http://www.apocalypse.org/~phi/htmud.html (World Wide Web Directory, 06/1995)

htMUD front door page

htMUD

what is htMUD?

htMUD is a distributed graphical tinymud. Its interface consists of two windows: a Mosaic (or other forms-capable Web client) window for input and room descriptions, and a telnet window for conversation output.

how does htMUD work?

The core of htMUD is a single perl script which handles all http requests sent to a single htMUD server. It accepts form inputs generated by using various action buttons (such as "Say", "Quit", or link buttons) and returns a page reflecting the current state of the room that you're currently in. It also automatically notifies players in the room of activity in the room (such as talking or people leaving and arriving) by connecting to a regular TinyMUD and sending messages to the players there. In this way, each player's regular TinyMUD serves as an output window. It also can automatically connect to other htMUD servers to exchange information such as the current location of a player.

Because Mosaic does not maintain a connection, htMUD has no way of telling if a player has logged out or has simply been inactive for a while unless the player hits the QUIT button. It's very important to use the QUIT button to make sure you don't keep getting output after you log off. It's also important to use the link buttons to travel from room to room rather than using the 'Back' button in your Mosaic or hotlists or URLs. If you use any of these other methods to travel, you could find yourself in two rooms at once -- a very confusing situation indeed.

To help fix some of these problems, htMUD has an idleout of one hour. If you don't say anything in a room for this amount of time, you'll be automatically logged out. If you're logged out of a room, you'll stop seeing conversation in that room, including things that you say. If this happens, you should return to the login page and start over.

how do I log in to htMUD?

To log in to htMUD, you need a windowing system, a copy of Mosaic, MacWeb, or lynx v2.3 or later, and an account on a TinyMUD somewhere. There are lots of TinyMUDs that give out accounts for the asking. Given the choice, you should use an unmodified TinyMUSH version 1.5 or later. Note that TinyTIM is not such a MUSH.

Once you have all these things, you can proceed to the login page. If you don't have all these things, you can still browse the database without participating in conversation.

why do I need an account on another TinyMUD?

Since Mosaic can't display information you haven't asked for, htMUD has to have some other mechanism for displaying conversations. This happens in another window; what's running in that window to allow the window to display conversation could be any program (and I'll probably soon write several different programs to display conversation in windows). I chose a telnet connection to an existing TinyMUD as the default program to be running in that window because it did not require players to install any special software to use htMUD. htMUD connects to the TinyMUD and passes messages to the player character logged in there, the TinyMUD passes the messages back to your telnet session, and conversation appears in your window, just like it should.

how do I build on htMUD?

To build on htMUD you need the following things:

a machine with a more-or-less recent copy of CERN or NCSA httpd running on it (the httpd must be able to speak CGI, the Common Gateway Interface).
a directory which is set up to run scripts from
a copy of the htMUD perl script (it's only about 25K long)
a copy of perl
an HTML editor, or a good knowledge of how to write HTML by hand
the installation instructions

or a friend with all these things who is willing to let you use them. Since htMUD is distributed, the load on any single machine is much lower than with a regular MUD, so it's easier to find someplace to put your building. However, it's still a bad idea to try to build on an htMUD without permission from whoever runs the machine.

what other cool things have you written?

I've got a whole bunch of other projects either completed or waiting on the back burner for me to have some time. Mostly I do these things to prove that they can be done -- htMUD was written in large part to prove that it was still possible to write something completely new in a weekend -- and therefore they never get to be finished products. That's okay; this isn't what I do for a living. If you see something cool that you want to pick up and run with, drop me a line.

htMUD was written by:

phi@www.arisia.org