2017-07-19 13:01:52

Greetings to all.

As I explained here in the Erion topic I am currently putting together a mudding guide for newbies to be posted in the articles room.

Muds can be great fun, but getting into them can be a wee bit daunting as a newbie (I certainly found it as much), plus we do get asked some common questions about muds on the  such as how to connect, how to play muds, what a prompt is etc.

The guide is not intended to go into advanced topics like scripting or triggers or the like, much less anything like creating soundpacks, it is just intended to get new players off the ground and up with an accessible newbie friendly mud such  as Cosmic rage, clok, erion  or Aardwolf as soon as possible.

So I am asking for anyone with input or suggestions for what topic to cover to  please reply to this topic, especially any new mudders who  have questions they'd like answered.

thanks in advance and keep the questions coming.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-19 14:59:56

Basic stuff:
1) What is a MUD and how does it differ from other audio and text based games?

2) Which client should I use? (VIP versus other clients like mush).

3) With which game should I start just to learn how things work?

5) How do I connect to the game?

6) Do I need the IP address to connect?

7) I don't like the stupid game you suggested I start with, where do I go to find more MUD's / are the MUD's listed in the sudiogames library the only MUD's we can play? (this one can be googled, but you might as well put it in there)

8) What is the difference between a MUD, MUK, MOOetc?

9) Game X sounds interesting, how to know if it is screen reader friendly?

10) What is ASCII, is it bad?

I will post more questions once I learn more about MUD's myself.  None of the above are hard to figure out, but it would help newcomers if all of it was in one place.  I will make a separate post if I actually want an answer to a question on MUDding since I am very new to it myself.

2017-07-19 17:28:01

Okay, so I decided to try Ardwolf since it seemed close to Alter Aeon which I am used to playing with a lot of supportive sound, but, here I will not have access to a helping sound pack which will force me to try out all the features in text.  For this I am also using Mushclient, and I am refraining from using clients provided by the MUD developers themselves.  I am also using NVDA as a screen reader.

MY progress so far:

Upon being asked to enter my password for my newly created profile the client stopped reading new text that pops up and only reads the new text once I have entered something.  For example, when I was prompted to enter my name, I did so.  When pressing enter I was told that some questions will be asked to help me set up my character.  No questions ever came, however, when I hovered my mouse over the client NVDA read the line that it missed before which was the prompt asking me to enter a password.  It now does this with all new lines of text.  When I enter my password, only then the client focuses on the line requesting me to enter my password.  I hope that explanation makes sense.  I have no idea how to fix that.

Another issue is that it reads a lot of junk like  # # # #.  I assume that is just because I have not reached a point where I can use a command that would make text screen reader friendly.

Any advice on the above would be appreciated.

2017-07-19 17:46:16

Good questions, indeed I already have some of them covered in the guide I'm writing but I will refer back to others, eg, what is a mud.
As regards clients, the reason you need a client is that muds are played in real time  so you need something that will pass text to yoru screen reader or to sapi, which pretty much any and all custom built clients that sighted mud developers have created won't do.

There are two alternatives for accessible clients, Vipmud and Mushclient, each has it's fans and it's quirks.

While I love the mushZ alteraeon client I personally prefer Vipmud for muds in general and would recommend it, particularly as for someone new to muds  it's generally easier to setup and run and is built to be absolutely screen reader friendly out of the box. while it is a commercial program essentially you do not need to buy it, or rather the bennifits of a full license are pretty minimal and you can go on using it for free as long as you like if you wish since the restrictions on the free version are not really that restrictive big_smile.
If you want more info on Vipmud feel free to ask.

Mushclient is a standard client that is not built to be accessible but there are several plugins for it that make it so. Getting a vanilla copy  mushclient and installing the correct plugins is a difficult process and probably not one you want to embark upon as a first time player.
The alteraeon MushZ client is essentially a heavily scripted and modified version of mushclient which comes with all the necessarily plugins preinstalled, so what many people who want to use mushclient for other muds do is  go into preferences and remove alteraeon from startup, then hit ctrl shift p when connected to the new mud and add in the plugins they want to use.

