Posted by
michael
on from the back-in-my-day-we-used-telnet-and-we-liked-it dept.
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?
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.
I don't know of any ...
by
dzym
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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 ...
by
ekidder
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Re:I don't know of any ...
by
Erwin-42
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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.
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.
Not sure about Multi-User
by
dupper
·
· Score: 3, Informative
But for non-graphical RPGs, just stick to the rogue-likes, and you'll be happy.
Re:Not sure about Multi-User
by
mercx
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> 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;)
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.
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
by
polaughlin
·
· Score: 2, Informative
zMUD is a mere $25 and it is the best Windows client you will find.
-- pat o.
Re:Pay for zMUD
by
pdbogen
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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!
Trebucket TK
by
strredwolf
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Requires Tcl/TK, but has ANSI color, supports MPI, and is well supported. Also has web update.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
JMC
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
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.
The only client I'll use
by
Kindgott
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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.
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.
Check out gnome_mud for Linux/Unix. It's very similar to gMud.
MUD is NOT MSN-Chat (tm)!
by
newr00tic
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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..
-- A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
TinyFugue, PowWow, PowTTY...
by
skaya
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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.
Here it is
by
guacamolefoo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
http://www.zuggsoft.com/zmud16f.zip
It's free. You can't lose by trying it out. If you hate it, try something else.
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.
Mud Clients: A Synopsis of the 2 best plus more.
by
lordmage
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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.
-- I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
TinyFugue
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
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.
Re:Pay for zMUD - Mud Admin's Perspective
by
meersan
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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?
-- We want endless gardens of data, where the bits can flower, flourish and reproduce.
-- Andy Mueller-Maguhn
Re:Yeah, but what is the best MUD
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Dragons' Star of course... hard core sci-fi, served on ice... http://www.dracon.net
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.
-- --=:: Wings and tail and snout and scales of blackest night::=-
A dragon stands be
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.
Slashdot Mirror
All my friends seem to like it.
check it out.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
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.
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.
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.
But for non-graphical RPGs, just stick to the rogue-likes, and you'll be happy.
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.
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.
Requires Tcl/TK, but has ANSI color, supports MPI, and is well supported. Also has web update.
Main page here.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
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.
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.
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
Technically? Multi-User-Dungeon.. Text-based Everquest. (Don't flame me)
, 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.
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)
Check out gnome_mud for Linux/Unix. It's very similar to gMud.
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..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
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.
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.
Lots of petrified grits
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.
Why not look at our MUD Client reviews page?
Pick one that has lots of YESs in its line, like Crystal for example.
Clio.
Can't believe noone mentioned that yet.
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.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
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.
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?
We want endless gardens of data, where the bits can flower, flourish and reproduce. -- Andy Mueller-Maguhn
Dragons' Star of course... hard core sci-fi, served on ice... http://www.dracon.net
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.
--=:: Wings and tail and snout and scales of blackest night
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.
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.
And (to bring us back ontopic), TinyFugue runs under Windows using Cygwin.