yourself geek way. The deep, unshakeable belief that you can successfully search out every piece of software for every task you want to do, install each, explore its configuration options reasonably, give it a fair test, then make the right decision given a finite lifetime. Also, delete the old ones and maintain a solid computer.

Many of us have lives to lead, full of working and commuting and fucking on the beach, as much as playing a MUD may seem to contraindicate. This is why we have a society, and Slashdot's mod system puts a pretty good spin on it. Ask question, wait until the discussion has been fully modded, turn Funny down and dial Informative/Insightful up. Skim. I guarantee that's faster than reviewing all the software.

For Windows: Wintin

[thanester]

A lot of people have recommended Tintin for *nix, but I didn't see any mention of the Windows equivalent, Wintin. It's my favorite MUD client, though I'll admit I haven't tried anything else since I discovered it about 6 years ago.

http://www.rasbora.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/wintin.h tm

TF rulez.

[SharpFang]

It's not a MUD client. It's AI programming language disguised as one...

For all mare lovers out there, feel free to test it on telnet://lintilla.df.lth.se:5010 - talker about zoophilia :)

wah

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you sure are a whiney little bitch aren't ya?

TF.

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably Tinyfugue, at least on the Unix side. Dunno from Windows. For Macs, I like Savitar. I'm a social mucker, not a combat mudder, though, so I mostly just highlight the names of people who matter to me.

YOU DID IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

That was not a bad 4th post (i've seen worse) although I would have liked to see a goatse or tubgirl link. Also, you did correctly call 4th post. Not bad overall.

YOU DID IT!

Monkeyterm

[SlashDread]

• http://www.eternals.dk/monkeyterm/About.asp

And while your at it, check out:

• http://www.astro.mud.com/

Tell em Dread send ya.
/Dread

Re:Monkeyterm

[SlashDread]

OK, I dont usually complain. But I do not understand why my post does not even get a +2 informative, while any reference to TF gets +5 insightfull... sigh

Monkeyterm *IS* free, *IS* a mudclient, and a pretty darn good one. Mod it 1 point up already! /Dread

Re:Monkeyterm

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

And it uses regexp! Although it's Windows only...

Re:This is about the dumbest slashdot news item ev

[DarkZero]

I mean seriously, the guy asks a stupid question, the editor even seems to think theres a simple answer. I mean come on people.

Unless of couse the whole thing is just some kind of in joke then of course I feel like a complete idiot for not getting it.

Geeks that run tech sites don't get a lot of opportunities to mention MUDs. By their very nature, they tend not to innovate in very extravagant and news worthy ways, but they're still a lot of fun and many of them are much deeper and fairer than the average MMORPG.

The /. editors needed an excuse to bring up the topic of MUDs. They found an excuse. They used it. Lots of us would do the same in their position, myself included.

TF isn't easy and it isn't the right way.

[slaida1]

If you're used to using numpad for moving around, you can forget TF. All things that should be simple are as hard as anything else in TF, you have to write goddamn config files and scripts for everything, including numpad commands.

It's like comparing editors emacs/vi against nano or such: yes, lots and lots of possibilities but stupid interface that requires you to learn something BEFORE you get to play again. My experience with TF was when my usual simpleton-win32client snafu'd and I tought "let's try TF, it's so famous it must be good, I'll be playing again in no time."

Download, compile and start it... numpad doesn't work? Ok, gotta set up them as hotkeys, where's the menu? No menu, where's help? Several man pages, googling, readymade and selfmade config files, stupid numpad keycodes, x-window console settings, keybindings and -mappings later I decide to give up with TF. It sucks the same way as emacs/vi suck when all you want to do is write couple of lines of text and don't want to waste time learning yet another editor.

TF is for people who don't want to play MUDs anyway, only write scripts to get good fast and bots to get good without much (playing)effort. I decided that it's kinda wrong and stupid when some people spend time coding quests/events/casual management into MUDs and other people code scripts so they can avoid bothering themselves actually playing those features. Other than that, such MUDs are more pissing contests for people with low self esteem than anything else, no joy being a newbie and only thing to keep one going is a dream of virtual demigod status. Oh boy.

BTW, US keymaps give :(colon) and ;(semicolon) with one keypress, some keymaps like FI takes them behind shift-key so you can imagine the frustration when people tout vi as a fast editor when : is shift-. and ; is shift-,

I know

[Moloko_Plus]

Why didnt anyone suggest PUTTY? Its an amazing, small, versatile Telnet/SSH/MUD client. Free too. It beats any of the pay apps ive seen for that stuff.

