MUDRammer - A Modern MUD Client

Description of App

MUDRammer is a modern MUD client for iPhone and iPad focused on speed, readability, and flexibility.

MUDs are online multiplayer text-based games. There are thousands, set in fantasy, medieval, Sci-Fi, absurdist, and many other worlds.

Background support - maintains your connection!
A gesture control for rapid player movement.
Beautiful ANSI color rendering in all orientations.
Syncs your preferences with iCloud across devices.
Customize MUDRammer with themes and font size control.
Add Triggers, Aliases, and Gags to any connection.
Tap to open links and emails in-app.
Unlimited command history.

Plus:

MUDRammer can open telnet links from other apps.
Easily save your favorite MUD for fast access.
Enable/disable typing autocorrect at any time.
Client-side text wrapping with font size control. Computer, enhance!

If you have issues with a specific MUD, please use the in-app feedback link or contact admin@splinesoft.net.

> get mudrammer from app store
You pick up the MUDRammer. You're an unstoppable force for righteousness (or evil) wherever you are!

Version

1.1

Free or Paid

Paid

Apple Watch Support

Not Known

Device(s) App Was Tested On

iPhone

Accessibility Comments

This app is very accessible. There are a few unlabled buttons and two unlabled text fields, but the app developer is trying to make this the most accessible MUD client app with VoiceOver. I suspect the few unlabeled things will be correctly labeled in the next version.

VoiceOver Performance

VoiceOver reads most page elements.

Button Labeling

Most buttons are clearly labeled.

Usability

There are some minor accessibility issues with this app, but they are easy to deal with.

Other Comments

Note: To choose a different MUD than the one that you're given when first starting the app, turn off VoiceOver, double-tap and turn VoiceOver back on. You'll then be able to see settings. Then you double-tap on worlds and can pick a different MUD.

App Store Link

https://itunes.apple.com/th/app/mudrammer-a-modern-mud-client/id597157072?mt=8&…

Developer's Website

http://www.splinesoft.net/contact.html

Recommendations

14 people have recommended this app

Most recently recommended by DougS 1 year 2 months ago

Options

Comments

Autoreading

Hello, I was just wondering if text was autoread by voiceOver, or if, like the other existing clients, you had to scroll through it manually?

Hiya, I wrote MUDRammer. I

Hiya, I wrote MUDRammer. I believe you'll need to scroll manually through new lines today. I am definitely looking at improving this in the short term.

Thank you

Thank you for your prompt response, as well as for your openness to making the game accessible. Adding the ability for voiceOver to read automatically would set an already feature rich client far above anything that currently exists for the IOS platform. Thanks again!

MUDRammer 1.2

MUDRammer 1.2 is rolling out to the app store over the next few hours with some nifty voiceover features: automatic reading of new lines as they come in, announcing connect and disconnect, and improved navigation (the top nav bar with the Settings and Connect/Disconnect buttons is now always on screen when voiceover is enabled). I hope you'll give it a try and I'm very interested in your experience with and feedback for MUDRammer. I want it to be the most accessible client on the store.

Version 1.2

As stated above, Voiceover now truly does read lines that come in from the mud automatically and the bar at the top now stays around with voiceover on all the time. I think he has succeeded in having the most accessible mud client in all of the store. Nice going!

This is a fantastic app,

This is a fantastic app, absolutely the best of its kind with regards to accessibility and design. In the future, a dedicated resend command button would be helpful. If apple should decide to add the ability to integrate other keyboards such as fleksy, it would make it even easier to type longer strings of text. Still, automatically reading incoming lines makes this an absolutely phenomenal app! Absolutely worth the price and love using it! Heartfelt thanks to the developer.

Hooray!

Hooray! Thanks for mudding with MUDRammer. You can resend a command today with the command history button - it's just to the right of the input bar. Tap once to fill the input bar with your previously-sent command, then press send. Some MUDs also have a dedicated method to repeat your last command; the MUD I develop on uses a period to repeat your last command. I'll definitely look into a more streamlined way of doing this.

