Attachment to old-school MU* clients

[Kestrel]

@derp said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@kestrel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

I think people are overestimating to some degree the gulf of difference between MUDs and MUSHes.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the interface or whatever looks cool on this one. But. I think you may be underestimating that same gulf.

Especially since, as far as I can tell, on this MUD you're just -- playing with yourself, rather than actively collaborating with other people. And I think that's where the real difference lies.

On a MUD your adventures and encounters come from pre-coded situations. On a MUSH, they come directly from the minds of other people in real time, and that's a big world of difference.

Written Realms for clarification can absolutely be used to create multiplayer MUDs. MUDs by definition aren't single-player, SUDs are actually very rare. There's just an example one up there on the website to allow anyone who might want to use it to build their own game to fiddle around and understand how it all works.

Iron Realms Entertainment (IRE) MUDs like Achaea (web client of which I've posted a screenshot above) are fully multiplayer; they're basically text-based MMOs. And although I no longer play them, I'm aware of very vibrant RP communities on them, and have read/partaken in some very neat logs. Players interact both with automated NPCs and with other players.

[SquirrelTalk]

So far I just do it because:

A) The client is easier to keep at hand than one tab among many.

B) Ares, to my knowledge, can't currently be programmed to highlight certain words and names in a different color.

and

C) It also, to my knowledge, can't be programmed to make sound notifications when certain words appear in the client to let me know someone trying to get my attention or whatnot.

That and it lets me connect to ares games and non-ares games on the same client, though I'm not sure how big a factor that is necessarily.

[faraday]

@squirreltalk There are browser extensions that let you highlight specific words. Ares ties into your browser/computer's notifications system, so whether that supports sounds will vary depending on your browser/OS.

[Derp]

@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

Ares ties into your browser/computer's notifications system, so whether that supports sounds will vary depending on your browser/OS.

I'm on a windows machine for work purposes and let me tell you those notifications come through loud. I'm just listening to my music on the Youtubes and suddenly CHIME-OF-DEAFNESS +11

Yeah. There are ways. <.<

ETA:
@SquirrelTalk

Also, in Ares at least, it supports the ability to change your favicon when there is new activity in the window. Por ejemplo:

The default one has like a little dot or something on it but that one wasn't bold enough for me so I need something big and red to catch my attention.

ETA2: Well, more specifically, it supports the ability for a game admin to do so but I am sure that you can sweet talk them into it!

[Coin]

Man, I just went back to the office yesterday and for some reason NONE of the Ares games I play will load on my Chrome (or other browsers) at work. None of them. They load the tab icon and the background image for the site, and nothing else.

No idea why.

But I can log in to the games via client.

So, you know, thank you for keeping the client compatibility around.

[faraday]

@coin That just comes down to what ports your work firewall has blocked. The fact that they're draconian enough to block the web portal ports but somehow missed the client ports says more about your work IT than the superiority of MU clients

(But seriously - if you can look at the browser console (View -> Developer -> Javascript Console in Chrome; other browsers vary) it will show the exact error. Maybe there's something weird going on. Feel free to PM me with details and maybe there's something to be done, but I doubt it.)

[Coin]

@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@coin That just comes down to what ports your work firewall has blocked. The fact that they're draconian enough to block the web portal ports but somehow missed the client ports says more about your work IT than the superiority of MU clients

(But seriously - if you can look at the browser console (View -> Developer -> Javascript Console in Chrome; other browsers vary) it will show the exact error. Maybe there's something weird going on. Feel free to PM me with details and maybe there's something to be done, but I doubt it.)

I was less lauding the superiority of clients and more just thanking the variety of connectivity options. XD

It's weird af because I used to be able to get onto the portal. Ares Central works fine, too, as does the Discord webapp. So it's really weird.

But I'll take a look when I go in on Monday and see what it says. Thanks.

[Arkandel]

@coin It's all about connectivity. Even the fact you can connect through a client is coincidental - your work's sysadmins simply neglected to block that port but drop outbound traffic to other ports for the same IP address.

It's just how your job's firewall policies are set up. If you have clout with them you can have them open the traffic up and you'll log on fine from the web client as well.

