Introduction

I'm going to be using this blog to discuss MUD design issues related specifically to God Wars II, but which I feel may also be of interest to other developers. I use MudLab for more general discussions, but I don't want to turn that into a load of "my game does this" posts.

My main reason for creating this blog is to record my experiences creating a custom GUI for MUSHclient. I've already been posting the information on MudBytes, but I think a blog would be a more effective way of managing the comments from other users - the MudBytes thread is getting a bit cluttered and difficult to navigate.

A graphical interface is something I've wanted for God Wars II for quite a while, although I've always tended to dismiss it as something outside my area of expertise. On 30th June 2009 I even made some early inquiries into creating a simple GUI for MUSHclient, but I never really took it any further. It wasn't until a couple of posts on MudBytes that I finally got the ball rolling.

The first was on 15th March 2010, when donky asked if I could detect which clients my players used. Prior to that point I'd never really looked into telnet negotiation (shameful I know!), but once I'd started playing with it I suddenly realised just how easy and useful it is.

The second was on 6th April 2010, when Scandum recommended that I add support for MSDP. At the time it was only intended for one of my players who wanted it for his TinTin++ scripts, but once I'd added it, I realised that it did exactly what I'd wanted to do with MUSHclient - and by 17th April I'd managed to create a basic MSDP plugin for MUSHclient.

By the end of April 2010 I had implemented MSDP and had created my first GUI - only simple energy bars, admittedly, but six weeks earlier I didn't understand how telnet negotiation worked, I'd never programmed in Lua, and I'd never written a client plugin.

In other words: This ain't rocket science. It might appear intimidating at first, but MUSHclient does all the hard work for you - all you need to do is provide it with the images, pass it the data, and tell it what and where to draw. Some of my players have already designed their own plugins, and another mud developer mentioned that he was able to create a basic GUI for his own mud in only a few hours, using mine as a template.

On that note, I should also mention that while you're welcome to copy and adapt my plugin for your own muds, I would ask you not to redistribute the images. I have collected a selection of public domain avatars which you can download here, along with some links for obtaining or creating more, but most of the graphics used by my plugin were created specifically for God Wars II by Alayla, or have other licencing restrictions.