Play immersive, multiplayer, pure-text games on Mudlet.

🆕 24 New Features ⚡ 25 Improvements 🔧 214 Bug Fixes 🏗️ 156 Infrastructure UpdatesWhat's New? Guided UI tour and new feature callouts, the Base UI starter interface with health bars and chat windows, browser-based sign-in support....

Mudlet 5.0 is the biggest release we have ever made: 420 commits and 537 closed issues since 4.22.0. It changes what happens the first time someone opens Mudlet, makes the client noticeably faster on the text it draws every second, and clears out a long list of everyday annoyances that had been with us for years.

Sixty seconds inside Mudlet 5.0: the redesigned game browser, the guided tour, the Base UI you can rearrange, and switching between open games with Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9. Direct link.
New players get an interface
Until now, a new Mudlet player connected to a game and got a black window full of scrolling text. Everything else – health bars, a map, a place for chat – was something they had to build themselves, or find a package for.
5.0 builds it for them. The starter interface reads what the game already sends over GMCP and MSDP and assembles health, mana and endurance bars, a map pane and a chat window out of it, automatically, on first connect. Every piece of it can be dragged wherever you like: the health bars, the map and the chat window all move independently, and adjustable containers can now be pulled out of their parent entirely.
It is not a black box. The chat capture is a normal trigger tree you can open, read and copy into your own system, and the whole thing ships as a package you can uninstall – cleanly, and it now actually disappears from the screen when you do.
It comes in three looks: the default, plus fantasy and sci-fi themes.
Alongside it:

A tutorial invitation on first launch, and a UI tour that walks through the interface.
Feature callouts that point out things worth knowing as you go.
A simpler trigger editor by default, so the first thing you see is not every advanced option at once.
The games list is split into My games and All games tabs.
The New profile button now shows you what it did.

Mudlet is substantially faster
We measured this properly, at the 5.0.0 release tag: sanitizer-free release builds, alternating A/B passes against 4.22.0, no overlap between the ranges.

What
Change

Display paint time
-47.1% (+89% paints per second)

Text throughput
+26.6%

ISO 8859-1 decoding
+48.5%

46 active triggers
+23.6%

Geyser layout move
-47.2% per operation

Geyser layout resize
-53.8% per operation

And end-to-end, running two real Achaea systems over 100,000 lines of real game log achieved between 12-25% improved trigger performance.
The work behind it: the display no longer lays out blank spaces it will not draw, lines that already fit are not rewrapped, the ISO 8859-1 decoder stopped allocating a string per character, colour tags in cecho/decho/hecho are processed faster, the buffer is no longer rescanned for hyperlinks that were never created, and a Geyser layout is laid out once per move instead of several times over.
Everyday text, fixed
Two of these had been open for years:

Copying no longer pads leading spaces in a multi-line selection.
Clicking the game window no longer hijacks Ctrl+C.
Copy as image works without selecting text first.
OSC 8 hyperlinks are handled properly, with a setting to turn them off.
Plain underline no longer keeps a wavy, dotted or dashed style from earlier text.
Full-window background images and gradients are supported.

Playing several characters at once
Ctrl+Tab cycles game tabs and Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 jump straight to one – including on macOS at last. Detached profile windows behave properly too: they no longer block the main window from coming to the front, and Alt+W and Alt+O work in them.
Mudlet also warns when two keyboard shortcuts clash instead of silently letting one win, and you can now tab through the shortcut settings in the order they are shown, with screen readers supported.
Sign in through your browser
Supported games can now hand sign-in to your browser – Google, Discord, or the game’s own account system – instead of asking you to type a password into the game window. Mudlet keeps the reconnect token in your operating system’s keychain, so later reconnects need neither a password nor a sign-in screen, and Forget saved sign-in on the Connection tab clears it.
The protocol behind it is documented at GMCP Extensions for game authors who want to support it.
New games and a new language
Four games join the default list: Rites of Passage, Dark Mists, PhoenixMUD and Federation 2 Community Edition.
And Czech (Čeština) joins the ~20 languages Mudlet ships in – complete, at 3415 of 3415 strings, contributed by Pavel Třešňák.
For scripters

getWindowGeometry(), windowVisible() and getLabelText()
Widget state getters for titles, stylesheets, tooltips and scroll bars
remainingNamedTimer() to check the time left on a named timer
getTextFormat() now reports which underline style the game asked for
Map menus can be matched against their map events
MMCP – peer-to-peer chat between clients – is documented at last, in Networking Functions
–offline loads a profile without connecting
Every default package now ships as an mpackage

Experimental: undoing the game’s own wrapping
Mudlet can undo the line wrapping a game applies before sending text, so the text reflows to your window instead of breaking where the game decided. As far as we know no other MUD client does this.
It is off by default and marked experimental, because games wrap in ways that are not always possible to reverse cleanly. If you turn it on, we would like to hear how it goes.

Thanks to everyone who reported issues, sent patches, translated strings and tested the PTBs.

Mudlet 4.22 is out - a mapper-focused release. Manage your map areas visually You can now create, rename and delete map areas right from the mapper with the new Configure Areas dialog - no scripting needed. A long-requested feature, finally here. Lock stub exits...