Life sucking MUD addiction

[WhiteManInChina]

Being the cheating bastid that I am, I use RoaClient. It's free and has excellent scripting capabilities for triggers and macros. It also allows the use of proxie servers.

Download:

http://4.18.158.29/RhoneWare/RoAClient/cli-down.ht m

I've been a player on one of the oldest muds around for about 10 years. It's great fun, but addictive, so try at your own risk...

http://tsunami.thebigwave.net/

Mud naked!

LDMud

[Anonymous Coward]

uid: krystian42

I think LDMud is very robust and has lots of potential.

I've corresponded with the author, and he's still updating the ol' mudlib.

Lars took over the project of former Amylaar Mud which was taken over from George Reese's LP Mud (perhaps some of you are familiar with Nightmare MUD?)

Lars's website is:
http://www.bearnip.com/lars/proj/ldmud.html

It seems Lars is trying to add MySQL, OpenSSL, support, amongst other things.

I've stumbled upon LDMud a few months back, and it comes packed with Heaven7 (LPMud with tons of Combat plugins), and the regular LPMud driver

Actually, just downloading his pack gets rid of the worry of choosing a (server/driver)/mudlib since it's all prepacked.

a good free MUD client...

[jromz03]

cracked ZMUD :p

There was wintin

[aepervius]

But all the link I can find seem to be "dead". It hasn't the sdame capability as Zmud, but it is sleak, small (hold on a 720k disk) and has good script capability. This was free to use. If you can try to find it, there is a windows version (wintin) and a linux one (tintin++ I think).

Forgot to say

[aepervius]

If you are interrested in the windows version i have it plus many script I did myself which you might find interressant (triggers , macro, etc...).

Moral Decay

[Chaosrider]

I was a huge fan of Moral Decay. I've read some posts that indicate that the MUD is still active (131.247.113.1 port 3003). Some of the earliest open source coding I did was with LPC (the MUD engine core).

It's amazing how MUDS are both simultaneously fascinating and a complete waste of time. I had a great time on them growing up, but they are just too addictive for their own good.

KMC

[Anonymous Coward]

KMC.

Embedded perl interpreter for scripts/triggers/aliases/whatevers.

Nuff said.

Re:This is about the dumbest slashdot news item ev

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean seriously, the guy asks a stupid question, the editor even seems to think theres a simple answer. I mean come on people.

Yeah, this news item is worthless and a waste of time compared to all those SCO news updates!

The *only* thing MUSHclient lacks:

[StupidKatz]

The only key feature missing from MUSHclient is the ability to map any key or key combination to any given macro. That's it. In every other aspect, it is the King of Clients (not open source, tho). Word has it this is being worked on, too.

Well worth a one-time $20 cost.

Next time, start a female character.

[Anonymous Coward]

"GetLaid" works better for them, but "PostToSlashdotAfterMidnight" works better for guys. It's just one of those game-balance tradeoffs.

Re:Next time, start a female character.

[Anonymous Coward]

GetAHighPayingJob seems to work better, too. Yay!

This is worth an Ask Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please. Try logging on any MUD and asking. :P

Christ.

But, for pity's sake..

Linux/Unix/BSD? Nothing beats Tinyfugue. Nothing. I repeat - NOTHING.

Winhell? I tend to use GMUD. Nowhere near the bells and whistles of ZCrud, but it gets the job done.

MuckClient

[Kwil]

Mutli-Session support (you can have as many open as your computer will allow)
Spell checker
case sensitive help
Hyperlink detection
Clickable hyperlinks
Option to conceal program while at work
Option to disable URL detection - (useful if mucking from work)
Option to disable ansi colours in game - (useful if mucking from work)
Macros
Highlights
Gags
Complete colour customisation
Advanced Command History
Save complete session text
Load from file
Record partial session
Auto login for sessions using the "Connect name password"
ansi colour support
complete session scroll back
user customisable colour/font on a per session basis
sound for activity in another session or when application is minimised
user specific settings
reconnect on disconnection
socks proxy and http proxy support
keep alive signals
restrict scroll back and history commands to save memory
Online checking for news and updates!
Autologging

Oh.. and free as in beer, though donations are accepted.

TinyFugue, PowWow, PowTTY...

[skaya]

If you use only UNIX, TinyFugue rocks. It has a very powerful scripting language (but very complicated too - complicated enough for me to start my own Python client, but that's another matter).

If you use only Windows, Zmud is (1) not free (2) quite slow compared to other alternatives. You might then go for JMC (which is lightning fast, has built-in simple scripting, and can use VBscript and other nasty things with plugins).

