[Orrin]

I wouldn't necessarily recommend FMud as it's a Flash app and I think HTML5 would be a better bet going forward. FMud will be 5 years old in a couple of weeks and the technology has definitely moved on.

I've been and while a lot of the code is pretty ugly anyone is welcome to use it in their own projects.

I think people are missing the point with the text vs graphics debate. Lack of graphics is only a small part of what makes MUDs unappealing to modern audiences and while a fancy web client certainly won't hurt, it's not going to change the nature of the beast.

Whether it's Bedlam's client, Batmud's or IRE's new(ish) HTML5 offering, they all look pretty enough but it's still just fancy wrapping around a terminal window. You still type commands at a prompt and the game play still dates from the 1990s.

This isn't a criticism of those games and they all have their market, but it's a mistake to think that lack of graphics is the the reason why MUDs aren't more popular with modern gamers. If you really wanted to bring MUDs into the 21st century you'd need to fundamentally change how users interact with the client and how the text is formatted and presented, as well as the actual game play itself.

is an example of a modern text game that has 20,000 monthly active users. The reason it's more popular than all MUDs combined isn't just because it has graphics as well as text.