With all the connectivety of today i am surprised I have not see muds being played on cell phones.
I know with languauges like pearl this is possible but who will be the first or is something like that going to alot harder than I think?
Or instead of just muds on cell phones would it be more likely to see a client that connects to muds before cell phone specific muds?
Anyways, I feel like this is prob the next direction in muds.

How it will actually look like to code this and go in this direction is very intresting question to explore.

Let me know what you think.

I don't think it would be hard to get a mud cellular, but it would probably have to be hosted from an external system, such as a computer or server and a phone would have a telnet inside of it to hook up to the external source.  Generally, MUDs don't demand a lot of your computer.  You could even use a modified version of a text messager to do all the commands and such.

I'm sure that it is possible for cell phones to connect to servers with text messages; in fact, Google has already done something similar(). They have a service that lets you get driving directions and business listings and other cool stuff via text message. As you already pointed out though, gth, typing would probably prove too difficult for it to be worthwhile.

This has been reviewed in the past via Gamasutra.com article and presents these issues:

1) As with many telnet applications, these are written primarly in Java. Since most of the older, inexpensive cell phones are not Java-based, they cannot run terminals (like telnet) across them. For the phones that are Java-enabled, the telnet applications that are available, however, presents such a limited screen to the client that is nearly impossible to play effectively.

2) The SMS system is not a streaming technology. Its more of a proxy system, thus telnet-like applications have problems connecting to real-time server environments.

3) Since MUDs are more keyboard usable, cell phones that aren't QWERTY based (i.e. you dont have to hit a number 2 or 3 times to change the letter) are in limited supply and usually very expensive (i.e. blackberrys, PDAs, etc).

This being said, PDAs however would present a better choice for being the gaming console. But you also have to remember that newer technology such as Flash MX is not yet available for these environments, so they will be just as limited as the basic 'Java-enhanced' phones. As for the C/C++ game clients, these could be run from PDAs but would have to really be stripped down from their PC counterparts due to limited ram and flash-drive disk space.

-- M

Darn it, my original post had the point about typing difficulty but I edited it out because I thought about the cell phones with keyboards.