If you want to MUD from UNIX and Windows, you could try PowWow when using UNIX and PowTTY when using Windows (PowTTY is really the PowWow engine combined with PuTTY, the famous SSH client).

Finally, I noticed that the most important things in a client are (from my point of view) :

• multi-command aliases (possibility to send a bunch of commands to the MUD with just one line of input), bindings (possibility to send one or many lines of commands pressing a single key)
• variables (possibility to use things like $target in your aliases, and setting $target with a single keypress, for instance)
• highlights or marking (possibility to make any line containing the word "critical" in bold red ; or marking in bold a given list of names - which could be the names of your online friends, for instance)

Any decent client should support this (IMHO).

I also ask a few more things from my client (and here is why I wrote mine) : be able to handle random socket connections (to connect to an IRC server or to a group communication server), be able to load images and pan them (to view and scroll the maps from the client, with single keypresses - note that you can also be clever and use Eterm backgrounds for that : Eterm has support for escape sequences to load/scroll backgrounds!), and powerful scripting (I use Python).

Last thing : I don't know what people call "powerful scripting", but for me, it's the possibility to do basically anything and without much hassle ;-) for instance looking up name of people you meet in a SQL database, or storing the list of your equipment in internal variables and popup windows, or analyzing your XP rate or the average amount of damage you do with each different weapon versus each different monster, etc.

Re:TinyFugue, PowWow, PowTTY...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's pretty cool, the way you put all the buzzwords in your post in bold.

Re:MuckClient Cont.

[Kwil]

I suppose you want the address for that as well, hm?

http://www.xcalibur.co.uk/MuckClient/

Here it is

[guacamolefoo]

http://www.zuggsoft.com/zmud16f.zip

It's free. You can't lose by trying it out. If you hate it, try something else.

GF.

ELF

[Tilps]

Having tried several mud clients, I find myself stuck with ELF, since while its scripting language is based on conditional relative gotos (ugh) ... i havent found another client which does good Always On Top sub windows for redirecting text to... Mudding 1600x1200 resolution, you need something for the other half the screen - a couple of always on top windows works nicely.

The fact that wine doesnt do always on top windows properly is one of the reasons i've stuck with windows as my primary OS for so long.

Ofcourse theres also the reason that having written Go Chess checkers connect4 othello and conquest in ELF's trigger language, rewriting them all again just sounds like too much of a waste of time. (note: ELF script has no arrays - i had to do all the above with string manipulations - maximum string length being reached storing half of the Go board... - did i mention conditional line count skips yet?)

ELF has a great trigger system - just wish i had the source so i could add real if statements! (and a couple of other things)
(shameless plug: dead.sedmonds.org:5000)

wintin

[firebat162]

wintin is my favorite. the scripting language is very easy to learn (as a result basic) but can still handle many automated functions in a mud. i've tried TF, but it just seems a little too complicated for me to learn if I just want to get on the mud and have some triggers and aliases.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wintin

Mozilla based, with MMX extensions!

[3john]

There is an xpi mozilla based client at

http://pueblo.mozdev.org/index.html

The project looks like it pricked its finger on a poison needle about two years ago though. I would guess that it wasn't going to work with a recent build of firebird ;)

SimpleMU!

[atholbrose]

I use SimpleMU, which is superior to all other Windows MUD clients I've tried for one reason -- spawn windows. Based on a regex, you can send incoming lines of text to subwindows, which is handy for keeping chat channels straight. It's also very quick and versatile. It's not free in either sense, but neither are many of the clients mentioned in replies.

Zmud is an awful hacky mess.

MUSHclient

[will_sd]

Under windows, MUSHclient is really nice, it provides all the usual options (auto-connect, aliases, triggers...) but also allows scripting in any language you want to use. Incredibly useful.

If you don't feel like paying the fee, the only drawback is a 30-seconds (if that much) starting screen.

http://www.gammon.com.au/mushclient/mushclient.h tm

(a nice mud: www.aarchonmud.com :)

Mud client review page

[plett]

Why not look at our MUD Client reviews page?
Pick one that has lots of YESs in its line, like Crystal for example.

Which yields to the question:

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the best MUD around?

I vote for xyllomer:
www.xyllomer.de
or directly to: mud.xyllomer.de:3000

Nobody has mentioned KMud?

[Jafar00]

For *nix you can't go far better than Kmud! http://www.kmud.de/ Ok, so it's not telnetty, but it's a lot like Zmud if thats what you are used to :)

Free doesn't make much sense for MUDs...

[pocopoco]

So many people have posted about zMUD and I agree. In my personal experience it's just silly to restrict yourself to only trying free clients (which I did for a while and have found them all inferior IMHO). The amount of hours people put into MUDs (which is a cost to yourself, just not in money) makes the small $$ cost of a single program which enhances those hours a very good deal.

