Top Mud Sites Forum Return to TopMudSites.com
Go Back   Top Mud Sites Forum > Mud Development and Administration > Advanced MUD Concepts
Click here to Register

Reply
 
Thread Tools
Old 01-08-2004, 10:28 AM   #1
erdos
 
Posts: n/a
Some things to point out:
1. practically no clients in existance these days fail to uphold ANSI standards

2. many people these days do not know what "ANSI" even is.  for many people, "Do you want ANSI color? [Y/N]" is their first impression of the MUD world.  And we only get one first impression.

3. References to ANSI may be somewhat obsolete:  it would suffice to simply ask "Do you want color?"  If anyone has a client too ancient for ANSI, they are likely to know what you're talking about, which this comes off much friendlier to people who've never heard of it.  (Note that this applies to any MUD which prompts for ANSI anywhere, not just login)

4. Worst case scenario, sending ANSI signals to a client which doesn't support them, will make garbled gibberish appear.  Contrary to popular belief, it WON'T cause anyone's computer to explode

5. Many MUDs prompt for ANSI both on intial login, AND in character creation.  The obvious redundancy just reeks unprofessional

6. As I'm sure 30 people will immediately reply, yes, I already know you can make a trigger to auto-send the "Y" at the login prompt, as does anyone else who is reading these forums.  So please don't waste HD space reminding us for the trillionth time that triggers exist.

7. Many of the new clients have ways of identifying themselves, or at least identifying that they support certain features (mccp, pueblo, etc.) If a client falls into this category, obviously it can support ANSI; is it still necessary to prompt for ANSI from it anyway?
  Reply With Quote
Old 01-08-2004, 01:10 PM   #2
Samson
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: United Socialist States of America
Home MUD: SmaugMuds.org
Home MUD: Arthmoor MUD Hosting
Posts: 249
Samson is on a distinguished road
Since neither option fit what I would have answered, I filed a null vote. I opt for simply throwing a color greeting out there without prior confirmation. As you say, most if not all modern clients or telnet programs will at least know what an ANSI sequence is, even if they won't process it. Even the lowly Windows98 telnet will simply ignore them.
Samson is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-09-2004, 10:06 AM   #3
Rhuarc
Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 50
Rhuarc is on a distinguished road

Talk about first impressions!

 Hey, why not do something original and autodetect ANSI compatibility on the client? For an example, see the mudcore engine. ()
Rhuarc is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-09-2004, 02:50 PM   #4
shadowfyr
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 310
shadowfyr will become famous soon enough
To put in my two cents... I remember long ago, in a reality far far away, a time people used to dial in using modems to some strange device called a BBS. It was amazing, most clients that where not pure junk would recieve a simlple 'can do ANSI?' request and reply with a 'will do ANSI' sequence of there own and no one ever had to worry about if the end user even had a clue what it bloody was. It would just end up in color.

Now, jump forward 10 years or so and we are using TCP/IP, Telnet, HTML, etc, etc. and most muds either ask the user if they want color or force them to execute a command like 'term on' to enable it. WTF? If someone wants to turn off color, then great. Otherwise why not use the existing ANSI negotiation sequence that has been around since the days of 4800baud modems to ask the client if it handles it and turn it on automatically.

The benefit is obvious, if the client works right they user will just end up seeing stuff in color. If the client's ANSI implimentation is actually broken, all you see is a few odd characters during the negotiation and the mud sends plain text after that. For the life of me, I don't get why this is so hard to do, but no one uses it. Is every Telnet application in existance actually broken and can't respond to the sequence? So much for progress if that is the case. What will be next, start making web servers that refuse to send HTML until you send a message to activate it for your specific IP?

