One game server, two front doors: serving a telnet MUD and a browser client from the same session layer

We’re the Paroxysm team, and we run a text MUD that players can join two ways: classic telnet clients (mud.paroxysmrpg.com [http://mud.paroxysmrpg.com], port 3000) or a browser client at https://paroxysmrpg.com/play/ [https://paroxysmrpg.com/play/]. The web lesson for us: keep the transport dumb. Both connections are thin adapters that turn bytes into lines of input and lines of output into bytes, and the game layer never knows which one a player is on. The browser side has to handle things telnet users never think about: tabs going to sleep, mobile reconnects, and turning ANSI colour into styling. Telnet needs option-negotiation bytes stripped before anything reaches the parser. We’d love to hear how others have bridged line-based protocols to the browser. Context: the game is early alpha and for adults (18+); this post is only about the tech. Site: https://paroxysmrpg.com/ [https://paroxysmrpg.com/] · Discord: https://discord.gg/Hkx8rcj4k6 [https://discord.gg/Hkx8rcj4k6] AI is used in making the game and the website, and in drafting this post. The Paroxysm team