haha yeah, most games take a little while to get used to, and some don't allow you to configure teh prompt, that thing aat the top of every screen that says your hp/mana/movement/etc every time you  move. it gets annoying so I usually quit and go on to another game. also teh player base is important. if I ask for help I want help and not, read the help files, or, sorry i'm too busy. I've even had a few games where the players would challenge me to a duel oe get me into a pk room so they could kill me. then laugh as i struggle to defend myself.  for muds i use a special version of mush client called mush z that has a plugin that allows it to work with jfw, wineyes, sapi, system access, a version of eloquence built into the package and nvda. and it's all free. but scripting can be a nightmare because of the complicated language.

wow, sounds like me. I find it hard to find a mud that I can stick with, I always find something wrong with ti, either I spend hours grinding, that gets boring, or they want huge amounts of gold for armor and weapons when gold is tough to find in the game. some games gold is easy to come by and some it's rare. I've tried vip mud, the only reason I didn't stick with it is you have to pay for it and it seems backwards to pay for a program to play free muds, and it doesn't work with  nvda. what i mean by this is it doesn't read what's coming in automatically, you have to scroll through the output, which can be a bit monotonous, and it's hard to keep up if oyu're in a group. I'm not bashing VIP mud, just saying why i couldn't use it.

Hi.
I have tryed many muds as well,but they all get boreing after sometime.
By the way,wouldn't this topic be better suited in the genral game forum?I mean its game related and many people simpley don't read the ot room.

Okay

As an NVDA user, Mushclient is the only thing that works. Do _not_ pay for vipmud. Yes, that might sound harsh, but hear me out. Vipmud is missing many, many features that have been standard in mud clients since 1999 or so!  Let me give you examples:
MCCP: MCCP is the mud client compression protocol.  It allows repetative text sent between you and the mud to be compressed, in order to save lag on your end, and bandwidth savings for the mud. It makes so huge a difference that Aardwolf will even punish you by handing out fewer quest points and less XP if you're using a client that doesn't support MCCP.  MCCP is supported on nearly every mud server and active mud today. Vipmud does not support it last I checked, and had no plans to add it.

MXP: MXP is the Mud Extension Protocol. It allows muds to mark up text with special formatting marks and styles, similar to HTML.  This can help mud clients better recognize and handle everything from paragraph breaks to exit lists. Vipmud does not support it, even though *well* over half the active muds today support and use it.

GMCP: GMCP is a protocol that all of the most popular muds (every iron realms mud, Aardwolf, and more) use to send your mud client specially formatted data about room names and numbers, exits, land types, NPCs, closest shopkeepers/fountains/inns/etc, your characters stats and effects, the skills and spells you know, and much much more.  Clients that support GMCP can then use this data in scripts, to build automatic maps and speedwalks, and do all kinds of interesting and helpful things.  Guess who doesn't support it, and has no plans to support it? That's right! Vipmud again!

MSP: MSP is the mud sound protocol. It allows a mud to include sounds with the game, and trigger those sounds on your client, with no need for you to make special scripts and triggers. Muds like CoffeeMud, Godwars2, Meteria Magica, and many more all support and use it.  Guess who doesn't? I bet you already know the answer: vipmud.

That's just a small list of things not supported by vipmud; I left out other minor features that every modern mud and client has like the mud server status protocol, telnet goahead, pweblo, etc, that vipmud still lacks.  Vipmud is yet another example of specialty blind software written to make a buck, that lags nearly fifteen years behind everything sighted people have come to expect in features of mud clients.  Payng for vipmud, in my opinion, means supporting the idea that blind people shouldn't get to use mainstream software, and can always expect less from the software we do get.  And I'm not just talking nonsense; I own a copy of vipmud, and am extremely unsatisfied; I had hoped that all of these missing features would come in an update, but we've heard nothing about them so far.  I had a lot of respect for GMA Games, as they usually release quality products, with lots of features, and add missing features in free updates. This hasn't been the case with vipmud. They've let down both themselves and the blind mudding community.  Maybe I missed an announcement or update, I hope I did. Because Vipmud just isn't the kind of product we've come to expect out of GMA.

