protocol
MSP
The MUD Sound Protocol — the server names a sound file and the client plays it. Old, simple, and easy to confuse with two other things.
Measured adoption
0 of 886 listed games — 0.0%
The games not counted here are not games without the protocol. A game is counted when we observed its server offering the option in a handshake; the rest are servers that did not offer it to us and servers whose handshake we have not read, and we cannot tell you which.
| codebase | offered it | identified |
|---|---|---|
| AresMUSH | 0 | 18 |
| CircleMUD | 0 | 47 |
| CobraMUSH | 0 | 2 |
| CoffeeMUD | 0 | 32 |
| DikuMUD | 0 | 35 |
| Evennia | 0 | 11 |
| FluffOS | 0 | 28 |
| MUCK | 0 | 24 |
| PennMUSH | 0 | 34 |
| RhostMUSH | 0 | 40 |
| ROM | 0 | 55 |
| SMAUG | 0 | 20 |
| tbaMUD | 0 | 5 |
| TinyMUSH | 0 | 9 |
MSP lets a server ask a client to play a sound: a bracketed directive naming a file, a volume, a repeat count and a URL to fetch it from if the client does not have it. It negotiates on telnet option 90, and it can also be sent in-band in the text stream by servers that never negotiate anything.
It is genuinely old and genuinely still used — ambient sound in a text game is a bigger effect than it sounds like, and for players using a client's audio cues rather than its display it is more than decoration.
Three things it is not
The client tables in this section had to be careful here, and it is worth writing down why:
- MCMP — the Mud Client Media Protocol — is a different protocol doing a similar job. At least one client implements MCMP and not MSP, and reading one as the other would put a claim in a table that nobody made.
- A client's own "play a sound" scripting call is not MSP. It plays a local file when a script says so; MSP is a server telling a client what to play.
- Bundled-plugin support is worth stating as such. One client's MSP support ships as a plugin that explicitly does no telnet negotiation, which works on servers that send MSP in band and not on servers that expect to negotiate it.
What we measure
Servers offering telnet option 90. Because MSP is frequently sent in band without negotiation, this figure understates deployment by an amount we cannot estimate — which is a limitation of what a handshake can see, and not a finding about the protocol.
See also
- MXP The MUD eXtension Protocol — HTML-like markup in the text stream, giving clickable links, images and forms. Widely specified, unevenly implemented.
- VIP Mud A commercial Windows client built for blind players from the ground up. It names seven screen readers — and publishes almost nothing about its protocol support.