Oh, no, one hour of work a month goes to paying for MUDs (I also prefer pay to play MUDs, btw ^^) which can entertain for 100 times that.

Re:Free doesn't make much sense for MUDs...

[dafoomie]

Sure it does. The main advantage of most MUDs are that they are free. Some codebases even do not allow you to charge any money or make a profit in any way (heh, no not the GPL). That does not extend to clients though. If you have a client that you like enough to pay for, great. But I don't find the free clients to be inferior at all. In the last 7-8 years of mudding, I've tried pay clients like Zmud, and just didn't like them at all. If you look hard enough, there is a free client for you out there. But I will admit, CRT is the best telnet client ever. Wish it had some mud features though, if it did, I'd certainly pay for a copy and use it. Until then, I'll stick with good old Gmud.

Mud Clients

[Anonymous Coward]

On the Windows side, your best bet is Zuggsoft's ZMud. If you do not want to pay the shareware cost, it has a free, albeit trimmed down, version. Another free Windows client you might want to try is the R0A client.

On Unix, a good GUI client is GMudix.

Mudconnector

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi I did this very search a few days ago, and came across an excellent resource for all things MUD related (www.mudconnector.com) It lists a links to a large number of MUD Clients. The Client I finally decided on was SimpleMu (http://simplemu.onlineroleplay.com/). Hope it helps

GMUD32

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used GMUD32 for years. I'd pay the guy wrote it.. hell I'd pay for the source code to it.. if i could find him..

Re:Moderators: YOU fail it

[fanpoe]

Um. Never have, never likely to as I don't check /. sufficiently often but still I have to ask why not?

Is there something wrong with doing something you enjoy that somebody else benefits from?

GMud and Pueblo for Windows, TinTin++ on unix

[spoonyfork]

GMud:
http://darkages.darkfantastic.net/pages/gmud.html

Pueblo:
http://www.cubik.org/mirrors/pueblo/www.chaco.com/ pueblo/

TinTin++:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=tintin%2B%2B&btnG=Google+Search

Once you have any one of these up and running check out Nilgiri DikuMUD:
http://nilgiri.mythril.com/

Others

[Rinisari]

RoA Client for Windows is what I used for 2-3 years.

Before that I had a Mac and used Rapscallion. Rapscallion was incredible. One of the reasons I stopped playing Achaea (I was Magus the Warlock...look me up in the history of the warlocks) was because I lost all my mapping information when I moved from Mac to PC and couldn't find anything to change over the file formats.

Now I actually know something about computers, and I could have stuck with it. All the movement commands I saved were in text files!

Re:The *only* thing MUSHclient lacks - xpertmud :)

[jsmyth]

The only key feature missing from MUSHclient is the ability to map any key or key combination to any given macro.

xPertMud has this and more. It plugs into a Perl engine, and has a Perl API that you can call from your own code. I've got a 2KB plug-in I've written over time containing triggers, aliases, macros, colour highlighting, additional screens that contain a summary of my health, exp, and gp/karma/mana, and keystrokes for F1, F2, etc., because I use a laptop I don't have a numberpad, so I use ctrl-j, ctrl-u etc. for e and ne etc., alt-j, alt-u for journey east and journey northeast etc., and many many many more.

If you can code perl (I think it's pythonable too) there's nothing like it. Go with xpertmud :)

What good is a free MUD client?

[Webmonger]

Did anyone else misread the headline?

"which is better" means /. page hits

[Speare]

Any "Ask Slashdot" submission which basically follows the form, "Which is better?" or "Which is best?" will generate more page hits, and thus more revenue for Slashdot. This is "Which text mud client is best?" To spark it even further, it has the "Which is better, graphical or text games" implication, and the editor added a link to one app but not a list of them.

MonkeyTerm

[Castolari]

I've been using it to MUD for about 2 years now- The urge to MUD comes and goes with me, but this is a long stretch- and it's free as in speech, Windows, has support for at least SOME of the Neat Tricks of scripting and things, and makes a cool monkey noise when it starts up. Check it.

Re:The *only* thing MUSHclient lacks - xpertmud :)

[jsmyth]

Just to be pernickety - the API that may be used in your own code allows you to write plugins, but not to instantiate xpertmud from your own process or use it via some IPC mechanism. Your code contains functions that can be called by xpertmud, and you can then control the screen (colours etc) or even other screens (for the updates and highlights), and send text to the server from within your code.

Pueblo?