Okay, now onto accessible muds. Right now, my favourite is CoffeeMud (coffeemud.net, port 23) because of its awsome crafting system, NPC AI, skills/chants/songs/spells, and more...see my post about it in this forum.  But with Mushclient, the NVDA reader, and the extra scripts, you should be able to play nearly anything. I've tried alter aeon, aardwolf, 6 dragons, 4 dimensions, core, all of the iron realms muds, hellmoo, miriani, threshhold, discworld, lensemoor, and many more. I've been successful with them all. 

Hope this helps!  And sorry about the rant, but it's something I've wanted to say since a month after vipmud was released.

I have bought the program; how, in that case, do you turn it on, configure where it keeps the sounds, etc? I'm not seeing any MSP options anywhere. It could be that I'm stupid, or missed an update? The manual doesn't seem to talk about it, either.

As far as I remember, I just stuck the sounds in the sounds folder of vipmud then activated the msp in the mud itself, eg with setsound on in materiamagica and it worked.

the only time I've seen sound fail completely in vipmud was with the alterean vipmud pack, but I'm not sure I set it to work properly there.

Wrong, you only need to download the sounds. I'm not sure if Alter Aeon supports MSP but I have it working flawlessly on Materia Magica, and for some reason partly working on its own in Godwars 2. Many muds do indeed have soundpacks which include scripts as an extra, allowing sounds in a mud which doesn't support MSP. You also need to check where the mud is calling the sounds from because some will add a subdirectory to the path.

In all the muds I've played I have rarely seen MCCP, and when I did try it the compression actually increased lag. Frankly these days bandwidth is cheap enough that there is no real reason to use it for text based games like muds, trying to encourage its use seems anachronistic. In my opinion the bandwidth saving is outweighed by the processing overhead.

Also formatting information like MXP is of limited or no use to us, and I have never even heard of GMCP before now. I certainly haven't heard it mentioned in a game.

I've used GMud, VIPMud, MushClient and MonkeyTerm. GMud is nice and simple but only really works with the Jaws scripts, I would only suggest it to a complete beginner. Its functionality is very basic. Mushclient is incredibly powerful but the more complex functions such as the scripting are too difficult for general use, this is speaking as someone who was educated as a C++ programmer at college.

I believe Miriani's sounds are from scripts not from MSP. To use MSP you need to:
Download the sounds from the game's web site and put them in the sounds folder in VIPMud's directory, assuming the mud doesn't look for the sounds in a subfolder.
Enable sounds in the mud itself.
Have the registered version of VIP.

Perhaps you could give us more detail on what you did and any errors you get?

which are those six "most popular muds on the world"?

Oh, yeah. Our mobile providers are totally screwing us over. Depending on your provider, you can expect to pay from 4 to 10 cents *per kb*!  Unfortunately, we have several providers, and the prices with all of them are equally bad. The only deal is to pay something like $20 a month for a 500 MB plan.  Whenever a new iPhone is released, one of our providers, Rogers, usually has a 6 GB for $30 special offer, but it's only available for about a month after the new iPhones are released, and you need to get a new phone on a 3 year contract to get that "deal".  So playing a mud on my mobile connection for a few hours can easily cost me over $10 if I'm not careful about compression.

Sorry for the aggressiveness; these are issues that I feel extremely strongly about.  I can't help my feeling that GMA released an incomplete mud client to make a buck off the blind community.  So I do find myself getting rather upset when people jump in to defend actions that I, personally, find inexcusable. I'm not trying to say that people who use vipmud are bad people; if you can afford it and it does what you need, fair enough. But I will not relent on my opinion that vipmud is a bad client, especially when you compare it to paid offerings available to the sighted community, and free offerings available to everyone.  As someone who has to put up with Canadian mobile and fixed line bandwidth prices, and also runs several servers for various communities, bandwidth is another issue that I feel strongly about.  It is *expensive*. Maybe not for you, but for others. Especially for server operators. If I opened the mud I'm developing to the public, and none of my players used compression, I couldn't afford to support more than about 50 hardcore players. This is another issue I've thought long and hard about, and come to the conclusion that if I do run a mud, the only way to keep it viable will be to force MCCP on everyone, or seriously penalize those not using it, and hope people can get hold of a client that supports it.  My current thoughts on a compramize are to allow 5 or 10 uncompressed connections to the mud at one time, and an unlimited number of compressed ones.  These are real issues. I'm not just being contrary for the sake of being contrary. To get a real world idea of the kind of difference this can make, look on your computer and find a 5 or 10 MB text file; log files can sometimes be good. Now zip that file up, and compare the size of the zipped and unzipped files.  Depending on the contents of the file, the 5 MB file probably zipped up to be well under a meg.  Hopefully, this will show just how enormous the bandwidth savings we're discussing really are. 

