The last couple posts have been about the grand AresMUSH web experiment, exploring the practicality of a web-based Ares front-end. Having puttered around with it for a couple months, I have unfortunately concluded that it’s just not practical at this point.
A web interface would certainly make it easier to play. It would be modern and cool. But given the state of web technology and the need to support old-school MU clients, it would make it harder to create a game and harder to code, breaking two of the primary goals of Ares.
Maintaining two independent user interfaces (web and old-school MU client) takes a lot of work. It adds layers of complexity to the code, making it more of a chore to learn and maintain.
Also, web frameworks are evolving at a breakneck pace. The latest/greatest thing today might not even be around tomorrow, leading to the sorts of horror stories described in this article. WebSockets, which are pretty essential to a dynamic two-way game server, are still dicey to implement and not fully supported across all browsers.
There are other challenges in the server administration and the huge effort required to support a full-featured web MU client (logging, spawns, timers, etc.) that players would expect.
Can it be done? Sure. But if it feels like work to me, as a professional web developer, it doesn’t seem like the right avenue for hobbyist game coders and admins. Simpler feels better.
The tooling problems, at least, will hopefully improve in time. Dynamic web applications and websockets are becoming more the norm. Rails Action Cable shows particular promise for Ares, given that it uses Ruby.
Ultimately I think the future is a web-only game (ditching the old-school MU clients) that you can install out of the box like most blog or forum software. Tweak a few config settings and you’re off to the races. Add a fully-managed hosting solution to take care of the admin side, and it would be even better.
Perhaps Ares can someday be the back-end engine for that sort of game. Time will tell. But that’s not the direction for Ares 1.0 (for now).
So for now, Ares is marching on with support of the old-school MU client interface. There will probably be a lightweight web console for configuring the game – something like what was described back in Ares Web Portal – but not a full-fledged web UI.
I’m hoping to have a public beta site game open by the end of the year, so stay tuned.