[Hellfire99X]

Back when I was actually into MUCKs and MUDs, I had a fairly good client that was called Pueblo. Sadly, the company that designed it went out of business, but I think it's still hosted on mozdev.org.

In fact, according to the site search on mozdev.org, it's still hosted at http://pueblo.mozdev.org , but I can't connect to verify it due to the web filters in place here.

Best thing about 1200 baud

[Anonymous Coward]

The best thing is that at 1200 baud you could pretty much read combat as it was happening. You could see what kind of damage you were taking etc. The worst thing was that as you read what kind of damage you're taking, it's already too late, since the battle was probably already over and you may be dead or alive. :)

Surprised that nobody has brought up...

[Aquitaine]

SimpleMU (simplemu.onlineroleplay.com)

I've used it for years. It has a lot of the same functionality that TF has; it was designed, IIRC, to be a kind of 'friendly TF for Windows.'

I've used it for many years now. I can rattle off what the features are, but just go download the thing. :)

tinyfugue examples

[Noke]

If you end up using Tinyfugue, I have all of my tf files up-to-date and free to view & use over at my website

Pueblo

[Badanov]

...is the way to go. I run Pueblo on Wine on my Linux box. Pueblo

tkMoo-light

[antelopelovefan]

tkMoo-light has always been my favorite MUD client for Windows and *nix platforms. You'll need tcl/tk. For Windows, I prefer ActiveTcl from ActiveState

I use this free client

[)-(ellbilly]

http://www.ashavar.com/client/ and find it to be very good. I also run the circle mud software

Don't insult Notepad

[herrvinny]

Notepad is _NOT_ a crappy tool. I've written so many Java programs, web pages, etc in that small program, it's not even funny. Notepad is exactly what I need: a no frills text editor. Besides, why should I go to the bother of getting another text editor when there's already a perfectly good one sitting on my hard drive? If I ever decide to get another text editor, I'll be downloading Microsoft's NotePad for XML.

Re:Don't insult Notepad

[pclminion]

I've written so many Java programs, web pages, etc in that small program, it's not even funny.

Actually, it's hilarious, since you just admitted that no program you've written has ever been more than 32K in size, since that's all Notepad can handle... :-P

Re:Don't insult Notepad

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's hilarious, since you just admitted that no program you've written has ever been more than 32K in size, since that's all Notepad can handle... :-P

And I suppose you mash your programs into one huge source file, instead of separating them like the rest of the world?

Re:Don't insult Notepad

[herrvinny]

I didn't say _ALL_ programs I wrote were in Notepad, I said that I had written a lot. Who modded this guy up, I want to speak to you...

I've been using Gmud for 7 years

[dafoomie]

For the last 7 years that I've been mudding, I've used Gmud. It was originally made to be compatible with Windows 3.1 with Win32s. It has all the features I need, kept very simple and out of the way, unlike Zmud. Other than those, I've found CRT to be the best telnet client ever. However it has no MUD specific features, so you will have to decide if it meets your needs or not.

CLIO

[SLot]

Clio.

Can't believe noone mentioned that yet.

MOO

[Anonymous Coward]

MOO stands for 'MUD, Object-Oriented'. The seminal codebase, LambdaMOO, was another TinyMUD descendant developed at the same time as TinyMUSH. At the time, MOO was generally considered friendlier to programmers, builders, and newbie players.

Powwow Based Windows Mud Client

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Powwty, a derivative of Powwow, a venerable *nix mud client, and Putty, an excellent telnet application for windows. It's definitely a good mud client once you get the hang of it.

It's available at http://www.elvenrunes.com/powtty

Lyntin

[Bhast]

I personally prefer Lyntin, a Python based mudclient. It has a tintin like scripting
language but can be easily enhanced with
python modules. It has several UIs: text,
curses, tk, and wxwindows right now. I
like it because I can add pretty much
whatever I need to it from Python.

The url is http://lyntin.sf.net.

Bhast

Re:Lyntin

[Senkrad]

Bah, why didn't I find this post before starting my own for Lyntin :-)

Re:EQ database? again: Monkeyterm

[SlashDread]

I guess since noone heard of Monkeyterm, I wont get any +2 interestings here. Oh well.
Monkeyterm uses regexp and VB to interface with Access for example. Many eq database scripts for its target Mud astromud (it should work on many MUDS thou) exist.

Do check it out, its free (as in beer), its for windows.

SlashDread
The Image of Siobahn is eyeballing you. You feel little.

Only if you embrace carpel tunnel syndrome

[mofochickamo]

Imagine this: you are a tiger monk on darkmists.org:2222. You need to master you spinning kick before the house of Enforcer sicks their jerk police on you. You can either:

1. Spend all night typing: spin; spin; west; spin; spin; east; spin; spin...; rest; ...; spin; spin; (etc).
2. Use the ZMud script your friend created and click "Run".