As for muds supporting GMCP: Aardwolf, Achaea, Aetolia, Imperian, Lusternia, and Midkemia all support GMCP. They all have well over a hundred players online at any given time. And there are probably other GMCP enabled muds I'm missing; those are just the obvious ones.  GMCP is widely supported by sighted players, and it could be of even more use to blind than sighted for making access improvements to games.  Unfortunately, the one specialty mud client for blind players chose to leave it out. See the problem?  The issues with vipmud are extremely serious, numerous, and not going away.  In my opinion, the only way blind players are going to see improvement is if we all stand up and make our voices heard, letting developers, even developers from inside our own community, know that we're not going to sit calmly buy while we get second class access to everything.  If google suddenly made 75% of new features inaccessible to the blind, they'd never hear the end of it.  I'm really struggling to understand why vipmud is getting a free pass from everyone. Well, more than a free pass really, as vipmud isn't free.  I'm both confused and upset by it, honestly.

Yeah, all of the iron realms muds are heavy, heavy, heavy RP muds. I think that's why they get so many players; they appeal to a sighted market that isn't currently served by graphical MMORPGs. If you look at the top 10 muds on TMC, all but 1 or 2 (Aardwolf and Battmud I believe) are extremely RP intensive.  If that's not your thing, then yeah, you've mostly got to go to a smaller mud. 

I know GMA is one man. But the things that gets me are: first, he's managed to do a *lot* better on all of his other products, so vipmud is a rather huge let-down. It feels, to me at least, like the developer at GMA is only an infrequent mudder, and doesn't have the passion for muds or mud clients that he has for audio games.  As though he just developed it to fill a market that he perceived would pay. His other products are not like that: they're well thought out, well designed works of love. Vipmud doesn't feel like that at all, IMHO.  Second, his product advertising, and the name Vipmud itself, goes out of its way to spread a lot of FUD about how hard it is to get mainstream mud clients to be accessible.  It's not that hard! Assuming you're using JFW, Window Eyes, or NVDA, I can get you running on any mud you want to play in under 10 minutes: probably less time than it would take you to buy vipmud and enter the license key.  Yet he has, in the past (and may still?) called vipmud the "only accessible mud client".  It wouldn't get me if he marketed it as the most user friendly or something. But he's marketing it as the only accessible client, and telling untruths about how his client compares in features to other sighted (yet still accessible) clients on the market.  This reenforces my first impressions that vipmud is an excersise in making a buck, rather than developing a first class product.  Rename it to TalkingMud, advertise it as the mud client with speech built-in, admit that other accessible solutions do exist and are easy to set up, recognize that vipmud has proes as well as serious cons, and I'd be happy. In other words, present his client as an option, rather than the only reasonable solution.  But GMA has never, for example, published a reasonable comparison between his client and mushclient, other than vague mutterings about how hard mushclient is to set up (untrue!). 

Honestly, I've considered making a distribution of mushclient, all set up for screen readers, and able to play on any mud. Install it, and connect, and it talks.  But as I'm Canadian, and so is GMA a Canadian company, I wouldn't feel safe doing so. If GMA accused me of trademark or patent infringement, and based on my feelings above I strongly suspect that he would, I can't afford to fight that in court.  What GMA is doing with the marketing of vipmud, and not releasing a feature complete client, is holding the blind community back, not advancing us forward.  I know he's one man. I know he's short on cash. But never the less, I still don't believe that excuses vipmud from blame. I'm quick to praise developers who get it right. And I'll praise any of GMA's other products to the sky. But I also believe that developers who get it so seriously wrong should also get there fair share of well thought out, reasoned criticism. And I haven't seen any of that in the community, and that really bothers me. 

Yes, I realize that if I don't like it, I don't have to use it. But it's not that simple.  Now mud programmers who want to fully include blind mudders are going to need to take vipmuds shortcomings into consideration, weather we like it or not.  For example, if I require MCCP, I can kiss a huge portion of my blind players goodbye.  So even though I don't use the client myself, vipmud is still actively harming me and the muds I love.  The only solution is to speak out against it, and make current vipmud users aware of the problems, and hope that enough of them will listen that GMA will decide to do something.