@Pavel Not for everyone, but no system is. The ability to do more with the tools on hand and experimentation within the field are critical for bringing it to new audiences, imo.

True. I’m very old and grumpy and want things to stop changing so much because I can’t keep up. This is all a reflection of me, not of how the field should develop.

I will say it’s worth looking at what Tyr has done with The Celestra on this. Pictures as an option instead of text, gradients built into the system and able to be saved, items in a library that can be pulled out at any time, customizable outfits, embedded Youtube videos, instanced events, person-to-person channels, and available both from a web browser and a standalone client.

Accessibility is not great, though, and something that could be improved for the VI audience.

Almost all of that sounds like a cacophonous nightmare.

TBH I kind of hate how much stuff has already moved off-game, like, I hate how everything for news and help files always ends up hidden in some badly done wiki instead of just easily accessed in-game and I hate how many people either write like a one line desc or just don’t write at all

• .5 I love that I can search a wiki to find help files (assuming the wiki is properly set up) and read them in a font and form that’s much easier on the eyes.

I hate that people have stopped writing descs. It hurts my heart forever when I look at someone and ‘You see nothing interesting’ or some pithy, one-line blah blah I look like Chris Evans what more do you want.

I like descs! Especially descs with some flavor to them that include things about body language, accents, movement.

Accessibility is not great, though, and something that could be improved for the VI audience.

Strangely my first thought for an example of this were Trillian / ICQ skins.

I was thinking Winamp. Same-ish era.

Strangely my first thought for an example of this were Trillian / ICQ skins.

@farfalla

Sure, but I think it would be neat if it also sort of stylized the client for folks not using a web portal as well.

Naturally it’d be an opt-in process.

Sure, but I think it would be neat if it also sort of stylized the client for folks not using a web portal as well.

Basically all the visual elements and a bit of the organization (like the chat tabs and stuff).

My idea is that individual games could provide a CSS-style sheet type thing that would pretty up the client along that specific game’s themes.

Is that something that would be possible with an Electron client?

Electron app

I want this. I want it bad.

I added a quick notification to test it and see what happens. So this first one is a standard browser notification from Chrome - I sent a new chat message from the native client, and as Chrome was in the background, it fired off a notification. Same sort of behaviour as Ares. No control over Chrome beyond triggering a notification, fair enough, can’t flash Chrome in the taskbar, or highlight the tab.

And then I thought - can I override the Notification behaviour when the JS frontend is loaded through the Electron BrowserView?

Yes.

Yes I can.

Rather than just a pop up notification I can make the taskbar flash as well (which is not standard behaviour). And of course, if I can override notifications when they’re being called through electron, I can do the same for anything else.

The upshot of that is, if I wanted to make a native client for this thing, it could be a single client that would work for every game that ran the system.

(Technical detail of the solution: when the JS frontend code is loaded through the Electron app, it replaces window.Notification with a function that sends an IPC message, so rather than sending an HTML5 Notification it fires off an event. The IPC message is then picked up by the main process of the Electron app and from there we can trigger anything we want, which in this case is just a native notification and the taskbar flash)

Of course, which is why I mentioned WebRTC and the others as an option.

I think the future of MUing is a three part problem.

1. The Clients
2. The Protocols / Communication Method
3. The Servers

The Clients and Servers can have a lot of variety, but I feel like the protocol should be pretty standard across all MUs, that way people can put up whatever server they want and know that they’ll be reachable by the max number of clients.

Also, if we’re talking about moving from a mostly deprecated communications protocol to a newer more robust one, what’s stopping the MU community from jumping to SSH?

Because it’s not really about the communication transport. It’s about the WAY that things communicate. The data they send over telnet.

The old MUSH interface is raw text in, raw text out.

That has the advantage of making the clients super dooper simple, because all they need to do is send and receive raw text. They have no knowledge of what that text actually represents. Is it a room desc? A who list? Does the player want to move? Talk? Send mail? Some clients give you some customization options, but fundamentally it’s a very primitive way for two systems to talk to one another. Next-gen clients and servers can do better and unlock features that are difficult to even imagine now because of the historical limitations.

Has anyone tried to adapt XMPP, WebRTC, or maybe Websocket for a MU server?

Telnet’s just the middle bit between the client and the server. There’s no reason to try and build a whole new set of clients and servers when we are just talking about getting rid of an old, and unsecure comm protocol. I mean, it might be as simple as reworking the clients and servers to use SSH.