The more I use this app, the

The more I use this app, the more I love it. It is fast, responsive, and as I said extremely accessible. I have now switched to using it exclusively, even preferring it to desktop applications. Is their currently a way to use the edit functions with the text of the game so as to copy and paste things from the game? As of yet, have not found a way to do this. I have also found that occasionally, when you add a world, the app will crash. Any ideas why that might be? Again, thank you for all your work on the application. Tangela

MUDRammer 1.2.1

Sorry about that! I believe that crash is related to voiceover and it should be fixed in MUDRammer 1.2.1, available today. Copying text received from a world - not just yet. Working on that one :)

While I really like MUDRammer, I find that VO reading out

While I really like MUDRammer, I find that VO reading out each chunk of text as it comes in rather frustrating. It's a really nice feature, don't get me wrong, but it can make things rather difficult. I wish there was a way to make VO keep your place in the command history. VO jumping to the most recent text sent from the MUD makes it really hard !to review the text that's come before. I guess it would help things if we could have VO read out the most recent piece of text, but not scroll the screen to it. That way, we could hear of emportant things going on, but go back to where we were before VO started reading. I hope that this makes sense. I also hope that nobody thinks that I'm critisizing. MUDRammer is a great client . I just find MUDS hard to play using it. Thanks, Shersey

MUDRammer <3 Voiceover

Thanks Shersey for mudding with MUDRammer! With voiceover enabled, MUDRammer should start reading at the top and continue reading new lines until it reaches the end, then automatically read new lines as they come in. If you type and send a command, MUDRammer will jump down to the bottom and start reading beginning with the server response to your command, if any. MUDRammer will also reset its position if you turn voiceover off and on again. Two questions for you: first, does the above accurately describe your experience so far? If not, I have some bugs to fix :) And secondly, how can I improve this for you? It sounds like you'd like more manual control over voiceover's position but I'm not sure I follow your suggestions. Thanks!

I think I have an idea!

Since this wasn't ever replied to, I assume that what's meant by VoiceOver not keeping its place is because the when new content appears, it jumps to the bottom. This means VoiceOver loses its place when new information is displayed, so if you're reading something over again and the game is rather active, you can't. At least, you can't if what you want to read is far back in the history. Of course, to me it makes a lot more sense that it exhibits this behaviour, but I suppose being able to change it might be useful in some cases.

Nicolai, that's exactly it.

I don't mind VoiceOver reading incoming text--I just wish it could do so without also scrolling the cursor to that point. Does that make sense? Also, does that answer your question? I can't think of any other way to explain it. I hope this helps. I really like MUDRammer otherwise. It's a great client! I really do hope yu don't feel like I'm bashing it, because I'm not.. I really appreciate all the work you put into making MUDRammer accessible with VoiceOver! Thanks, Shersey

voice over and bluetooth keyboards

I like this app, I like how it reads everything out the way it does. Is there any way to speed the voice over up though? If I were fighting a battle I'd die fast because the read out is super slow. Also, do any of you use this app with a blue tooth keyboard? If so how did it work for you all.

7Rammer

I included many VoiceOver changes in the most recent update, 1.6, as iOS 7 includes many interesting new accessibility APIs.

MUDRammer should work well today with a bluetooth keyboard. In the next update, you will be able to use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to move forwards and backwards through your command history. Nifty!

I'm also looking into some other accessibility changes for the next update:

A gesture to pause and resume speaking. I'm currently planning on using a two-finger double-tap for this. But will it be discoverable? I'm not so sure. What do you think?
iOS 7 will allow me to set the reading speed. MUDRammer uses the default speed today but I'd like to include some means of adjusting it.
Any other requests?

Thanks everyone for all your feedback. I want MUDRammer to be the most accessible MUD client on the store.

updates

hiya. sounds good, looking forward to your new update, and any changes. I don't often play mud's at the moment, but when I do mess with them, I sometimes play around with rammer. probably the most important things to sort out at the moment, is stopping voiceover making the end of buffer [bonking sound?] every time you press enter to send your text to the game. the speed increases will be most useful. I know somebody, who would love to use your client full time for mudding, and get out of windows completely, but at the moment, simply can't, as she can't keep up with things going on within the game if there is a lot of stuff happening. another thing that could be handy, is to have an edit option, to copy, made available in the rotor. so that you could tap a message on the screen, switch to edit, flick down to copy, and double tap. this would make getting hold of text for the creation of triggers / gagging much easier. I can't think of anything else off the top of my head right now, but I think these are the main things. I'll post again, if i come up with any other ideas.

