MUD client

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A mud client is a piece of software used to connect to a MUD. Generally a mud client is a very basic telnet client that lacks VT100 terminal emulation and the capability to perform telnet negotiations. On the other hand they are enhanced with features designed to specifically work well with mudding.

Standard features seen in most mud clients include ANSI color support, aliases, triggers and scripting. The client can often be extended almost indefinitely with its built-in scripting language. Most muds restrict the usage of scripts because it gives an unfair advantage, as well as the fear that the game will end up being played by fully automated clients instead of human beings.

[edit] History

The first mud client with any significant number of features was Tinytalk by Anton Rang in 1990, for Unix-like systems. This was followed in the same year by TinyFugue, originally by Greg Hudson and taken over by Ken Keys in 1991. TinyFugue has continued to evolve and remains one of the most popular clients today for Unix-like systems.

Another early client was TinTin++ by Bill Reiss in 1993, which in turn was based on TINTIN, written by Peter Unold in 1992. The client gained popularity quickly because of its easy to use scripting language and the popularity of DIKU muds which it was designed for. Being open source with originally no license restrictions, many current clients like GGMud, MudMaster, and Pueblo are based on TinTin++.

Until 1994 however, the only Mud Client available for Windows was basic Telnet. In November 1994, the first Windows Mud Client with Trigger support was released, VWMUD Master. Written by Vaughan Wynne-Jones, VWMUD Master was designed primarily for LPMUD, but later versions embraced other environments, and incorporated Tintin-style trigger and alias support.

Also following on from Tintin's success, Mike Potter (better known as Zugg) was keen to produce a Windows port of the client. In 1995, zMUD reached v1.0 and began to be distributed. Initially, it was licensed as freeware, but Zugg realized that he could make a living from sales of the client, and thus Zugg Software was formed, selling zMUD v4.0 as shareware.

[edit] Mud Client Support Table

The MUD client support table gives an overview of various mud clients, the operating systems they run on, supported protocols, and scripting capabilities.

[edit] Telnet extensions

Some MUD clients and servers have augmented basic TELNET / VT100 with a variety of new higher-level protocols and features.

A widespread feature is MCCP, which specifies a method for compressing the data streams. A proxy can be used for any client which does not support MCCP directly. Another, less used, extension is MXP, first developed by the Pueblo client but was then taken and extended by zMUD. Several of the more advanced clients are capable of handling MXP, which adds an HTML-like structure to a server's output, providing additional formatting capabilities among other things. Some other occasionally used protocols are MUD Sound Protocol, a means of playing sounds in MUDs, and the MUD Client Protocol, a framework for new client - server protocols.