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
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.
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:What's a MUD?
by
pdbogen
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Why not look at our MUD Client reviews page?
Pick one that has lots of YESs in its line, like Crystal for example.