Hi Dallas, on your comment

Hi Dallas, on your comment "she can't keep up with things going on within the game if there is a lot of stuff happening."

Is this because the speaking rate is too fast? Or too slow?

Either way, I'm planning to include a means of adjusting the speaking rate.

speed

hi, i think it's due to being to slow. but yeah if ther is some kind of toggle, that would be the best way i think. that way each person can set it how they need.

A way to turn the SAPI voice off

I would like it if there was a setting to turn off the iOS SAPI voice and just use the voice over autospeaking instead.

Hm, not sure what you mean by

Hm, not sure what you mean by 'SAPI voice' ?

What I Meant

There's the voiceOver voice, and then in the newest version, a separate voice that speaks independently. I prefer just being able to use voiceOver's speech engine sometimes, rather than everything being automatically spoken and not being able to immediately flick through things. Yes, I would be able to stop/pause it with the two finger double tap, but that could get redundant.

SO in short, a way to return

SO in short, a way to return to how MUDRammer was prior to the 1.6 update.

Understood, thanks. I guess

Understood, thanks. I guess there's the rub: there are two different speech engines now included with iOS: standard voiceover and iOS 7's new synthesizer.

The new 7 synthesizer allows much finer control over increasing and decreasing the speaking rate, plus allows you to pause and resume speaking mid-sentence.

Standard VO has just one speaking rate and cannot be paused mid-sentence.

In MUDRammer 1.6, I moved everything over to the new 7 synthesizer.

I'm curious, do people prefer standard VoiceOver even if it means just one speaking rate?

new speech in app

Hello, I actually emailed the developer about the 1.6 update. I like the fact it uses the IOS7 synthesizer because I hate the sound that it makes everytime new text comes in when using the standard voiceover. However, I absolutely cannot use it as long as there is two voices speaking. I hope you can find a middle ground--either find a way around the annoying sound as text comes in with standard voiceover or find a way to hide the output, allow controls to navigate the text through the IOS 7 synthesizer, and make it useable in that regard.

Hello, I'm about to buy

Hello, I'm about to buy mudrammer, however I have a question. Can we also use the jesture control to navigate with in the mud? (eg swipe left to go west, right to go east, up to go north and down to go south)

@Hadi - yup, that's exactly

@Hadi - yup, that's exactly what the gesture control is for. It supports movement along the 8 cardinal directions, but I haven't yet added gestures for up and down.

However, I don't know that the gesture control will work properly if you have VoiceOver enabled. With VO enabled, touch events tend to get consumed. :/

TTS and international languages

Hi. First off, excellent app, and props on making it so accessible! Great job. I was wondering if you could perhaps add a setting so one can change the TTS language? It doesn't follow voiceOver's default language, which means that even though I change it to US english on a danish phone, the TTS keeps speaking danish because it doesn't honour VO's settings. I can't find a way to change it in the settings on the phone, but I believe devs can actually add support to change voices etc. Could you possibly please implement this, or tell me how to do it if it can already be done? Thanks Malthe

TTS and skipping

Sorry for the double post. I've now played a lot more around with it, and still find it excellent. However, I would love to be able to have the tts simply skip the rest of what's queued for speaking. If I know a mud well, or have a huge amount of combat spam, this would be excellent. Imo the 2-finger double tap (magic tap) would be perfect for this.

TTS language

Hey Malthe, you're absolutely right - MUDRammer currently uses the device language for speaking and that may not always be appropriate.

I had actually started writing a feature to try and auto-detect the current language, but it was too easily confused by the extra punctuation that can be very common in MUDs.

Here's a more complete list of accessibility improvements I'm planning for the next update:

A gesture to pause and unpause speaking (currently set to two-finger double-tap)
A setting to increase or decrease the default speaking rate
A setting to override the TTS speaking language (default English)
A gesture to stop speaking and advance to the end of the text buffer. Not sure about this one, maybe a two-finger triple-tap?

Anything I'm forgetting?

