Dec 30, 2017, 8:58 PM
A directory of MU*'s that's actually good
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Is there one? I'm used to topmudsites and MudConnector, but both seem a little out of it these days. There are things I've seen that I know for a fact are not there, as an example. Is there a MU* directory worth actually looking at?
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All (* I think) modern Mushlikes have some info available from the login page via the INFO command. I still don't know why we care how many dbrefs have been used, but there you go.
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I prefer mudstats.com but unfortunately they only seem to update once or twice a year. The Mudconnector is still the best place to advertise your game, in spite of all the outdated links to games that are long gone.
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I think a good, constantly-checked listing of such games would be a really excellent second step (after projects like Evennia and Ares and whatever web platform that might come next) to expanding our hobby.
It's frustrating how dang hard it is to find games.
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@tat Yeah I agree. I've thought about trying to expand the Ares game directory to other game platforms too, but it's not as straightforward as I'd like for various reasons. And I need another project like I need a 2x4 to the head
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You know, I've been meaning to talk to you or @Chime for the last hour about what would be involved in doing something like this.
But then I remember that I hate this hobby and want to push it off a cliff.
Then I get distracted in coding something else for this hobby.
Why do we do this to ourselves, Faraday? Why?
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@thenomain said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:
Why do we do this to ourselves, Faraday? Why?
Clinical insanity?
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@faraday said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:
@thenomain said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:
Why do we do this to ourselves, Faraday? Why?
Clinical insanity?
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Evennia (and, I presume, Ares) use a custom in-built protocol for our game-lists. There is however also an "established" mud standard for this. It's called Mud Server Status Protocol MSSP and works so that the listing website regularly connects (over telnet) to the game and retrieves the data. Evennia does support this but I don't know if any of our devs ever bothered to register with a site that uses it. Not sure if the traditional mush servers have support for MSSP but it's common in traditional MUDs since KaViR's C code snippet supports it.
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Griatch -
@griatch PennMUSH supports MSSP 'out of the box'. Mudstats.com will use MSSP if it's available on the game. The Mudconnector, however, does not.
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I registered with a bunch of sites, but since the listing never showed up and I never heard anything back, I assumed it didn't work or whatever.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
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@apos said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:
I registered with a bunch of sites, but since the listing never showed up and I never heard anything back, I assumed it didn't work or whatever.
All you need is a listing on The Mudconnector. I know they had some issues a while ago with new listings not being posted but that's been fixed.
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@apos said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:
I registered with a bunch of sites, but since the listing never showed up and I never heard anything back, I assumed it didn't work or whatever.
If it doesn't, please make an issue for it, issues will never get fixed if people don't report them.
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Griatch -
@griatch said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:
Evennia (and, I presume, Ares) use a custom in-built protocol for our game-lists. There is however also an "established" mud standard for this. It's called Mud Server Status Protocol MSSP and works so that the listing website regularly connects (over telnet) to the game and retrieves the data. Evennia does support this but I don't know if any of our devs ever bothered to register with a site that uses it. Not sure if the traditional mush servers have support for MSSP but it's common in traditional MUDs since KaViR's C code snippet supports it.
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GriatchI used evennia for my Fading Suns game and it worked fine on mudconnect using MSSP.
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What would be awesome is if Ares and Evennia both supported exporting their world lists in a standardized JSON or XML format from a given endpoint.
Then someone who wanted to make a new listing site could a) pull from the Ares and Evennia lists as at least a baseline for 'here are some games', and b) export their own site listing in that same format, so that c) clients or third-party tools could import it too.
a.k.a. Packetdancer (or "Pax" for short)
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“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@thenomain said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:
MUML?
Out of technical ignorance I ask: Why not MSSP?
MSSP allows you to get the status of a game once you know its host/port in order to connect to it and issue the INFO command. The Evennia/Ares lists give you a convenient list of games, websites... and host/ports, which you could then use with MSSP. The one dovetails nicely into the other.
Basically, the Evennia list only shows Evennia games, the Ares list only shows Ares games, and since they're meant to be sort of server advertisements—"come look here for what you can do with this system"—that makes sense. But you could export those lists and use them to seed a combined list of RP-focused games, akin to Mudconnector but specific to RP rather than combat games. Similarly, you could use MSSP to move things to 'dead' and take them out of the active list when they stopped responding for a week (or if they had only =<1 people on for all samples for a month, or something).
a.k.a. Packetdancer (or "Pax" for short)
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But what about systems that don't use this? MUDs, for instance? Are you looking for a system that will automate game info as much as possible, but give people the ability to register manually?
What I find surprising that's (maybe?) missing from MSSP is detailed game information: What it's about, advertisement info, whatnot. I find this surprising because the game itself would be the only verifiable source of that information.
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@thenomain said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:
Out of technical ignorance I ask: Why not MSSP?
- It's highly MUD-specific (number of rooms? PK-allowed? Classes? Races? Yeaaaah... not so useful for most MUSHes).
- It uses out of band telnet communication. UGH
- It requires the directory to know ahead of time that the game exists, which requires you to have some kind of submission bottleneck. Also a lot of people just can't be bothered to submit their game.
- It lacks information that can actually be super-useful to people. A basic ad blurb, like you mentioned, and an activity graph like AresCentral allows.
I mean, I could make Ares acknowledge MSSP. It's not that hard. But it's annoying to do so just to support current MUD(!) lists that only update themselves once every year (it seems).