[obit]

Could someone write a protocall, in java perhaps, using a modest SQL dbs with a class hierarchy that displays through a telnet shell, a list of for example, muds registered on TMS? I'm going somewhere with this, I promise. The Shell would look something like this:


_____________________________________________
(N)ame (G)enre (P)layers (U)p (D)own (S)elect
_____________________________________________
cd>P Games by Players Currently Online
_____________________________________________
generic.mud.example port 1000 35 Active||
generic.mud.example port 2000 28 Active
generic.mud.example port 3000 19 Active
generic.mud.example port 4000 19 Active
generic.mud.example port 5000 17 Active
generic.mud.example port 6000 *Unknown*
_____________________________________________





I just banged that^ together in this post. I know it looks terrible, but it's only a concept. Cursor positioning would be used to keep the top 2 lines of text static. Only a handful of commands would be used. In an actual implementation, upon logging into telnet topmudsites.com port 23(or whatever it happenned to be) there'd be a small introductory screen where you merely press [return] to continue.. For the purpose of making that thing fit in a post w/o word wrapping into garbled mush, I left out a few of the other commands, such as (Q)uit or (H)elp or I could think of a hundred other (T)hings. Simpler would be better though. U to scroll up D, down S or [ret] to connect to the game. The || represents the cursor. The Whatever-you-wanna-call-it* program would ping each mud in it's database maybe once every 5-10 minutes to confirm that it is operational and to check the number of players. All the 10-255 char mud descriptions would be available in the shell, another press [ret] to continue.. Since most of the features would be pulling information from serverside tables that would be easy and quick. The "Players Currently Online" would be the hardest feature to include, as registered mud owners would have to tag the first line of text upon login(It could be wiped before a human player even sees it) in each of their muds with a generic #P35 or whatever and be honest enough to have that tag coded to reflect the actual number of players in the game. Sigh.. aside from TMS actually hosting over a thousand free muds... anyways. The next challenge would be redirecting players from the Shell to the game they have chosen, seamlessly. Images of green-on-black dumb vt100/220 VAX/UNIX terminals keep coming to mind.. and GOPHER for some reason... I need sleep.

What I'm getting at is a one window solution to instantly give a player quick playable access to a huge inventory of games, and quickly move along from one to the next until they find one they like. Once they decide to stick around at a mud, they will likely start going directly to that mud via their own client. WHen they get bored, as players often do, they can always fall back on the WYWCI* Shell and play something else. I've seen this type of thing work before, though on a much smaller scale and a really long time ago. On a massive scale such as this, there'd be a huge playerbase to go around.

As I proof-read this, I see it for the mindless babble that it is, but who knows.. maybe my blind faith in the ability of 1's and 0's isn't too far misplaced.