The state of the MOO / Sexy Modern Multiplattform Client (long)

[christopher-john-czettel]

Context

I started playing MUDs/MOOs in the early 90ies and have been an on and off player in multiple genres since then. Sadly I noticed that in the recent years the big ones (AardMUD, Sindome, HellMOO, etc.) are still around and doing quite OK, but many small and niche ones seem to be dying off, with max online players below 10, and them struggling to keep alive. It seems mostly only veterans and blind players hang around, while the (the very few) new players are having troubles with the high barrier of entry. (Or actually finding out about this kind of "game".) This seems to be the reason, player bases have been declining in the past decades more and more.

I personally believe, that MUDs/MOOs still might have a place in the current century and text is still relevant, if we - as a MOO community - manage to make the text-experience more palatable to the newer generations that grew up with GUIs on smartphones, high-res 3D graphics on their consoles and never heard of MOOs.

Reviving the MOO might require some "dumbing down" and "casualization" - I figure the younger generations won't generally be up to spending lots of time creating a character with old-school commands, writing a character history with 1000 words for an RPI MOO and learning hundreds of commands before even getting started with the experience (they don't know yet). I think Stunt's web interface is a good start, but not enough to make a difference (I think).

Oh... and marketing, but that's a different topic. ;-)

Try imagining this

You open your MOO-app on your phone, see a room description with a colorfully highlighted rock on the floor. Instead of typing "ex rock" seeing the verbs and then typing "pet rock", all you have to do is put your finger on the word rock, and you instantly see a list of verbs in a context menu that you can select from.

There might be a menu offering some default emotes you can select from, etc. while still allowing you to type up - and if wanted save - custom emotes/poses/etc for later (re-)use.

Providing menus and wizards to create simple objects and dig rooms (or even character generation) wouldn't be that hard either.

Add a nice map system that translates ASCII-maps to some nice graphical UI so players don't get lost.

Maybe add some "intelligent" autocompletion that takes into account players/NPCs/items in a room to ease typing on a small screen, that kind of stuff.

This might not be what "old school" MUD/MOO players - like you and me - want but would allow new players to get acquainted with and really experience the virtual realities text-based immersive multiplayer games can provide without the barrier to actually learn all the details about MOOs at first. Maybe some of those new players might "graduate", try out a "real" MUD/MOO-client and join a more sophisticated "real old-school" MOO later.

All this could be achieved without dropping the compatibility for classical text input/clients, all the app would have to do is parse and generate text for the MOO.

User Acceptance Tests

I built a small demo MOO with a pet rock (based on Yib's Pet Rock -> http://cmc.uib.no/moo/yib/index.html) with some humorous content and showed it to a few younger none tech-savvy friends of mine, who never heard of MUDs/MOOs and they were very intrigued. Especially as I demo'd multiplayer and adding own rooms/items to them. Basically, the feedback was "Wow, that's like WhatsApp/Telegramm, just with avatars, rooms and emotes. Cool!" One of them even started fantasizing about creating their own apartment to invite their friends over and have a party while they were driving to work on a bus. SOLD! ;-)

What I want to do

I have been interested in and playing around with libqt (KDE is based on it, pronounced "cute", see: https://www.qt.io/) and its QTcreator for quite a while now. Basically, it is an open source (GPLv3/LGPLv3) library for cross-platform development (Win, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Android TV). Tutorials and mini-apps can only bring you so far, so I am looking for a "real" project to get into the nitty-gritty. Therefore I would be willing to start off an open source prototype (thinking MIT-license here) based on qt and Stunt for such an app and see where it goes. Personally, I think this would perfectly fit and extend the idea of making MOOs more accessible to the masses who have never heard of telnet. ;-)

A nice presentation on CPPcon this year "QT as a C++ Framework: (History, Present State, and Future)" is to be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWiAUUblD34&t=4280s

What I am asking you

(in no particular order)

• Would you be interested in using something like this?
• Do you see any flaws or have ideas for improvement?
• Do you see any other use cases?
• Do you know of any other project that is trying to achieve the same?
• Any features you would suggest?
• Would you be willing to contribute to stunt or the new app?
• Is this a direction you can see the Stunt project going?
• Would you prefer me trying somewhere/something else?

Please share your thoughts, no matter if you think the idea is great or shit! ;-)