There are explanations in the plugins dialogue  for what the various plugins do, but The important one is mushreader, which will output text to your screen reader.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-19 19:07:15

Okay, I tried that, it works better now that I have added the mushreader plugin.  However, it still reads spam.  I will try VIP mud and compare.  I am curious though, how extensive is the loss of features if you do not buy the full product.  What will you lose? That might also be worth including in the guide if a person might consider the lack of certain features too much of a pain and would rather go through the trouble of setting up Mushclient from the star instead of paying for VIP.  That is assuming the features that is not included in the full version of VIP is present in Mushclient.

2017-07-19 21:09:56

I installed VIP mud.  It is easier to get to work than Mushclient, but I think it might be worth mentioning that when I tried to add a character NVDA does not read the labels of the different fields that should be entered.  So I can see there is something that needs to be entered, but I cannot see what the field is for.  I managed to figure it out by clicking on one of the other MUD's and see where they entered what and applied the new MUD's info that way.

2017-07-20 00:42:03

If it's a line of ASCII characters, changing client doesn't really help I think. And for you vi people who want to use mush, I personally recommend going with mush-z right away, no matter how much they tell you it's only for Alter Aeon. It's not. And it's way easier to set up stuff. But then it may be just me being use to mush more than vip, due to channel history and stuff, and due to my limited choice of not being able to buy it.

Why do ghost hunters have to hunt ghosts? Well, there's a fear of being ghosted out there. They may need therapy as well as their ghost hunting kit.

2017-07-20 08:48:20

@Tensoon what do you mean by "spam" here?

Ascii characters, extra information such as character stats etc, indeed pretty much all of your text that appears from the screen comes from the mud not which client you are using. It's generally up to the mud's developer to have alternative display options other than ascii info and ways to control the amount of text you get in the game so that you can keep up with muds action along with sighted players, e.g a way to customise your prompt as I described earlier.
I'll also say that  playing some muds, you might need to turn your voice speed up since if your voice is too slow you are more likely to miss things, especially in fast action combat games like cyber assault.

While it is true that if you want to get into more complex scripting there are ways  to write scripts for your clients to help with less than accessible muds, eg, by gaggin certain unhelpful incoming text so that it is not shown, generally speaking if you are having to do this just in order to play the game the mud is not truly accessible, which isn't to say you shouldn't play it, just that it will be a lot more work and the developers aren't doing their job properly big_smile.

As to vipmud, the differences in the free version are as follows:
1: you can only one session open at a time (though unless your inclined to play multiple muds or multiple characters at once this probably shouldn't matter).

2: If you write scripts you don't get the automatic script debugger in free mode. Again probably only of use if you actually want to start writing mud scripts, plus of course you can write scripts without the auto debugger and check them yourself anyway.

3: In all muds accept Valhalla mud (which David greenwood is a fan of), The free version will cut out after two hours and need to be restarted. While this is mildly inconvenient  most muds allow for timed out connections and the like, and if you have created a profile for your mud reconnecting is as simple as opening the program and hitting enter.

4: no msp support. Msp stands  for mud sound  protocol. This is a way that some developers have implemented sounds in their games by having the  mud directly play sound files you've downloaded. This doesn't however mean you get no sounds in the free version, just that you (or someone else), needs to write a script for directly playing sounds as various text gets sent to your computer, rather  than be able to use the protocol mud developers setup directly.

In practical terms, there are not that many games that actually use msp (classic six dragons and Materiamagica are the only ones I know and mm's sounds are pretty minimal), and there are several games with very extensive soundpacks scripted directly for Vipmud, ---- Cosmic rage even has an  vipmud soundpack written by it's devs.

That is it. Most of the time the only major deal with the free version is the two hour time limit and even that isn't too much of a problem. I personally used the free version of Vipmud (and that back when the time out limit was one hour), for a couple of months and though I did decide to buy the commercial version it was more because I wanted to support Gma games than because I specifically needed the commercial version.

While the conflict of Nvda not reading the headings for text entry boxes automatically is a bit odd, there are several workarounds, the easiest is simply to hit nvda numbpad 7 (in the desktop layout anyway), switch to screen review mode and then hit np7 again to read the headings of the boxes as you tab to them.