Hi Thanks for the prompt

Hi Thanks for the prompt response! That sounds excellent! Regarding the gesture to stop speaking, 2-finger tripple tap is already reserved for VoiceOver's item chooser. Perhaps just if someone tapped (or double-tapped for VO-users) the output field it would stop speaking and not pause it? Either that, or simply make the two-finger double-tap stop speaking. If someone want to review the log they can, after all, just swipe up til they get there, where as stopping speech is really, really useful on muds. I'd personally use that for the most part, so magic-tap would in my opinion be best for that. Not sure if others would disagree, but just my thoughts. Best regards Malthe

Hello. I just want to know if

Hello. I just want to know if anyone has done a podcast on this?

No podcasts as far as I know.

No podcasts as far as I know. But if you do one, please let me know. I'd love to hear it and share more widely. :)

Hello, As one of the people

Hello, As one of the people said, is it possible for you to make the speech completely stop instead of pausing, when double tapping?

Pause vs. stop

Thanks all for your comments. Very helpful for me.

What do we think about having the two-finger double-tap gesture do the following instead?

Immediately stop speaking, and
Jump to the end of all received text, and
If any new text is received, starts speaking again beginning from that newly received text.

On the plus side, this means there's only one MUDRammer gesture to learn for speech. On the minus side, this would remove the ability to pause and unpause speaking from the same point, as there doesn't seem to be much interest in that. How's that sound?

idea

hi. i am wondering, is it possible to make that 2 finger double tap, location dependant? so for example. have the 2 finger double tap in the top half of the screen, perform a pause / resume, and a 2 finger double tap in the bottom half of the screen, perform the other command, of stopping, scrolling to bottom, then read any new messages. this would mean you could have both. do you think this is possible with voiceover running?

I'm all for the 3 points

I'm all for the 3 points which you've elequently put in the list. That would be perfect for my mudding needs.

the three points

HI, first let me say I love this app. I've killed many great hours in the car mudding on road trips with this baby. Accessibility is always appreciated, and this app is especially good in that regard. Unfortunately, the new ios synth has killed it for me till the next update. I like the three points on your list. If the double tap could do those things, regardless of where you tap it on screen, that would be great. Also, wondering if there is a way to implement the same keystroke but as a Bluetooth keyboard command. For example, if you could hit the ctrl or apple key on the bluetooth keyboard and have it do the exact same thing as the double tap, that would be really great. I tend to use mud rammer either with my Bluetooth keyboard or a braille display, so a quick keystroke to stop speech and go to the end would help in a big way. Thanks and keep up the great work. Also, if there is sufficient interest in doing a podcast on this app, I would consider doing one. I've not done one for applevis before, but feel like this app is deserving of some good attention. I'd have to wait till after the update though.

Thanks roxtar!

Thanks roxtar. I really like your idea for a bluetooth key command to simulate the two-finger double-tap gesture. Maybe something like Command-Option-Down Arrow?

And you'll have to let me know if you do a podcast so I can share it!

There's one other VoiceOver issue that some of you have written me about. If you tap an element on-screen while iOS 7's synthesizer is speaking, it will be spoken with standard VoiceOver and you'll have two voices going at once. That's a poor experience and it wasn't a problem until now because, previously, MUDRammer used standard VoiceOver and it would be interrupted if you tapped something on the screen.

I don't have a good solution here yet, but I still think it's worth it to use 7's synthesizer because it'll let me offer you a preference for speaking language and speaking rate. What do we think?

Reg: the other voice over issue.

Hiya The volume of the speech usually ducks under VoiceOver, so I don't find it a problem. The 2-finger double tap will also solve this problem, as, when you want to type, you probably don't want to hear more of what's being read and thus will want the speech to continue from the endpoint, or that's how I see it anyway. All in all, the 2-finger gesture to stop speech will really solve a lot :D Malthe

toggle

I may be wrong, but it is possible to change the speed and language of voiceOver voices already. Even so, I would really appreciate if a toggle could be implemented for those who just prefer the old voiceOver layout. Would this be possible?

VoiceOver speaking rate

I sure didn't think so, but it turns out I was mistaken. In Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> VoiceOver, there is a slide control to set your preferred speaking rate. That removes one of my main reasons for preferring iOS 7's synthesizer.

