www.mudportal.com
 

Hi Everyone,

I'd like to announce the auspicious birth of !


First and foremost, I would like to be a site that helps new players discover MUDs and enables veterans of the genre to "game socially" at home or when on the move. My focus is turning the portal web app into an easy-to-use, generic web-based client with increasingly advanced features. Already, MUD admins can begin to deep-link to the web app (explained ) and provide their players with a sleek web client that works on tablets, as well.

Also, we are allowing users to customize their web app from inside the web browser. And trusted developers can customize the app for all their players using a straightforward plugin format. How cool is that?

If you would like to contribute to in any more serious shape or fashion, such as helping with the site/app coding, promotion, or forum administration, just let me know.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Love it! Nice work Plamzi!

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Great work! I really love the design. I linked your announcement in the Forum of the MUD I am playing.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Site looks great. I just registered over there. It's nice to see a more modern forum interface. What's the process for adding our MUD (Aarchon) to the MUD list? How about featured games?

Thanks

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

In Other News:

* The MUD Portal web app has been re-themed to fit snugly into the site template.

* We now have a working framework for users who want to make web app customizations. That is, anyone can tinker, or contribute seriously to customize the app for themselves, or their players. And everything is done right in the browser.

* We have working examples of plugins that are actually in use. One of them adds basic MXP support.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Very nice, Plamzi.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

'Tis but the beginning! If you're a game admin, list your game with us, or deep-link directly to your very own web app (as explained in the edited OP).

It's time for the players to also take interest. For I have just released the Game Center, a module that allows registered users to create multiple game profiles, each with its own set of macros and triggers.

Triggers and macros support wildcards. Simple macros will appear as Quick Buttons on a sortable panel (see screenshot).

The MXP plugin has also been improved.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

New Features:

* Improved MXP support, including multi-select dropdowns.

* XTERM-256 color support, including background colors.

* ANSI background color support. Improved ANSI color processing speed.

* MCCP2 support for bandwidth savings and even better responsiveness.

* UTF-8 Encoding support for games using special characters and non-English games.

* New graphical status bar plugin based on GMCP data sent Aardwolf-style.

* Ability for 3-rd party plugins to capture MSDP data.

Did I mention that this baby runs in a browser?

If your game's website is sending prospective players to something Java-painful of FMUD-dated, consider these two lines:

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

New plugins:

ChatterBox

Flexible and well-commented plugin that builds a tabbed box for redirecting all kinds of input. Ideal for chat (see updated OP screenshot). The example published to portal users shows how to use RegEx to capture a dozen channels.

iFrame

Display your own content (e. g. web-based help files or a who is online list) in a UI window. Supports easy adding of a hide / show icon to the main window. Supports refreshing the content (e. g. polling a who list) at a given interval.

New features:

* You can now list a game in progress that can be left in an unpublished state. You will be the only one who sees it listed in Game Center.

* UI windows snap to one another. Window management improvements.

* New event hooks for more plugin options. Improvements to core plugins for ease of use, and for adding control icons to the Scroll View toolbar.[b]

JujuMapper: Open Beta!
 

Re: JujuMapper: Open Beta!
 

Haven't checked out the functionality yet, but I like the aesthetic of that map.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Hello MUD Admins,

This is a reminder of the many free resources made available to you on . Things you can do:

1. In a few minutes, enhance your official game site with a polished Flash-free web-based client with tons of features (including best-in-its-class MXP):
2. Submit an official listing for your game on the site and have your game appear in the web app's Game Center as well as in various other places on the site.

3. Once listed, make use of a wide variety of pre-built modules to create a state-of-the-art custom web app in a fraction of the time. For example, .

4. Receive prompt support for your web-app related coding adventures, request new features.

And, of course, players are also very welcome. The web app has matured to a point where it rivals the best desktop clients, and the best part is, you don't have to be a scripting guru to use its advanced features.

OP screenshot updated to showcase the latest JujuMapper view.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Thanks for the reminder Plamzi.. was just checking out the portal again this morning.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Quick update:

* New module, , allows you to add a fast and easy cool-looking login dialog. It's a good example of what you can do with the Modal helper module.

* More let you control better how the app looks to your players. For example, the "solo" parameter lets them use Game Center's features but only lists your game and its profiles.

* App windows can now be collapsed down to their toolbar and their state saving for registered users has been improved.

* has begun and already covers a fair bit of ground.

* Many under-the-hood fixes and improvements to , including faster path-finding for click-to-move.

