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Old 06-14-2010, 04:49 PM   #10
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
Posts: 2,052
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Re: Client support for graphical maps?

Sorry to necro an old thread, but I've now done exactly what was discussed earlier in this thread, and thought it might be of interest to other mud owners. This is a simplified version of what I did.

First, I added support for to my mud, and downloaded the latest version of MUSHclient (as it supports open protocols). I then created a simple MSDP plugin, allowing me to transmit out-of-band data between the server and client. You could also do this with ZMP, ATCP/2 or Aardwolf's 102 protocol, but I chose MSDP.

Next, I obtained the images I needed. Two of them came from my website (a title bar for the left side of the screen, and a textured tile to use for the background). The other two were generated by the mud from internal data - a 20480x20 tiles.bmp for the overview map (1024 tiles side by side, each 20x20 pixels) and a 2560x20 terrains.bmp for the zoomed map (128 terrain types side by side, once again each 20x20 pixels). MUSHclient allows you to easily extract parts of an image, which means you don't need thousands of individual tile and terrain files - I simply pass the client a series of tile/terrain index values which it uses as an offset of the appropriate bmp file.

Finally I had a play with MUSHclient, learning how to display graphics using plugins - fortunately it's fairly straightforward, the documentation is very good, and Nick Gammon is always quick to answer questions and provide working examples. I reduced the size of the text window, drew miniwindows below it for energy bars, and to the side for maps and combat information, as follows:



The player has to update to the latest version of MUSHclient, then download the graphics and install my plugin. Fortunately I can see which client version they're using from within the mud, and also detect whether they've activated the plugin, which makes troubleshooting a bit easier. The plugin is still a work in progress, but even in its unfinished state it's proving .

I've also had a bit of a play with Mudlet, which should be able to do the same thing, although it doesn't support MSDP, ZMP or open protocols - so you'd need to use ATCP or 102. It also doesn't allow you to extract parts of an image, which means each tile/terrain will need to be loaded as an individual image - I'm not sure what sort of impact that'll have on performance.

John from WGF is also working on a which may be able to support maps done this way, so that'll be worth keeping an eye on as well.
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