Alternatively, you could set the system voice to Sapi and everything reads fine, indeed Vipmud can work entirely through Sapi if you need it to.

Hth.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-20 10:21:03 (edited by Tensoon the Kandra 2017-07-20 10:42:19)

I used VIPmud for about 2 hours last night.  I have not gotten into any of the advanced features, but I can say that it is a lot easier to set up than Mushclient.  I am not planning on buying it though, and the constant reminder that I am not using the paid version is very annoying.  I think that it would not bother most people and that it is definitely a good point of entry for folks that don't like tweaking things to their liking and prefer having a thing work right out of the box.

With that said, there are a few features I wish to implement in Mushclient.  W will be using zMush since it is already set up rather well.  The issue I have is that I don't know what all the plugins do and if you add the wrong one (even if it is just to the list without actually enabling it) you get an error.  Therefore I think a rundown of the essential plugins would also be necessary to add to the guide.

When using VIP mud I really liked being able to switch between input and output by pressing TAB.  In Alter Aeon I used to press ctrl and tab to switch to a notepad window which had all the output copied to it.  Which plugin provided that feature? VIP also had a feature which you can toggle in the config which makes the client ignore the spam which I mentioned earlier, which as ASCII art.  Is there any way for Mush to do this without some scripting? Is there perhaps a plugin which adds this feature? 

Also, I use NVDA with eliquence  at about 60% speed.  How fast would you recommend I put it in order to be able to keep up with combat in faster paced games?

2017-07-20 15:24:02

@Tensoon, separation of input and output windows is something I like in Vipmud and one reason I personally prefer it over mushclient, along with several extra keys such as ctrl space to find  in the entry window.

The closest mushclient has to the two windows system is the "capture output" plugin which gives you a notepad window that you can alt tab to which records all the text from the mud.

One handy function both clients also have is an ability to retype a command by just hitting enter on it. Inv ipmud you can do this by going to the output window, using up arrow to find the command you want and hitting enter (you can also do a word search with ctrl r if you need to but this is not as necessary), while in Mushclient you can do it by up arrowing until you find the last line with the command you wanted.

This is handy if say your mining and keep having to type "mine ore" or something similar, since you can just hit up arrow and enter a few times rather than typing out the hole thing.

I don't believe mushclient has an ignore ascii feature though I could be wrong, I do have more experience with Vipmud than Mushclient since I find it over all easier to use, even though I do really like the MushZ client for Alteraeon.

As regards speech rate it's generally a matter of individual choice, what voice your using and how fast you can stand things than any kind of hard and fast rule, especially because some are less forgiving in speed terms than others, and some muds have more or spammy combat.

A good acid test to see if you need to raise the speed is to start a fight, listen to the speech then go down to the bottom of the screen  and hit up arrow to see how much new text is coming in.

If your missing things you might need to turn the speech up.

Btw, I! just learned something.
if you go to tools and preferences in Vipmud and find the system voice, set it as screen reader and make sure the "reat text entry labels" box is checked Nvda will read the boxes in the connect and character setup prompts no problem.
god knows why this is unchecked by default, but it's nice to know it's not a bug.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-20 18:53:13

I had it set to screen reader, but I just left whatever else there was as is.  It is odd that it is unchecked by default. 

I added the capture output plugin to my Aardwolf, but it does not open the notepad window automatically.  I have not played around with it much yet though, so I will see what I can figure out so that I can tell you how to add that part to the guide. 

It seems to me that there are quite a few people that prefer Mushclient over VIP and I find it hard to believe that people would be so in favour of the client if it does not have a way to make it ignore ASCII.  ASCII is very annoying and clutters up everything.  I will also do some research on this and see what I can find.

2017-07-20 20:17:50

I used the capture mud output and the current output plugins and the notepad window appeared and works.  I also read on an older post that typing cmo will open the notepad window.

I came up a bit short on the ASCII thing though.  That is the only thing I have seen so far that might make a case for using VIP mud.  Although, I also have not tested vipmud's capabilities  when it comes to ignoring ASCII.  I will leave that to you Dark since you know the client and you have played plenty of MUD's.

