Atlantis

Not finalized; see text

Current Version: 0.9.8.9 (September 11, 2009)

Atlantis is a client specifically designed to aid in playing text-based multiuser games. It is designed from the ground up entirely in Cocoa, and integrates with system services - such as the Mac OS X spellchecker - as much as possible. In addition to the expected feature-set of every MU* client - connect to a game, provide highlighting, log output and so on - Atlantis has a number of fairly advanced features:

• 'Spawn' support.
• Shared world settings.
• Growl support
• Versatile Windowing
• HTML Logfiles
• User defined hotkeys
• User defined aliases
• Advanced event system
• SSL-encrypted connections
• MCCP support
• Perl scripting
• MCP 2.1

Version 0.9.8.9 adds/changes the following:

• GENERAL: Perl *REALLY* works on Snow Leopard now. Sigh.
• GENERAL: All worlds show up as submenu of 'Worlds' now.
• GENERAL: Spawns always focus their input area when selected now.

The author is planning on both free and shareware version of the software; a discussion forum post on the official web site explains the plans in more detail.

PennMUSH

Current Version: 1.7.4p15 (Temporarily unavailable.)

PennMUSH for Macintosh is a port of the popular PC-based PennMUSH software. Version 1.7.4p15 for Classic changes the following:

• It's only for Classic, and only PPC at that; there is no longer a 68k version.
• Brings parity with the normal UNIX/Win32 distribution of PennMUSH.

See the PennMUSH home page for more information. (Temporarily unavailable, as the author graduated from college in May 2003 and lost access to his hosting; the latest version available is 1.1, from April 2000.)

Savitar

Shareware; $15

Current Version: 1.1.4 (May 23, 2000) / 1.3.12 (October 31, 2006) / 1.4.3 (May 5, 2008) / 1.5.1 (December 26, 2009)

Savitar (formerly Tinkeri View) is a "MUVE" (Multi-User Virtual Environment) client for the Macintosh that is very promising and has been undergoing very heavy development since 1997! See the very nice--and unusually educational--Savitar web site for more information.

Version 1.3.12 (which only runs on Power Macs running OS 8.6 - X) includes the following changes:

• Added recovery code for missing ANSI color preferences
• Fixes for ANSI color brightness/dim rendering
• Fixes for ANSI background color rendering

Version 1.4.3 (which only runs on Mac OS X 10.3.9+) includes the following changes:

• The 'play' local command can now stream MP3, MP2, MP1, OGG, and AIF files.
• Changed the "open text window" local command to accept unix-style paths (goodbye OS 9-style paths).
• Fixed a potential crasher when closing a window.
• Fixed bug in text windows. Horizontal scrolling now resets when text wrapping is turned off.

Version 1.5.1 (which only runs on Mac OS X 10.4.11+) includes the following changes:

• Fixed a bug where certain bad regex expressions in triggers were causing a crash.
• Removed support for OS X versions prior to 10.4.11.

SlashMUD

Current Version: Preview 3 (May 9, 2005)

For Mac OS X only, SlashMUD is an Open Source, object-oriented, extensible, and speedy MUD server. According to the author, "SlashMUD is an Open Source, Macintosh-based MUD that is currently in the final stages of being ported to Mac OS X. SlashMUD is fully object-oriented and includes many unique features built-in as standard. Much customisation can be done by editing the data files, and what can't be done that way can be done by writing a SlashMUD Plugin (implemented as compiled code snippets written in C or C++) for customisations or by altering the source code. SlashMUD started off being very loosely based on the flow of control in an LP type of MUD, but has been designed from the ground up to be fast and extensible. It is fully compiled for speed (rather than interpreting another programming language), uses a custom plain text format for storing data and runs as a BSD-subsystem application on Mac OS X. SlashMUD began life as an Object Pascal Mac OS 8/9 application, but is in the process of being ported to ISO C on Mac OS X (actually the target platform is POSIX, and it runs quite happily on Linux but I prefer to use Mac OS X)." The "What's New" page has more information on this release.