Games that do interesting things with the web app API, MXP, or any other "beyond telnet" features, have a very good shot at being featured more or less permanently on the homepage.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

is a cloud app whose goal is to make you forget to install Mudlet on your next machine.

If you are a MUD admin without a sleek and sexy web app who is able to , the MUD Portal's goal is to make you ashamed of yourself.


Quick update:

* Game Center now includes a folder with the complete current listing of games from MudConnect.com. Even if a game is not listed on TMP, players will be able to access it, save profiles for it, and customize their experience.

* Based on excellent feedback from an RPI admin, added a multi-line input option that will make writing in-game mail or editing long descriptions oh so much nicer.

* Smart copy and paste in ScrollView. Ability to download a log file at any moment with one click.

* ANSI Italics now supported.

* API documentation added for .

* You can now easily override the default processing functions for and MistyBars. For instance, you can configure them to listen to MSDP instead of GMCP and parse the data any way you need.

* Docking custom tabs now supported by all windows, not just ChatterBox.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Hey that's great.

Maybe a silly question, but have you thought about allowing connection to the proxy chat from a desktop client?

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

What's a use case?

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Maybe you sometimes use the mudportal client (on a phone, on some other computer), and also use a desktop client. When you're on the DT client you still want to connect with the MP community. Intermud chat basically.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Hmm, well it's not that much work to let people telnet into the chat server, but how is that different from connecting to any one of dozens of games that have Intermud chat?

Also, the mudportal client is a desktop client as well, and features like this one are intended to entice people to congregate on the site.

I'll definitely add a page where people can just chat, from phone or desktop browser.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

That's a fair point, but it seems like MP connects an order of magnitude more muds than any intermud network I know of.

OK, I'll give MP a shot as my sole client and see how it goes...I always thought I'd give up mushclient when they pried it from my cold, dead fingers :)

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

I'd like to give this thread a quick bump.

I feel that any dev who cares about improving the user experience should take a serious look at the tools that mudportal.com offers. It's getting to be a very mature and solid, absolutely free, offering and I think more people (other than myself) should be doing more great things with it! The is growing, and the is kept relatively up to date.

If you are considering customizing a web client but have specific concerns or reservations, don't hesitate to share them either here or on the TMP forums.

If you are a player, next time you're stuck on a computer where you don't have your favorite MUD client installed, just try your home mud through the mudportal app--I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Plamzi,

I'm planning on hopefully messing with mudportal some time in the next few weeks, but was wondering if you had any plans to add full MXP support at any point? I haven't done a lot of testing but it looks like sends work, but that color/font support is limited.

-Astark

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

I've pretty much added everything that has been requested (except for NAWS, which didn't make sense to me in the web context). It helps a lot if I'm guided to a specific game with specific commands / places where I can test specific expansions to MXP.

There are parts of MXP that I don't think anyone uses, so I'm not shooting for "full" anything, but devs who are using the portal heavily or customizing for their playerbase will definitely drive me to eventually support everything that their particular games implement and that will make their browser client experience better.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Appreciate the quick reply. With my initial testing the only non-supported feature I found so far was changing the font (like to Comic Sans MS). We don't legitimately use this feature in game, but we do mess around with it from time to time on the channels and while logged in through Mudportal you don't see any of the text. Ultimately this isn't a real concern for me, and I probably should have done more testing before hastily posting here. We've seen a few users log in via Mudportal and once a few other projects are wrapped up, I'm looking forward to diving into MP a little deeper.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Some MUDs use it for page breaks, which would still be useful for a browser client (for example when viewing long lists of information). Some MUDs also use it to wrap text, and may assume a default width of 80 characters if the client doesn't offer an alternative via NAWS. I wouldn't consider it a priority feature, but NAWS could be useful for some MUDs.

I think you'll find MXP is one of those "chicken and egg" features. It has some features I would like to use (such as inline graphics and font tags), but I'm not aware of any generic free clients that support them, and I'm not going to add something I can't test.

For me, the main incentive for changing the font is that it would allow me to use a variable-width font (which looks much nicer than fixed-width), but still switch back to the monospaced font when displaying tables and ASCII maps (as they need to be correctly aligned).

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

When I was considering it, I went through the use cases you listed. It seems to me that a modern web client has a much easier way of handling these things for all games, rather than offering some kind of special treatment for the few games that use NAWS. For instance, the app has a split screen feature that lets you read long text at your own pace.

Likewise, offering the user a way to lift any fixed width (and using easy CSS for auto-wrapping) is a few lines long, and it will provide a more consistent handling across games than if I tried to calculate the current character width (for a user-resizable window with scalable font, mind you) and then told the server about it. Seems like a huge pain for the opposite of gain.