2017-07-20 20:55:10

Well I am not sure how "ignore ascii" works, since I have seen ascii in other games, one reason I sight removal as ascii as one of the jobs of a developer, indeed I suspect the ignore ascii option only ignores some of the most common ascii in games. In Aardwolf you can get rid of a lot of ascii by turning off the automap and maprun options, indeed this is true in most muds since usually ascii is primarily used in maps and simply turning them off will do.

Myself I like Vipmud for ease of access and the two windows system which makes retyping commands and  history easier, plus I like the way Vipmud handles multiple characters and muds with folders for sounds etc, but  it is to a large extent a personal preference thing with some people preferring one client and some the other.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-21 16:39:55

I am at it again. 

I am still looking for issues I might find when starting a new MUD.  I went onto TMC and just added whatever seemed interesting to my Mushclient.  I encountered an issue I am hoping someone else might be able to resolve, because I am clueless.  With some of the MUD's I added my screen reader ignores the last paragraph of text.  It only reads it when I enter a new command.  This is not exclusive to my screen reader.  The capture output plugin also ignores it.  At first I thought this was unique to End of Time since I have never seen anyone here talk about it, but it does the same with the Square soft MUD and the Anime Planet MUD which I know people here have played.  I can still see the text by hovering my mouse over it though.

This issue is not present with Aardwolf and Cyber Assault.  To make sure this is not plugin related I added several global plugins which I used to test all the games.  VIP does not seem to have a problem with these games.  It reads the last paragraph without any issues.

Any help on this would be appreciated.

BTW Dark.  In order for the notepad to appear when using the capture output plugin one has to type cmo for the plugin to start capturing text.  Just in case you did not know and need to add it to the guide.

2017-07-22 00:07:16

Hi all.
O-T I can't install Prometheus sounds properly.
I put them in the Prometheus folder in my documents.
The sounds don't work at all.
I am using VIP mud 2.0
You should add an explanation of how to add the sounds.

Hopefully, we'll get a fully accessible open world game someday.

2017-07-22 12:08:56

i think first can try space mud,because most this kind have a friendly mapping system,and simple commands.starmap usually have a coords,sector system,can build a map in your mind,usually not lost.
about other,alter aeon,clok,just explore and find a goal,clok need RP,so,just ask around.
this kind,quest is hard,because i can not know how to finish the quest,because every quest diffrent.

2017-07-22 13:46:53

"Rtd with the promethius soundpack as I remember it is self installing it works a little differently. Usually yes you do just dump the sounds in the sounds folder but promethius works a little differently, you just tell the ext to use the vipmud folder in documents and then wait since it's created to be self extracting.

"Tensoon, i'll include that command when I get to adding details with mushclinet, thx.
As regards the paragraph not reading I am nnot  sure since that isn't a problem I've had.

maybe check the resolution or the like or ask in the squaresoft mud topic if it's a  which occurs in that game. It could be involved with something like the way the text is ent from the muds to the client,  what is happening I do not know exactly since mostly for trying out new muds I use Vipmud.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-22 15:48:44 (edited by atgnat 2017-07-22 15:53:16)

I used to be really into MUDs in junior high and high school and reading discussions on them always makes me hugely nostalgic, but I just find them too time consuming to get into today. Reading up on dozens of pages of lore and memorizing skill and race mechanics before even starting, or having to sink in hours and hours to stay competitive with other players is just too much of a hurdle for me now, but I'm sure there must be more straightforward ones out there that are a little easier to jump into by now.     

What's a good, simple MUD client without all the bells and whistles these days? I used to use FireClient iirc but it wasn't perfect and I'm not even sure it exists anymore.

Though a game world encouraging exploration and quests or puzzle solving has always appealed to me more than constant PVP and PVE (probably why I became an instant fan of parser IF once I discovered it) and I'm not even sure where to start searching for that in a MUD.

2017-07-22 19:21:08

Hi atgnat
Client wise for an accessible client Vipmud or Mushclient are your best bets. See earlier in this topic for info (another reason I'm making the guide).
For muds I'm a solo exploring/questing sort of player myself, so pvp and keeping up  other players never appealed to me.

Hmmm,  mud recommendations that is an interesting one.

