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.