The choice is yours.

Pueblo!

[coyotl]

Check out Pueblo, a HTML-based open source MUD client for Windows.

It rocks.

Mud Clients: A Synopsis of the 2 best plus more.

[lordmage]

Running a successful Mud for a bit I have come into plenty of clients.

MCL - Mud Client from Erwin Andreasen. Those in the ROM field know Erwins great work on signals, copyover etc. MCL is just incredible. Link: http://www.andreasen.org/mcl/

Zmud - www.zuggsoft.com - Free clients are decent but still not as overwhelmingly powerful for Windows as Zmud.

Zmud is by far the most used, followed by Gmud and the Java Telnet clients we have on our website.

Just go to google or freshmeat and search. Its more fun checking around than just taking our word for it.

Well.. may as well plug the mud as well
www.mageslair.net - Welcome to the Addiction.

If it's all that dumb

[revividus]

Why are there a few hundred perfectly serious,informative posts giving an answer to the question?

If you don't care about the topic, why read and post in the thread? I, for one, welcome our new MUD-fanatic overlords, and feel that all right thinking people should do the same.

Re:If it's all that dumb

[Photar]

http://www.google.com/search?q=good+mud+client

Re:If it's all that dumb

[revividus]

http://www.google.com/search?q=some+one+who+cares+ what+I+think

Your search -- someone who cares what I think -- does not match any documents.
No one was found who cares what you think.

Suggestions:

-Post to discussions that are about something you're actually interested in.
-Don't read articles that you think are stupid, or don't belong.
-Make more `Soviet Russia' references, everybody loves that.

Re:If it's all that dumb

[Photar]

Woah, search engine insults. No need to get nasty now.

use...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows: Wintin
Linux: sclient

Mud client for windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody mentioned wintin? Go get it at www.wintin.org. It's free and does actions/triggers, aliases, highlights, substitutions and gags. I don't know what else you could ask for... well maybe a good font, but don't let that stop you from experiencing the sweet sweet wintin goodness.

And test it out by coming to the mud I play! It's hosted in Texas, but was previously written and located in Sweden... Good stuff! EliteMUD is at elitemud.net port 4500. If you're bored, come have a look. BTW, if you log in, use the newbie channel to announce you found the mud from slashdot... Then people will help you. :p

Mud Client

[Anonymous Coward]

MUDs are certainly not going away. Even with new games like everquest, the mudding population is still growing. just look at http://www.topmudsites.com/ to get an idea of a few of the muds out there, most of which claim to maintain a very large player base.

Personnally I play on dartmud.com:2525. If your interested see thier website www.dartmud.com.

As for a mud client, Zuggsoft still have the free version available for download. It's still better than most free or even many pay for clients.

http://www.zuggsoft.com/zmud/down.asp#zMUD go to the bottom of the page for the free verion.

But my suggestion is, if your a true mudder, just buy a lisense for Zmud. I've been using it for over 5 years now. I have tried many other mud clients and zmud is the best in my opinion. In addition, Zugg listens to his users, often time implementing user suggestions for improvement in the next releases. And you cannot beat the support for coding triggers. Just take a look at the forums at www.zuggsoft.com to see how quickly people get thier questiond answered.

Talahaski
www.dartmud.com

TUsh - The Telnet User Shell.

[dsb3]

I'm still quite happily using my 1992 vintage TUsh (v1.74). It has macros, triggers, highlighting ... everything else just confuses me. As I recall, the last update that happened to my copy was to change the signal handler for linux (seems it resets the SIGINT after each use and if it's not reinstated you can only use a Ctrl-C keybinding once since the next one bombs out of the client).

TinyFugue

[Anonymous Coward]

TinyFugue has a very sophisticated scripting language. It's more useful and faster than anything else I've tried. It runs on UNIX, Windows, and OS/2.

In short, TinyFugue r0x0rs my b0x0rs.

RMC

[yello_downunder]

Short for, I think, Ron's Mud Client. It's a gtk app and it works pretty well. I ended up switching to TinyFugue because it is better at scripting and it's easier to play over ssh while you're supposed to be going to your next university class. Search on Freshmeat or on Google for it.

Emacs!

[An Onerous Coward]

I've never MUD'ed, and I've never seen any documentation of the fact. But somehow, I just have this suspicion that Emacs has some killer MUDing features.

[consults The Oracle]

Yep, there's a mud.el file available (or, rather, several different ones). If you're not one of those evil Vi heretics, it might be worth playing with. :)

I don't think there's much danger...