Doesn't have to be. I'll meet anyone in the middle and test together. The <IMAGE> tag is so close to HTML that I just added support for <image url=""> in one line. It won't take very long at all on my end to support it fully. Just let me know.

I'm actually not seeing a spec for setting a font name, so I'm not sure how ww_crimson is setting "Comic Sans MS" in another client. I hope he shares some details.

What I am seeing is the <TT> tag that is supposed to toggle "non-proportional font". If by that they mean "non-monospace" then, for the effect you are looking for, it seems like you would need to wrap most of your text in <TT> and then unset it for things that need to be displayed fixed-width? It seems like the inverse would be much less work.

Supporting <TT> will not be a problem, as I can just pick a good non-monospace font with extensive Unicode characters and allow the server to toggle in between. Are you requesting this feature and will you help me test it? (I know that you have your own custom client so not sure how much of a focus this would be for you.)


Also worth considering in this context of this discussion is that the Portal app supports HTML, so if no other client under the sun supports MXP <IMAGE> or <TT>, then you may want to tap into that for a wealth of display options, including showing actual tables, and setting any web font you can reasonably expect the user's browser to have, etc. If you want to do neat toggles instead of requesting the font again and again, just wrap it in a <STYLE> tag. There is even more flexibility available on the front end to extend functionality via the API.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

What I mean is, if the client doesn't support NAWS then the MUD may assume a default window height, because sending hundreds of lines of uninterrupted text will often disconnect the user. This is particularly a problem with admin commands that list all objects/mobs/etc in the game, but could also apply to skill lists and such.

But once again, you'll find many MUDs wrap the text themselves before sending it, usually with a default width of 80 characters.

I can add an MXP inline image to my MUD if you want to test it, but you support MXP as well - you might find it easier to test on your own game, where you can adjust things directly.

You'd do it <FONT FACE="Comic Sans MS">like this</FONT> (see for the spec, although the example it gives is wrong).

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Maybe there are games out there that support pagination only based on NAWS-reported screen height (and not the Diku pageset command e. g.). The problem is that from what I've read, I would also have to report the "screen" width, and given how dynamic that can be in the client, it's just not worth the headache.

I understand perfectly what you're saying, but since I can't reliably (or easily) guess how many characters a player's text window currently fits horizontally, I'd rather go with the server default in this scenario. Line breaks at 80 characters are not bad-looking, and may leave some room on the side for the player to position other useful stuff. It would be worse if I report width of 300 characters, but the actual limit on the player's screen is 290... Not to mention that allowing variable-width fonts makes guessing the right width in characters pure voodoo material.

At the end of the day, I feel that if a game server is relying solely on NAWS, then it's probably more interested in the game being playable in telnet terminals than on the web. Otherwise, they can easily add a few flags on their end to make all text look good in a dynamic window.

No need. I tested it and it works. Now the ball is in other people's courts.

Thanks, I missed that. All font attributes are supported now: face, color, back, size, in any order.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Don't have anything to add to the above, but I'd like to say thanks for adding the font face support. Hopefully in coming weeks I can move mudportal higher up on the list of projects. Thanks!

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

plamzi, do you have the syntax for the MXP image use?
I'd like to play with that too (maps etc).

Thanks!
- Dave.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

I don't yet support any other attributes though. The image should just show up in its original size.

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

Today, mudconnect.com is down again, and so I wanted to take this opportunity to point out what some of you may still not know, that the MUD Portal has a solid modern forum site section with active administration.

The portal was created during a turbulent period at TMC but was never meant to be a clone. Instead, I wanted to offer this community an easy way to game socially using a cloud app. I also wanted to offer admins and devs an easier way to reach new audiences.

To find out more, head over to

Re: www.mudportal.com
 

The MUD Portal is even more social today than it was yesterday!

Now, you can use your existing Facebook, Google, Twitter, or GitHub account to log in.

If you still don't wanna, use the new /name | /nick command in chat to give yourself a temporary nick. Or just go by "guest", we don't care!

As long as you enjoy playing your favorite games socially, on a 21st Century client.


P. S.
FYI, Twitter auth seems to be the worst of the bunch. First, Twitter asks you for all kinds of permissions, including to post on your behalf (which the Portal site would never do). Then you're still asked to fill in a registration form because the details Twitter shares are too slim. I guess the only benefit is from then on you can use your Twitter credentials, if this is where you hang out.