phone friendly MUD?
 

I would sometimes like to play the game from a phone while I'm not at home.

But several questions come to mind.

If anyone else has had experience playing from a phone is there anything you can tell me about how easy/difficult/impractical it might be? Or any tricks you did to make things work out?
(I'm using an android phone)

As far as which MUD game to choose, I guess the only thing that might help a bit is if the game allowed long idle times while logged in. A while ago I tried a MUD on my phone but after about a minute or two it automatically logged me out.
This is not too big of a deal, I can always just play when I know I'll have more free time and not just 5min while waiting for something.

The other things that come to mind are mostly about game clients. I suppose I could also just type all the commands out, but that might get a bit painful on a small touch-screen keypad, so has anyone had experience with a MUD client for android phones that helps out?

NOTE: I plan to mostly play from a desktop computer, so these issues aren't going to really influence my MUD choice too much, but I just want to get info on this topic.

Re: phone friendly MUD?
 

You lost me at "android", but you should look at the Blowtorch client. For a free offering, it's pretty good.

My guess is you being disconnected had more to do with the quality of your connection at the time than anything else.

Re: phone friendly MUD?
 

The thing to do while logging on from a cellphone would be to block as much of the messages from the mud as possible, if the mud has that option.

For instance our mud has the toggles 'brief' (which blocks the room descs and only shows the room name, exits and mobs/objects in the rom), 'compact', (which removes the blank lines between commands), and nobat, (which blocks the battle spam). All are meant to facilitate things for players with small screens. You can also set things like page height and pagewrap, to adjust to a smaller screen.

I think we are not alöne in this of course, several other muds probably have similar toggles, you just need to know what to look for in the game.

Re: phone friendly MUD?
 

yeah we've got those sort of features too, I think our idle out time is between 12 and 15 minutes (being a ROM derived MUD the roughly 45 second tick get into the math). the one thing I'd avoid on mine personally would be PK, unless you've got decent macrokeys for common PK commands setup.

Re: phone friendly MUD?
 

Aarchon is not a MUD specifically designed for phone-friendly play, but we do have a few features that might accommodate a phone user.

The ones mentioned above:
Brief : Doesn't show room descriptions when you move, only when you type look
Compact : Removes extra blank line spacing

Some others:
Combine : Combines all similar objects in your inventory
Action : Automatically uses a skill/spell for you during combat without adding lag (saves a ton of typing)
In game aliases : You can make you own aliases that save to your player file to shorten common command sequences
Heavily Customizable Prompt : Display anything from room exits, to your group leaders' health status
Gag Features : Gag extraneous messages like missed attacks, equipment swapping messages, faded attacks, aura damage, etc.
Channel History Commands : Playback channels to see any discussion that you missed

I imagine that many MUDs offer a lot of similar features, but if you're interested, come check us out. I know for a fact we have at least 3 players who play from their phones right now.

You can idle for about 8-10 minutes before being disconnected, or longer if you setup some basic triggers. We advise against the triggers though because you can starve/dessicate yourself and die.

Blowtorch is the best client that I know of for Android. I use it with a few customized buttons from time to time and it works well.

-Astark
Aarchon