Seems like MUDRammer may be better off if I revert to using standard VoiceOver. The only major issue I can see is that it's very easy, intentionally or accidentally, to interrupt VoiceOver by tapping on the screen. The tricky part is that you may or may not have intended that behavior to happen.

With standard VoiceOver there's also no longer a need for this proposed two-finger double-tap gesture, since you can just interrupt VoiceOver and it will start reading again when a new line of text is received.

So, shall I revert everything back to standard VoiceOver?

Reverting to voiceOver would definitely not be a problem for

What the subject says. VoiceOver really already has the fairly extensive control over speech parameters, which would save a lot of coding on your end I'll bet :) . It would be fine by me.

Reverting to VoiceOver

For the reasons mentioned above, I would really like to see the app reverted to use VoiceOver normally once again.

reverting to voiceover

As interesting as the ios7 synth is in theory, I think reverting to just voiceover would be a good option. While the 7 synth gives you some flexibility, I've never gotten it to speak as fast or be as responsive as voiceover. Also, with voiceover, you can more easily control which area of the screen you're focusing on and trying to read. One area that I can think of right off the bat is let's say you've been in a battle, or had a lot of chat messages coming up. Muds, after all, are one of the spammiest places in the universe. So say you've got a lot of battle spam going on, and there's something you want to read in the backlog. It's probably near the top of the screen. You can hit the screen near the top and maybe get close to what you want with voiceover. There's no way to do that with the 7 synth. You're left not being able to skip around. This pretty much eliminates the potential for combat, fast walking, being in groups/parties, etc. With voiceover, you can just tap the screen to make it shut up while you're in a group that's fast walking around an area, etc. I know this has been a long, somewhat ranty and incoherent post, but it's late, and my brains are a shade scrambled. MOral of the story? Going back to plane old voiceover would be a happy development, at least for my particular mudding style. Maybe you could just have a setting to toggle between voiceover and 7 synth? Just a thought...

voiceover switchable

hi there, for myself, and another person that uses mud rammer, i think voiceover would be the better option for many reasons, most of which are already listed here. but a toggle would probably be a good option, that way, those who wish to use the 7 synth, can do so. but defaulting to voiceover seems like a better idea, for the most part. and certainly a lot easyer in terms of coding.

All VoiceOver all the time

Next version of MUDRammer will be VoiceOver only; I'm removing all the iOS 7 synthesizer bits. 7's synthesizer has a number of drawbacks that many of you have helped me realize, and I don't see much value in a toggle to include both of them. I've open-sourced the VoiceOver speech synthesizer that I wrote for MUDRammer's next update. Maybe you can share it with your iOS developer friends. :) https://github.com/splinesoft/SSAccessibility

Hello mudrammer I had a

Hello mudrammer I had a question; does mudrammer disconnect after 10 minutes if u put it in the background? or the apple restriction does not include the mud protocol... or whatever it is :) For irc and SSH connections if u put the apps in background they'll get disconnected after a while

Background connections

The amount of time MUDRammer can stay connected in the background depends on a number of factors: your device's hardware, what other apps you're using, which version of iOS you're on, etc.

There's no guarantees here, as iOS can and will kill off background apps if you open something resource-intensive like a game. So I show a warning after MUDRammer's been in the background for 8 minutes in hopes that you'll switch back to it and keep your session going.

I've seen MUDRammer keep sessions active in the background for 6+ hours and I've also seen it get killed more or less immediately. I am, alas, at iOS' mercy. :/

Well, I believe that'll just

Well, I believe that'll just explains that the apple restriction does not include the mud client, then. because in ssh connections, if you put the app which is connected to an ssh server in a background, IOS will kill it after 10 minutes (or less)

MUDRammer 1.6.1

Hail MUDbuds! You should see MUDRammer 1.6.1 in your updates list in the app store over the next few hours. This release performs all of its speaking with VoiceOver. You should be able to interrupt speaking by tapping any element that is spoken by VoiceOver. VoiceOver should start speaking again after you type something or when you receive new text.

Thanks again everyone for your feedback and do let me know how it works for you.