PHudBase -- a PHP-based, WebSocket supporting naked codebase
 

Hello, all! I've puttered around here over the years and have only recently gotten back to developing my games, so I'm back! And for you dual-forum readers, I've posted this exact message at TMC and TMS forums. Gotta get the word out....

I've taken a couple of days to build an open-source, clean version of the codebase I've developed over the last 4 years (stripped down to the work of about two nights).

What resulted is called, "PHudBase," short for PHP MUD Codebase (duh). PHP-MUD was taken by another guy named John doing what appears to be something very similar. About 5 days ago (and more power to him -- I'd love to see further innovation on this stuff).

Aside from being a very-simple-to-code base (and very, very naked), the big thing is that I've built HTML5 WebSocket support into the engine, so very rich browser clients can be built without the need for Flash or Java and without sacrificing speed or reliability (this is a true, two-way, socket based interface).

The project is hosted at with a demo (for Google Chrome users only for the time being) and the codebase available at Google Code (linked from the homepage).

If you don't have Chrome, you can also telnet in at phudbase.com:12345 and use the following commands (pretty standard):
say
look
n|ne|e|etc.
quit

I really think this could be an excellent start for a budding developer, and more importantly, a great way to hook these young'uns that don't know what Telnet is to our games.

I'm also interested in working with anyone who wants to try implementing WebSockets alongside your standard socket-type code in existing codebases. Hit me up at or the Google Group linked from the homepage.

So what do you guys think?

- John

Re: PHudBase -- a PHP-based, WebSocket supporting naked codebase
 

That is pretty wicked actually. One problem we have with MUDs is getting to computers that have blocked port 23 for whatever reason. Does this get around that somehow?

Re: PHudBase -- a PHP-based, WebSocket supporting naked codebase
 

I don't think so, I get the impression that Web Sockets is just a JavaScript TCP/IP API.

EDIT: actually it looks like it's another protocol on top of HTTP, so it probably would.

Re: PHudBase -- a PHP-based, WebSocket supporting naked codebase
 

Nice!

I like the ability to drop input prompts into the text itself.

Question: Is my computer talking to the server, or is it talking to the webserver where the client is, and that webserver talks to the server?