[KaVir]

Thanks - my plugin is open source, so if anyone is interested in doing something similar you could copy it and modify it to suit your tastes, or just use it as a guideline or reference.

One of my players has created his own plugin, for example, which includes a portrait (changes based on which character he's playing) and buttons. He uses smaller maps than me, and has created some custom images for creatures and buildings:

056af1edd9.jpg(click to enlarge)

This approach gives you a degree of flexibility that you wouldn't normally find in a custom client - I offer players a default interface, but they can customise it as much as they like, or even create their own from scratch. It also saves you a huge amount of work, as creating a feature-rich client is no small feat.

Several muds and codebases already support , which uses the same data format as MSDP. If your mud has MSSP then you could copy that to create a basic implementation of the MSDP protocol with very little effort. You could have an interface like this for your own mud with only a few hours of work.