How did you discover your last three MU* ?

[magee101]

@faraday tbh, I have no idea what telnet is really, except I think it's what I use on MUSHclient to connect to games? I'd really loathe to have to learn a new client after a decade or more of using MUSHclient >.< I am a creature of comfort.

[Arkandel]

@magee101 said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

@faraday tbh, I have no idea what telnet is really, except I think it's what I use on MUSHclient to connect to games? I'd really loathe to have to learn a new client after a decade or more of using MUSHclient >.< I am a creature of comfort.

The new client will be the web browser you are using right now - there's no learning curve. Nor do you need to know the difference between telnet and http for that.

The UI will be different for many web games though, that's true. However many current telnet-based games have different commands for CGen, getting places (+meetme versus @map versus +join), doing combat, etc.

They're the same - or very similar - only within the same 'family' of codebases, so for example if you're familiar with Theno's nWoD code you can play on almost every nWoD game using it with little need to adjust. However I'm pretty sure that'll be the same when our next-gen codebases mature enough to let us use the web; games using Ares will feel very similar even if they might look different (in terms of colors, etc).

[faraday]

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

The new client will be the web browser you are using right now - there's no learning curve. Nor do you need to know the difference between telnet and http for that.

I was actually talking about next-gen desktop/mobile clients. Like Atlantis3 or MUSHClient2. I really don't see the majority of MUSHers switching over to web clients any time soon. Even if we made a game-specific web client that was awesome, it would only be for that game, and folks really don't want to have a bunch of different browser tabs open for different games. Logging, spawns, dockable windows, events, highlighting ... these are all features that our MUSH clients offer that are not very conducive to developing on the web. And trying to make a web client that's both richly-featured and easily customizable for folks who aren't pro programmers? Good luck.

@magee101 The telnet connection is under the hood of your MUSH client. MUSHclient or Potato wouldn't be able to utilize the new features I'm talking about unless somebody released a new version that did so, but I'm assuming server developers wouldn't break backwards-compatibility with old clients. That would be considerably short-sighted of them considering how many MUSHers are all: "You can have my SimpleMU when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

The new client will be the web browser you are using right now - there's no learning curve. Nor do you need to know the difference between telnet and http for that.

I was actually talking about next-gen desktop/mobile clients. Like Atlantis3 or MUSHClient2. I really don't see the majority of MUSHers switching over to web clients any time soon. Even if we made a game-specific web client that was awesome, it would only be for that game, and folks really don't want to have a bunch of different browser tabs open for different games. Logging, spawns, dockable windows, events, highlighting ... these are all features that our MUSH clients offer that are not very conducive to developing on the web. And trying to make a web client that's both richly-featured and easily customizable for folks who aren't pro programmers? Good luck.

I'm not sure how you mean that. Maybe our disconnect here is that the kind of game I have in mind isn't one you can connect to over telnet at all (rather than one which allows a web client to connect to it as well, or enhance it in other ways).

So all of the features you mention would be done over the web client. Logging, spawns, dockable components, they've all been mainstays in web applications for many years now. The key is to not care about losing backward compatibility with MUSH clients.

[faraday]

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

So all of the features you mention would be done over the web client. Logging, spawns, dockable components, they've all been mainstays in web applications for many years now. The key is to not care about losing backward compatibility with MUSH clients.

If you don't care about losing backwards compatibility with MUSH clients then you don't care about losing backwards compatibility with MUSHers. That seems like shooting yourself in the foot to me, since it's not like we have a large population to begin with.

Maybe (hopefully!) 10, 20 years from now folks will feel differently and web will be the mainstay, but I don't see it happening in the near future. The use cases just don't line up. Even things like Discord and Slack chat, which have a lot more in common with MUSHes than most other web apps, provide desktop/mobile versions because a good majority of the userbase finds that more convenient for live-chat interaction.

As for logging, dockable components, etc... actually no, those are not 'mainstays' in web applications. Yes, they can be done, but they are clunky and require a lot of custom code. Trying to make those kinds of things responsive to different screen sizes is a royal PITA. We're not talking about professional developers here, for the most part - we're talking about hobbyists who have learned a bit of a simple scripting language (MUSHcode) or have dabbled in Ruby/Python. If you want people to be able to customize your web client for their own games, then you need to keep the code reasonably simple.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

If you don't care about losing backwards compatibility with MUSH clients then you don't care about losing backwards compatibility with MUSHers. That seems like shooting yourself in the foot to me, since it's not like we have a large population to begin with.

We've done this before, but maybe this is something we'd need to agree to disagree too.

See, the way I see it if we give MUSHers something that's better than what they have they will want to use it. But it needs to be good.

If we replaced SimpleMU (or whatever) with all its features with a functional web client which only has the bare essentials, or with a UI that's completely different from the classic "command line at the bottom, main window has the text", then yeah, they'll object.

But why would we do that?

[faraday]

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

See, the way I see it if we give MUSHers something that's better than what they have they will want to use it. But it needs to be good.

Yeah we'll just have to agree to disagree. I've gotten enough feedback on "playing via web" both here on MSB and in my discussions about Ares that I really don't think most people want to play that way. And the technical challenges of implementing all of Atlantis/Potato's features on web (and more - since it has to be better) seem so great that I don't think anybody's going to want to tackle that. Time will tell I guess.

[Lithium]

@faraday The advantage to being able to play by web is the ability to get involved easier for someone new to the game, and for things like possibly being able to play from Work. I've had jobs where it was slow enough I could play, but playing via phone /sucks/ and could not bring a laptop in.

I think it would give us a greater chance to get new people into the hobby too if they could just be pointed at a web page and go.

[faraday]

@lithium said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

I think it would give us a greater chance to get new people into the hobby too if they could just be pointed at a web page and go.

I don't disagree, which is why Ares has a web client built in and also some non-traditional ways of doing scenes via the web (more like Storium or play-by-post) on top of the traditional MUSH format.

But there've been no fewer than what - five? six? - different MU coders taking a crack at a web client that mirrors the traditional MU interface, and they're all pretty bare-bones. It's not because we all suck, it's because web development is a black hole of mismatched tools and browser incompatibilities that makes developing web apps a real nightmare sometimes. Heck, I just spent countless hours this week trying to improve the way Ares' web client connects to the game due to firewall issues with websockets. It's a ginormous time sink.

Could someone really dedicated to the problem tackle it? Sure. Slack and Discord have a web UI that's not too different than what a MUSH might look like. But they also have a whole team of developers working on it full-time -- and they're very centralized; not something you can customize to every game-runner's whim. I think we need to scale our expectations a bit.

[magee101]

@arkandel But that's actually bad for me anyways, because my web browser eats up tons of resources on my shitty laptop. MUSHclient eats up almost nothing.

[Kay]

Re SimpleMU, I genuinely tried other clients when it was no longer supported, I really tried. But...

[Arkandel]

@kay I use it too. Of course it's such an ancient piece of software it's starting to develop its little quirks; for example copy+pasting out of it on Windows 10 works... inconsistently.