Abigail Brady

They appear to have totally updated Cryosphere to version 2.6, more than six years in the making. It doesn't yet have the web interface that I wrote 2 years ago installed on it. But this will happen.

This is quite weird.

Writing new MUDs was a perfectly reasonable habit when we started in the late 1990s. MUDs are tailor-made for bored students to write (none of this stuff with needing artwork, we were perfectly capable of writing adequate prose and good code) and perfect for them to play, being low-bandwidth. It had become a bit more eccentric in the early 2000s, when we did the big scenario rewrite and world-building. But there was a certain community out there. Now? Well, it's basically retrogaming, isn't it? Except not the fashionable sort. No 16-colour sprites for us, you see. As we hurtle through our 30s, Cryosphere is still there. Our hosting has gone from an account at CSLib to now a server somewhere in Germany that none of us have ever seen, and which we share with ElvenMUD. The same people log in from day to day, and for whatever reason use it to coordinate social activities with each other. There doesn't seem likely to ever be a mass inrush of players, even if one day we finish the world and the trading aspect of the game. It's reached a steady state.

We're having a 15th anniversary party in the autumn. In 2015 it will have existed for half my life. Will it still be there in 2022? Will our children and grand-children maintain it as a curiosity?

On "holiday". Four more days to work this year. Really should do something sensible with it next year. Have continued sudden and inexplicable actual projects during holiday.

Last month I put out my first release of Crystal, with a fix in it I had promised to release ASAP five years ago. Oops.

As you might have gathered from my last post, work has also continued on Chrysalis, the web client for the MUD. It's quite a bit more than a proof of concept now.

• session-id rather than username/password being sent each time
• better terminal emulation, unicode support
• Wordwrapping is done on the client-side, so it reflows nicely if you resize
• alternate style sheet which uses a proportional font; and mud-side markup to allow things that can't be shown like that to be shown in a monospace font
• HTML tables for tabular data (illustrated with the list of things in Muon's bar in the screenshot)
• prompt grabbing, so your prompt ends up to the left of the input box

Lots of niggling UI things left to do: possibly the most important part remaining is a user creation path, and figuring out what to do about the pager.

I finally started work on the web mud client today. This has gone better than I expected. I am able to load up a web page, type a command into a box, press a button, and then have it log in to the mud as a user, do that command, and send the result back for display in the HTML page, which displays with formatting as it would have done in a telnet.





I am declaring victory for today.

( what I need to do next )

Have decided to try to revive my mud client, crystal, as an active project (two commits in the last 12 months is kind of bad). So we now have a shiny new mailing list for it. All hail crystal!

Managed to get through the day, and slayed a number of bugs, dead! Currently going through the photos from last night... Also I cooked for everyone this evening.