[Cappy Red]

Do you really want geeks showing up on your doorstep in full chainmail, a sword, and the amulet of Yendor?

You should be safe, unless a view from the West of where you live beholds a white house, with a boarded front door, in an open field. You're also safe so long as grues remain abundant in the wild.

*honk*

MUSHclient

[DesertFalcon]

It's been recommended before, I just wanted to second the nomination. It's a Windows client, crippleware (you can use it for free but you don't get all the features.) Hmmm what else? It's fast, it's clean and slick, I bought a copy ages ago and still get free updates. Nick Gammon (the guy who wrote it) answers all of my emails personally, and has implemented two or three features that I requested. To me, this kind of personal contact with the author is worth a lot.

Dude, use telnet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day, we used telnet. And liked it.
A good MUD works fine under telnet...

Re:This is about the dumbest slashdot news item ev

[Photar]

So, you admit then that this really isn't a good Ask slashdot and it is just a hey look at us we're geeky because we care about muds. In wich case its still lame.

Re:This is about the dumbest slashdot news item ev

[Photar]

"Ask Slashdot" which is under the category "Sections" which is under the "Stories" which is under "Slashdot" which is "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."

SO THERE!

Lyntin

[Senkrad]

lyntin.sf.net Hands down best client, and there are TK and now wx front ends for those who need gui. and for a mud that is still pretty popular, try zombiemud.org

Uhm Here??

[GeekedyGeekGeek]

Didn't take the time to read all the responses to see if this one was mentioned, but ah well. http://www.sanx.org/mudclient.asp Sanx's MUD Client Sanx's MUD Client does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a client for use with MUDs, MUCKs, MUSHs, MOOs and other role-play games / talkers. It's written in entirely in Visual Basic 6 and has been tested on Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This software is offered as freeware, and source code is supplied. This software is no longer being developed. However, support is available and it is a stable release. Sanx's MUD Client comes with the following features: Multiple world support Large 8000 line scroll-back buffer One hundred line command buffer Save History function and built-in history viewer Programmable and recordable trigger and macro facilty ANSI Colour support Customisable colour highlighting Auto-login function Note / Message Writer Limited customisable interface Source code included Click here to see a screenshot of the program. Download Sanx's MUD Client Current release: 1.2.41 Download Sanx's MUD Client now! sanxsetup.exe ~ 2.15Mb Download Sanx's MUD Client update. (sanxupdate.exe ~ 222kb) Please note: You must have version 1.1.6 or later installed for this upgrade to work succesfully.

Re:Pay for zMUD - Mud Admin's Perspective

[meersan]

I personally mud in ZMud 5.55. I abhor 6.66 (er, 6.62) like the devil. I used 4.62 for years until it crashed enough to drive me to upgrade. 4.62 may be "free", but your odds of getting the automapper to work without crashing are roughly 50/50. That's one of the troubles with ZMud--the hit-and-miss nature of upgrading.

The mud I code for/play on (riftsmud.net 4000) has MSP support (Mud Sound Protocol). At least from what I've seen, MSP requires the player to separately download the sound files (.wav usually). Then the MUD sends a line of text telling ZMud when to play the sound. This felt sufficiently kludgy to me that I haven't personally bothered to turn it on.

One of our immortals is salivating over the prospect of adding MXP/MCCP support. So far the rest of us have little motivation in trying to figure out how it works in order to add it. MXP appears to be a means of htmlizing mud output--you can specify font style and color, add hyperlinks etc. Display little bitmap pictures and so on.

Very, very problematic to me is the prospect of adding client-specific extensions to what is basically a source-available application (CircleMud/Diku license, *cough*). I want everyone to be able to play our mud with roughly the same experience, regardless of what client they are using. Any other mud admins out there agree?

This subject intentionally left blank.

[42forty-two42]

I prefer gMUDix on *nixen, and RoAClient on win32

Simple, portable client....

[phouka]

... called MuLMO is available at

http://www.jiffyscript.com/information/networkin g/ mulmo.php

It's perl based, and known to run under Windows
variants, Linux, and Perl. I presume it would run
under just about anything with a Perl interpreter.

I just use telnet

[Anonymous Coward]

Use telnet

Look at the mudconnector

[the_arrow]

One of the best MUD (or, as some prefer, MU*) resource sites available is the Mud Connector.
Try looking in their resource section.

GMud for Win32

[Maestro4k]

I've used GMud for Windows for many years. It has full ansi support, multiple windows, triggers, aliases, and macros. You can set up custom sounds for events (for instance, make it play a certain .wav file when someone messages you), and can log your session if you so desire. It also allows you to have different aliases/macros/triggers for every MUD you use, which is quite nifty.