Trebuchet Tk

Emailware; $0

Current Version: 1.070 (December 4, 2005)

From the Trebuchet Tk home page: "Trebuchet Tk is a client program for connecting to TinyMUD style social MUD servers on the Internet. This program is designed to be used with TinyMUD, TinyMUCK, TinyMUSH, MOO, and several other variants. It's probably not well designed for combat oriented MUDs like LPMUD and Diku, but it does support them." Features include:

• TCL/Tk is a powerful extension language, which you can use to add new abilities to the client. You can even create fully interactive GUI dialogs from TCL/Tk scripts. Actually, the entire client is written in TCL/Tk. Yet it's amazingly fast.
• Trebuchet supports MCP 2.1 for close-knit client-server cooperation. It only supports a few (impressive!) MCP packages so far, but it should be trivial to create new ones.
• The server can request the creation of GUI dialogs via the MCP GUI package. This could make in-game bulletin boards, mail programs, and text editors much easier to use.
• If you have the TLS extension to the TCL interpreter installed, Trebuchet will support SSL encrypted connections to MU* servers that support it. The FBMuck 6.0 and ProtoMuck servers have support for SSL.
• You can create Hilites and Triggers that watch incoming text from the world. They can highlight all or part of each line, send automated commands back to the MUD, or even run TCL scripts.
• Pattern matching for highlights and Triggers is very flexible. The matching schemes include "Starts with", "ends with", "contains", "wildcard matching", and "regexp matching."
• Highlight Styles can include text color, background color, font, size, bold, italic, etc.
• Highlight Styles can have StyleMenu entries associated with them, that pop up in context menus when you right-click on the highlighted text. (However, there isn't yet a GUI interface available for setting these. Just a command line interface.)
• You can create command line Macros that can take multiple arguments and expand them out to much more complicated commands or TCL scripts.
• You can create QuickButtons that can send commands or execute TCL scripts with a single click.
• You can create KeyBinds to let you send commands or execute TCL scripts, with just a few keystrokes. (or only one!)
• You can connect to multiple Worlds at once, each one with it's own scrollback buffer.
• You can search scrollback forwards or backwards, using literal text or regular expressions.
• You can Log text from a world to a file, in either formatted HTML or plain text format.
• You can Quote a file to the world, with prepended and/or appended text for each line.
• An integrated Scratchpad lets you edit text files, or jot down descriptions, then send them to a world.
• Almost all these features have keyboard-based methods to invoke them. (Except Quickbuttons)
• All these features have command-line interfaces as well as GUI interfaces.
• Trebuchet is cross-platform, available for Windows 95/98/2000/XP, UNIX with X Window and Mac OS X.

Version 1.070 adds/changes the following:

• Fixed: Some servers send telnet IAC DO LINEMODE, but can't handle the reply.
• Fixed: Various bugs in TELNET protocol and STARTTLS support.
• Fixed: Input buffer can now be resized as small as the scrollbar will allow.
• Fixed: Compass rose no longer sends dicrection commands to the wrong world.
• Fixed: qbutton_minwidth /pref now only affects quickbutton widths.
• Fixed: Improved spellchecker error reporting. Made it not kill standard_timer.
• Fixed: Removed extra newlines from opening and saving text files from textdlog.
• Fixed: /error dialogs should now pop up from the foremost dialog.
• Fixed: Attempted to fix quickbutton layout code.
• Fixed: First-run window size now is reasonable.
• Fixed: MCP dialog creation error with setting max dlog width and height.
• Fixed: Improved window size estimation for first-time run.
• Fixed: Turning off HTML logging now should work correctly.
• Fixed: Various dialogs now start with focus in Name field.
• Fixed: Added validation for various dialogs, before allowing Add/Update.
• Added: Support for TELNET terminal-type reporting.
• Added: /dokey delete_char, to delete the character before the cursor.
• Added: Text dialogs now have horizontal scrollbar, for when word wrap is off.
• Changed: Cut will now refuse to put a null string into the copy buffer.
• Changed: aspell defaults no longer have --lang=en args, so debian works.

You can read about the author's ambitious plans for the software on the Trebuchet Tk home page.

In regard to cost, the author notes: "As with all quality products, there is a cost to pay. In this case, though, the fee is not monetary. My entire asking price is this: If you have a moment where suddenly you find that Trebuchet has done something for you that makes you sit back and go 'Wow!,' drop me an e-mail about it. That will pay me in full."