Many moons ago I decided to venture back into the world of MUD - Multi-User Dungeons. It had been several decades since I last played and things appear to have moved on a bit. No longer are we bound to basic telnet play - a whole new set of MUD protocols appear to have emerged to enrich the user experience. I hunted around for some MUD clients and finally settled on Mudlet. I played, I added some extensions, I tweaked settings BUT then the developer in my kicked in. I can write my own client...

Apps need a catchy name, MUDly was born. I began to write the new MUD client by hand, in C (who doesn't like C?) and, not concerned with it being cross platform, I went for developing with Gnome in mind.

Many rewrites later, I parked the project.

Then came along AI and code generation and I decided to have a finishing the client, or get it to a point where I can use it to play.

There is another reason for creating the client but I'll get to that in another post. The client serves as a platform for something more interesting.

Back to MUDly, so far we have

• Built for Gnome/Gtk4

• Text-To-Speech - no missing those conversations

• 2D Map - every client needs one of these

• 3D Map - because I can

• Supports many of the MUD protocols as I can test

• Plugin architecture - thats just how roll

• MCP Service - connect codex so it can test

• Text-To-Image - so I can visualise players and rooms

• User configurable layout - including multiple displays

Here are the pics

Dual display layout

Player and room txt2img

Drag and Drop layout system

If there is something specific you'd like to know, leave a comment.

I'll aim to post more on MUDly in the future.

Before you ask, I'm not intending to release MUDly in the near future but if I do it will be as a Gentoo package.