Why Mushclient for the custom client work?
The choice of MUD client for this project was always going to be a question and, sure enough, a few people have asked “Why Mushclient?” vs other clients. Usually, it is a cmud/zmud user asking the question so I’ll focus on that, but it really applies to any other client.
We have reached a point where many players feel like they need add-ons in their client to enjoy Aardwolf fully. I can see the need for this and tend to agree. If we accept that these things are needed to fully enjoy the game, then the game should provide them. As a free MUD (let’s leave the debate on that phrase for another post), it makes no sense for us to tell players “Sure it’s free, but to really play you need to buy a $25 client”. Existing MUD players understand this, a new player won’t.
The end result of all this effort should be that a player generally does not feel the need to program the client themselves or buy a different client to enjoy the features that Aardwolf has. They may add a few helper aliases and triggers, but that’s about it.
Cmud users tell me that the scripting capabilities in that client go further than Mushclient. I don’t know Cmud well enough to comment on that one way or the other, but for the sake of this post let’s assume it is true. That is perfectly ok - if a more technically inclined player wants to buy Zmud/Cmud for enhanced scripting of their own, I would never attempt to discourage that. It is a fine product that has done many things to bring MUDs forward in general over the years.
By the time someone knows enough to care about any perceived improvement in scripting engine of one MUD client over another, they don’t need my help creating their capture windows and triggers anyway. They are not the target audience for this project.
This project is aimed at a player new to MUDs wanting to enjoy the game and providing a nice client to help them with that. They might be persuaded to download and install a client, they’re probably not going to be persuaded to download a client, download some separate plugins, figure out how to install the plugins and experiment with the best configuration options to check for playing Aardwolf. These folks are the target of this project.
With that being said, every plugin being developed will be driven by new tags added to the mud itself. Those tags are fully visible and available to script developers for other clients. Users (or developers) of other clients are welcome to submit equivalent plugins to be downloadable from Aardwolf.com. There is no proprietary or undocumented protocol being used to favor one client over another.
Even with Mushclient (and other clients), there have been some excellent plugins created by people over the years. Other players start to use them then rely on them. However, the original authors then move on. Later, when something changes in the game, the scripts don’t work anymore and the people using them don’t know how to fix it.
V3 going live broke a lot of scripts people were using and really made this problem clear. The Mushclient plugins being released here will be officially “supported” by the MUD itself and if game output changes, they will be updated.
So why Mush over the other free clients? At the start the main reason was because we already have a lot of people using it, some plugins were already out there as a starting point and it was “good enough”. It is very actively maintained and even if that were to end, the source code is available. When I asked Nick about the possibility of creating a single-install for Aardwolf with plugins already enabled and he turned around and sent me the NSI installer script, it was a no brainer.
We’ve exchanged several emails since then and a few enhancements in the client itself to make this project simpler have already been added to mushclient and are in version 4.29, which is already released. Maybe you can get that kind of turnaround and help with other clients, maybe not, I see no good reason to look around.
MUSHclient also runs on Linux platforms, under the Wine system. This lets players who are using Ubuntu, Red Hat, and other flavors of Linux also enjoy MUSHclient, and the plugins released here.
The only goal in all of this is to make Aardwolf easier to play for people new to MUDs. Not to try to declare one client better than another or to make other plugin writers irrelevant. Once people start to rely on something to enjoy the game, wherever possible the game should support that and make it available to everyone.
I never saw Mush Client before… I used TinTin++ and jumped to zmud, but it’s wonderful to see our base client on it… it have wonderful stuff for new players (and for old too) and I agree that will help to collect more players.
I’m testing it right now on wine and I have several issues, but it could be my compilation (I never use ready packages).
Maybe in the future (and future is a wonderful word for it) we can think doing something for TinyFunge like this client to have a native client for unix systems and not emulated, but now…
Wonderful job Lasher. Thanks a lot for sharing your world with us
Doesn’t seem to allow me to install.
can’t write: c:\program files\mushclient\lua5.1.dll
do i have to uninstall the 4.27 version?
I fully agree and I can honestly say mush client runs good under wine, I ran Debian 3.1 sarge using wine to run mush client. I cant wait to test this mushclient script I hope you give it to us testers to try out. Great work
bleahy : You should not need to uninstall the 4.27 version. The only reason I can think of for the error message is that you had MUSHclient running, and the DLL was in use. If not, try restarting the PC to free the DLL up, and then install.
Backed up my old mudclient and installed the new one. Off the bat it would not load the plugins, error it gave was:
Can’t open world file: C:\Program Files\MUSHclient\Aardwolf Map.mcl
Can’t open world file: C:\Program Files\MUSHclient\Aardwolf Stats.mcl
Somehow its not pointing to the world file where the plugins are. Maybe something local on my machine not sure. I moved the plugins to the MUSHclient folder and everything works as expected.
Ref #5: Devlex:
Can’t open world file: C:\Program Files\MUSHclient\Aardwolf Map.mcl
This one is strange, the worlds should be under …\Mushclient\worlds and are installed that way as a default.
It sounds like you had a previous install of mushclient that was backed up, but not uninstalled. The installer sets your default worlds directory with this, but will not touch it if there is already a value there.
The installer itself could be a little smarter about where to put the world files based on your registry key, but existing Mushclient users wouldn’t be using this install - they’d download the plugins separately. Thanks for the feedback and for trying it out!
Bleahy,
As most know, I’m a fanatic about tinyfugue. But I agree that it truly isn’t a good choice for a project with the goals that Lasher stated. A few years ago, I was thinking about releasing “Abe’s Bot-In-A-Box”, which would be a similar project, but using tinyfugue (just a rudimentary out of the box setup to get someone to be viable). Someone as a user is free to do something like that (I’ve also been meaning to resurrect an archive like Metria’s for tf scripts), but I believe it would be too much to expect the MUD itself to support a project for what is really a geek’s client, and not a newbie client.
Just my thoughts,
Abe
Nick has helped me a couple of times with MUSH and that reason alone and that hes usually around still actively working on his client but not so much that he wont help people with it is an understandable reason to go with MUSH alone.
I uninstalled my previous version and installed the test package. Worked like a charm except for one minor sizing thing. The bottom of the main mushclient window doesn’t extend down far enough, so it just barely covers the bottom of the mud output window and the map window. I have a screen cap if you want to see. Screen res is 1280×1024.
When I log on the non-test mud and try initaard it gave me a message about not being able to open world file, but no error on the test mud.
Very nice, can’t wait to use it for real. (Just started using mushclient a few days ago).
Ref #7: Abelinc - TF is a little technical for most people. But, if there’s scripts you’d particularly like to develop for any client and need a tags option, just let me know. They’re easy enough to add. I dont want to add multiple sets of tags around things that already have them, but otherwise they can be added quickly and tried on the test port.