[Carma]

This post is deleted!

[Kestrel]

@carma

[krmbm]

@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

stuff about ports

Just wanted to toss in: a long time ago, you helped fix the web portal so I could use it behind my work firewall, and it still works great.

I was one of those "you will pry my client out of my COLD DEAD FINGERS" people till quarantine. I gave up my gaming PC for workspace for almost a year. Now, even though I have a client back on my desktop, I never use it.

[Raemira]

I've tried Ares and it's just not for me. I'm not very big on web based products to begin with. If I can't have a client for something, anything, I really don't want it. I'd prefer to manage things on my computer.

As for my specific experience, Ares is a whole OTHER mindset of playing. Almost all of the scenes that were open were ones that were private and not open for anyone to joining them. That's very exclusionary. While they had a policy of just ask for RP, I don't want to have to ask for RP every time I want to go out onto a grid and play. I just want the opportunities to be there and have the chance to decide if I want to join or not with folk already out there. For someone who is introverted and has problems asking people to do things in the first place, it's also exceptionally intimidating.

I'm also very bad at async RP. If I'm not there in the moment, I lose sight of what the scene is even about and then lose interest. However, I recognize that it is a great tool to loop in others who can't match timezones and maybe want to RP with each other.

As a dinosaur to the MUing community, ultimately, change is hard.

[Derp]

I was gonna make a reply to this here, but it isn't about MU clients so much as a kind of MU peeve, so moving the actual reply over to MU Peeves!

[faraday]

@raemira said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

. Almost all of the scenes that were open were ones that were private and not open for anyone to joining them. That's very exclusionary.

It's the exact same command/screen to start a public scene as to start a private one. Public is actually the default setting.

What you're seeing is a shift in the preferences of the playerbase that has been building for ages. I've seen it on all kinds of games for years.

Ares just makes it a little more explicit than logging in and seeing everybody in private apartments, RP/TP rooms, OOC areas waiting for so-and-so to arrive, or scenes on grid where a page of "Mind if I join?" is met with "Well actually we're kinda in the middle of something..."

If you don't like it, that's cool - everyone's entitled to their preferences. But this is a social issue not a technological one, and you solve it with social means (staff leading the way by creating public scenes, making incentives for public scenes, encouraging public scenes, etc.) not technical ones.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

Ares just makes it a little more explicit than logging in and seeing everybody in private apartments, RP/TP rooms, OOC areas waiting for so-and-so to arrive, or scenes on grid where a page of "Mind if I join?" is met with "Well actually we're kinda in the middle of something..."

Not wrong. The last game I was on that was client-based only (Penn, I think), you almost never saw anyone outside of their private rooms. People sat there until they agreed in pages to go to the private room of someone else and do something. You could walk around the grid for days and never meet a soul.

[Tinuviel]

@l-b-heuschkel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

You could walk around the grid for days and never meet a soul.

I'm fairly confident that the days of wandering the grid and confidently finding random RP are over. And have been for a while.

[Lotherio]

@tinuviel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@l-b-heuschkel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

You could walk around the grid for days and never meet a soul.

I'm fairly confident that the days of wandering the grid and confidently finding random RP are over. And have been for a while.

I can say tonight there were three on grid scene where I was tonight, one was not random/advertised at all, two were spontaneous from RP requests. This doesn't include the 3 open scenes in temp rooms or private scenes. 6 or 7 other people were idle on grid at various locations. All were open on grid for anyone wandering the grid though. It is, however, uncommon compared to all other places I've been the last few years.

[Tinuviel]

@lotherio said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

I can say tonight there were three on grid scene where I was tonight

That's not at all what I said.

[Lotherio]

@tinuviel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@lotherio said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

I can say tonight there were three on grid scene where I was tonight

That's not at all what I said.

You said days of grid wandering are done, I kindly disagreed.

[Tinuviel]

@lotherio said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@tinuviel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@lotherio said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

I can say tonight there were three on grid scene where I was tonight

That's not at all what I said.

You said days of grid wandering are done, I kindly disagreed.

Then you are wrong in more cases than you are right.