Hi Everyone
I know this has come up before, the question of how we can play Muds
on the Mac. After doing a lot of experiments, I now have a method of
playing Muds using OS X and Voiceover, and I thought I'd share it here.
I use tintin++ in a terminal window to play. The reason I focused on
this method is that tt has always been my favorite Mud client, and I
had a lot of triggers and such that I didn't want to have to redo, and
terminal reads reasonably well with Voiceover to begin with.
Point-by-point, here's what I consider the important issues and how I
address them. Others might have different priorities and different
viewpoints.
auto-reading:
Terminal's auto-reading is mostly sufficient for mudding, as long as
you keep two important things in mind: any text that is identical and
on the same line doesn't get read, and everything else will auto-read
as long as it's not a direct result of your actions. The only time the
first point is an issue is when your prompt doesn't change, and I,
personally, don't want to here the prompt read every single time
anyway. More important in my mind is the second point, meaning that
anything that happens as a direct result of your pressing return to
acknowledge the command will not auto-read. So, if you go north, the
room name and other such things will not auto-read. However, if
there's a delay, of even a half second or so, between when you press
enter and any text appearing, auto-reading will kick in again. It
takes a bit of getting used to, but I've grown to like it, to be honest.
sound triggers:
If you use tintin, in order to have sounds played as part of a trigger
or alias, you'll need a command-line audio player, and one is not
installed with OS X by default. However, source for one is included in
the XCode developer tools, and it can easily be compiled with a few
commands.
Finally, VO's keys can take some getting used to while playing Muds,
and I'd recommend making use of the numpad commander to get a layout
that suits you.
Other notes:
This is not restricted to tintin, any unix-based console Mud client
will follow this pattern, so if you prefer something else feel free to
use it. The auto-reading and other behaviors will be the same, though
how you handle audio files and triggers will, of course, vary. Also,
this will only work in Leopard, as Tiger has serious issues with
reading terminal which prevent it from being very useful for playing
Muds. Feel free to contact me if you need any help or want to try this
and aren't sure about something.
Hope this was of some help. As I said, this is what works for me, it
may not for anyone else.
- Mudding on the Mac, revisited Jacob Schmude
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