Re: `Cosmic Rage, an all new, all awesome Space MOO from Nathan Tech!
Okay, one problem I see right away is that the Mush-client pack download from your site's soundpack page in the Cosmic Rage section leads to a Dropbox 404. Rant ahead, but know that this isn't against the MUD, it's just how things happen I guess, and I will be trying the MUD, with one of the given soundpacks of course:
I know VIP Mud is great and all, and if you install Mush-client directly and set things up one by one it is complicated, but see the Unofficial Squarsoft MUD's sound pack to see how easy it can be, just download, unzip, run mushclient.exe and you're ready to go. Contrast that with VIP Mud's thing, copy this here, that there, run vipmud, configure this to that. Really, it's the opposite. The commercial client makes things more complicated, by being commercial, so no one can really make a pack, just instructions that have to be loaded into a client. But what do I know, VIP Mud must be easy to build for, plop in a sound, a line of text to match it to, and there you go I guess.
Edit: Just tried out both sound packs for VIP Mud2. Sierra's pack hasn't been updated since 2018, June something. If it has been, that newer version hasn't made it to the site, and might as well not exist for new players. In the Readme, there is no info on how to even start using the pack or logging in. For me, that makes the pack useless as I have little prior knowledge of VIP MUD, with its laughable UI with its unlabeled edit boxes for character name and whatever else. Ugh, that's the most angering thing I've ever seen, a program made for the blind, having edit boxes that aren't labeled so that they can be read by screen readers. And don't give any excuses of "just use sapi for UI". No, that's just inaccessibility. Snap's soundpack didn't come with a Readme, changelog, installer, or anything. I have no idea what to do with the thing. Very unprofessional, even for a community effort. "but oh just find these people on Twitter or CR and they'll give instructions." Do you think a new player would put in the time to do that? Heck no. I almost quit the Unofficial Squaresoft MUD because I have the set freaking aliases for skills when they could just do fuzzy matching like Alter Aeon seems to do. But I still don't know what to do with these packs, so I may not play the game again until these huge barriers for entry are solved.
So yeah, I'd just remove the link to the Mush-client pack, and just say the blind player will need VIP Mud, a commercial, $30 client, to enjoy Cosmic Rage at its best. And please put in that Tintin++ is a good client for Mac and Linux users in the list of clients. Mac users can use TDSR, Linux users can use Fenrir, both make using the terminal a little less painful.
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