Sorry, that was a bit of a rant, but I find it plain silly...
shadowfyr is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-09-2004, 03:24 PM   #5
Rhuarc
Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 50
Rhuarc is on a distinguished road
That is exactly what I was referring to.
Rhuarc is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-09-2004, 03:27 PM   #6
Kylotan
Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Nottingham, UK
Home MUD: Abattoir (Smaug)
Home MUD: ex-Jellybean (Smaug)
Home MUD: ex-Dark Chambers (Merc)
Posts: 174
Kylotan is on a distinguished road
Send a message via ICQ to Kylotan Send a message via AIM to Kylotan Send a message via MSN to Kylotan Send a message via Yahoo to Kylotan
Does 'new client' mean 'pretty much every client ever made' in this context? I don't recall seeing a client that didn't send 'ANSI' as one of the terminal types if you ask for them, so you can pretty much guarantee an accurate answer that way, if you're willing to delay the greeting screen a second or two while you query the client. I'm not sure if there is a separate telnet option you can ask for that specifically deals with colour support.
Kylotan is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-09-2004, 03:36 PM   #7
Kylotan
Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Nottingham, UK
Home MUD: Abattoir (Smaug)
Home MUD: ex-Jellybean (Smaug)
Home MUD: ex-Dark Chambers (Merc)
Posts: 174
Kylotan is on a distinguished road
Send a message via ICQ to Kylotan Send a message via AIM to Kylotan Send a message via MSN to Kylotan Send a message via Yahoo to Kylotan
You'd be surprised at some of the ways in which various versions of ZMud have been broken. My version in particular fails to follow the quite simple examples at and sends the terminal type list incorrectly, meaning I have to do extra server-side checks.
Kylotan is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-09-2004, 05:20 PM   #8
Faeton
New Member
 
Join Date: May 2003
Home MUD: MultiMUD (multimud.net)
Posts: 1
Faeton is on a distinguished road
Hoi,

I don't think a greeting like that (Do you want ansi?) is at all a greeting (as you said, it probably is confusing to most).
I prefer to have them create their character, enter the game, and then, whereever they turn out to be, place a sign with the initial hints (or have a book or whatever) which also mentions how to change color levels i.e. how to turn ansi on/off.
This doesn't ride over the newbie like a truck, and you're not pushing him into something either. Quite (user-:) friendly imho.

Regards,

-faeton
Faeton is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-10-2004, 03:14 PM   #9
erdos
 
Posts: n/a
Amen, that's what I say too.  In fact I brought it up in these forums some months ago;  the more general idea of using the telnet standard for various things, not just ANSI negotiations.  As people who read the thread then will assure you, it was met with a combination of ignorant people saying it wouldn't work and less ignorant people pointing out that lots of MUD clients don't even support the telnet protocol (which wouldn't really matter since at worst case scenario they'd just gag them, I defy you to name one modern MUD client which doesn't at least do this much). One idiot even claimed that if you negotiated using the telnet standard, you were opening yourself to hackers :P

I think really the issue is more that the majority of "coders" wouldn't have a ghost of a clue how to even begin--- after all, this wouldn't just be yet another "copy and paste the spell_fireball function and rename it" job which seems to comprise the bulk of most coders' time!
  Reply With Quote
Old 01-10-2004, 08:11 PM   #10
shadowfyr
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 310
shadowfyr will become famous soon enough
shadowfyr is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools


ANSI prompts at initial login: good or bad? - Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
ANSI logon screen for Circle-based mud Lazari MUD Coding 4 06-03-2006 11:22 AM
Know of a good mud? ReadOrDie Tavern of the Blue Hand 1 02-26-2006 01:20 PM
Java and ANSI Tezcatlipoca MUD Coding 6 04-11-2005 12:30 PM
Ansi art, or whatever its called Enzo Tavern of the Blue Hand 3 08-21-2004 12:12 PM
ANSI Colors in muds markizs Tavern of the Blue Hand 9 04-10-2003 02:09 AM

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

All times are GMT -4. The time now is 03:17 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Style based on a design by Essilor
Copyright Top Mud Sites.com 2022