GMud isn't exactly freeware, but no-nags (abandoned) shareware. AFAIK, the address in the about section is no longer valid to send money to, and the "official" download URL contains a version last updated in 1995. You can find it at the "official" download URL or Google for other sites.

Somewhere along the way the source was released apparently. I saw custom versions of it out there when I last Googled to replace my lost copy.

Note, I'm not recommending using no-nag Shareware in place of freeware in general, but abandonware is a bit different, if you can't pay for it, there's not much you can do.

tf and smm++

[Cozminsky]

If clients I really like tf, and you can use it on windows through cygwin (precompiled binaries can be found at http://www.druware.com/tf).

A niche client that I also found cool is smm++
(http://freshmeat.net/projects/smmmudclient /?topic _id=86%2C84%2C87%2C80). It is basically designed for mapping a mud, so once you've got the layout I wouldn't bother with it, but it seems kind of cool for getting a feel for a mud.

A client that a few people who play on the same mud as me is called simplemu (http://simplemu.onlineroleplay.com/) and they seem to like it better than zmud.

I recommend...

[Metal_Demon]

Achaea, I dug it for a while. One of these days maybe I'll return, if I get bored with MMORPG for a bit.

Built in clients maybe?

[Jorkapp]

Windows: Start->Run :: Telnet
Linux(KDE): K->Run Command :: Telnet
(I believe that should do it)

If you don't like the windows built in client, try using PuttyTEL (Google for it). Its a nice client.

Telnet and TinyFugue

[fm6]

And (to bring us back ontopic), TinyFugue runs under Windows using Cygwin.

My elisp MUD client dates back to 1989

[bee]

You may smirk, but I've been running my custom-hacked elisp client for muds since 1989. It's actually older than TinyMUD itself, since it originally was written as a telnet replacement for furMUD (a Lisp-based MUD) back in early 1989. My client had things like logging and such before any other client out there, thanks to taking advantage of built-in Emacs features.

Unfortunately, I don't have the motivation any more to hack all the cool stuff that should be hacked into it, so if there's anyone out there who wants a good solid elisp MUD client, and especially if you know and enjoy hacking elisp, drop me a line, and I'll share the code with you.
At 33K, it's definitely the smallest client out there, and since it runs anywhere emacs runs, it's arguably the most portable as well.

Anarres II

[Hugh Mayfield]

How about Anarres II?

Re: ed is the standard!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem...

ed, man! !man ed

gmud/tintin++/cantrip

[generationxyu]

Well, this all depends on the OS. For Windows, I've heard good things on my mud about gmud. For UNIX, tintin++ is pretty good. It's a newer build of a classic client. In Mac OS X, which is what I use, Cantrip is so far my favorite. It has all the features you would expect from a MUD client (ANSI, command history, aliases, triggers, macros), plus one HUGE advantage: Perl scriptability. I have one Perl script running all my speedwalks. It also makes simple botting/automation quite simple if you're familiar with Perl.

gmudix

[Sharth]

gmudix is the best one that i've found for a linux environment. zmud for windows.

Pueblo anyone?

[Cervantes]

Sheesh, I'm disapointed no one has been evangelizing Pueblo, the best damn client period! At least, my fav... never crashes, sure, maybe it's not ZMUD for gadgets, but I never had any use for most of the crap in ZMUD anyways. Nice clean interface, lots of scripting possiblity, and it always behaved properly (except on a few certain colour codes that were rarely used. May be fixed now, I'm not sure. Busy planning my own mud.)

I think this link should work:

Pueblo

MUD client

[bytebucket_1024]

can't you just connect to a MUD with a telnet client?

Mudwin, anyone?

[vrmlguy]

Mudwin is my favorite, but I'm a bit biased. I guess that I need to dust off the source code and recompile it for native Win32. When I wrote it, most MUD clients for Windows 95 were written in Visual Basic. Mine was one of, if not the first to be written in C. Given the hardware of the time, it blew away the competition.

Several other posters have mentioned features that their ideal client would possess. I'll try to see how many I can easily add.

Maybe I'll turn it into a SourceForge project...

I know it's redundant, It has to be redundant, BUT

[Anonymous Coward]

... telnet? Comes with every operating system worth a damn.

Actually, I use whatever terminal emulator I happen to have, putty, SecureCRT (not free but I like it), telnet from my UNIX systems, etc.

MUDs and SSL

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone knows MUD clients with SSL support? Using openssl as a client is a pain in the ass, specially for Windoze...