Alteraeon is a great game and good newbie experience, it also has lots of quests and can be played solo, however with at least two main classes plus the chance to learn spells and skills from your others it can be a bit info heavy at times. Still with great quests that carry through the game it's great to play as a story and with the mushZ client it's more like an audiogame than a mud.

Aardwolf and Erion are combat hacks each with strengths and weaknesses.

aardwolf has esier fire and forget combat, quicker over all advancement, but harder to navigate areas and sometimes need for web based tools, not to mention npc goals that are nearly impossible due to obscurity.

erion is more coherent generally, has interesting though not over complex combat and actually possible missions, but  is very slow.

Both games have pregen quests where you can just run on and whack monsters, though Aardwolf's are imho harder.

Frandom is great as a single player game since basically it plays like a giant interactive fiction, so if you just want to check in and poke the landscape to see what it does that might be a good bet, particularly since the parser is logical and the game has rudimentary combat at best (indeed you can't advance through combat only through quests).

4Dientions is similar to frandom and what shines there are the activities to do, however when I played bugginess and quest obscurity were a little frustrating in places, even with what were supposed to be straight forward activities like the various crafting options, a shame since there iss a great game in there.

Cosmic rage is brilliant for it's activities, though since each activity is a little different you do have to prepare slightly, still it is imho the least obscure and easiest to pickup space mud.

Needless to say very reality heavy muds like clok or lament probably wont' be helpful if you want to dive in straight away.

Of course I'm still trying muds out. lots of people like cyber assault  I've not got far with, and I've heard good things about both lensmoor and 3kingdoms/3scapes (which are similar games taken in different directions),  the last three are pretty complex, one reason I've not really got involved with them as yet.

Of course others will have thoughts on this too.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-07-23 06:10:59

i think miriani have a fast start,a fully working pilot life,if love RP,have better RP item than Cr.
i like description,if you standing on the street,you can see what kind shop around in the description.

2017-07-25 13:03:44

Hello, so just a quick update on that issue I had with Mush not reading the last paragraph of new text.  TSP on the new yugioh mud's chat alerted me to the cause of the issue and explained it rather well.  I found an old article that might explain it a bit better than I can, so I will paste it below:
note on prompts
MUSHclient, and these plugins, process complete lines only. This means that certain lines, such as prompts with no newline at the end will be spoken after the next line comes in. There are several ways around it.
For muds that support it, enabling Convert IAC EOR/GA to new line in the Output item of the configuration will translate certain telnet sequences into a newline for you. You may have to enable it mud-side (e.g. config +telnetga on smaug). If your mud doesn't support it, enabling this won't hurt anything.
Most muds allow you to put a newline after your prompt, or turn it off entirely. help prompt will usually say how.
In character creation where this is usually an issue, you'll just have to review the screen in order to read the last line of output that may have come in.

If you want to provide specific instructions on how to get to the config option: Convert IAC EOR/GA to new line, it is as follows: Game > Configuration > Output > Second to last checkbox is Convert IAC EOR/GA to new line.

Stewy, on the same yugioh chat also mentioned that if you toggle auto-retype it will read the last line for you.  This is due to the client then indicating that the option has been toggled and thus adds a new line to the output.  One can use this to get through the character creation as mentioned in the quote from the article above. 

It appears that VIP does not have this issue due to it automatically adding a new line after a certain amount of time has elapsed without there being one.

Since I have picked up this issue in at least four MUD's during my testing, I think it is important that you add this to the guide.

2017-08-25 19:55:09

got a problem with VIP Mud and NVDA
I installed the update to NVDA and I am unable to play any Muds on this client.
It will not type in  properly and gives me a run time error when tabbing between the input and output fields. why is this, can anyone help.
I hope I posted this in the right topic.

2017-08-25 23:27:42

Well post in whichever topic you like or create a new one if you wish (it's not as if we have a limited amount of them).

the problem your having I suspect is that the Nvda addon was for vipmud 1.0 and is no longer necessary since 2.0 has Nvda support by default.

Just run Vipmud with nvda as normal and everything should be fine.

hth.

Btw, I've not forgotten about the guide, but things are a bit hechtic at the moment what with moving house and such.
I have written a couple of sections and do intend to get it finished and posted up, so questions and information is still good to have.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)