Register forum user name Search FAQ

Gammon Forum

Notice: Any messages purporting to come from this site telling you that your password has expired, or that you need to verify your details, confirm your email, resolve issues, making threats, or asking for money, are spam. We do not email users with any such messages. If you have lost your password you can obtain a new one by using the password reset link.

Due to spam on this forum, all posts now need moderator approval.

 Entire forum ➜ MUSHclient ➜ MXP and Pueblo ➜ mxp 'default' colours
mxp 'default' colours

It is now over 60 days since the last post. This thread is closed.     Refresh page

Pages: 1 2  

Posted by Feantur   (70 posts)  Bio
Date Wed 01 Sep 2004 11:21 PM (UTC)
Message
How can I change the default mxp colours? I.e. as far as I understand it, the MUD sends tags with certain colour names and the client renders them to colours. So, e.g. if the client gets a 'red' tag, how could I change the colour for 'red'?
Top
Posted by Shadowfyr   USA  (1,791 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #1 on Thu 02 Sep 2004 06:45 PM (UTC)
Message
Umm.. You don't. The reason being that Red = #FF0000 as a standard. If you could redefine what the standard colors actually mean, then they wouldn't be a standard. MXP is not really so much a mud feature as a transplanting of HTML into a mud envorinment. If an HTML tag 'looks' like a particular color in all browsers, this is a good thing, same with muds imho. If I specifically use say, "The house is the color of <color="PapayaWhip">papayawhip</color>.", I expect it to not be green when the client displays it. The same is true of the pure colors like red.

Now, I will admit that some muds just beg to have you change the bloody colors. They still only use the basic Ansi colors, just with MXP tags, and they employ them in a way that seems to want to bore straight into your brains and make you go blind. Either ROM or Smaug (I can't remember which at the moment) try to do this by avoiding the common and reasonable light grey, instead opting to make the largest blocks of text in the game bright yellow by default. I am still trying to figure out if there is a setting for that or you have to manually edit every damn room. lol

In any case, there isn't any built in way to change the settings of a color name to be something else and for real applications of MXP, not just the 'lets underline mob names...' BS most use it for, the guys designing with it wouldn't want them to be changable anyway. It would ruin whatever information he tried to convey by using a specific color.
Top
Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,158 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #2 on Sun 05 Sep 2004 05:29 AM (UTC)
Message
I'm glad you asked that, because I argued long and hard in the zMUD forums (where MXP was developed) that there should be provision for MXP colours to be "palette" colours (like ANSI colours), however I lost that argument.

I suggested that it would be preferable for MXP to send "style" information (like, this is a room, this is an inventory), rather than "use colour #AB123C" because not everyone might like that colour. However it was deemed that MXP would be used to send actual colour information, and hence it isn't really practical to change it.

Sure, standard colours like red could be detected, but what if it was #FF0001 - one bit away from straight red?

What you can do is check "ignore colour changes" in the MXP configuration box. Then it will not use MXP colours. Then you might use triggers to colour the lines as best you can.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
Top
Posted by Feantur   (70 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #3 on Sun 05 Sep 2004 07:01 AM (UTC)
Message
I'm doing that atm, but it's a more than imperfect solution. :-) It would be great if MUSHclient could do some magic about that problem (not I mean you should go against the protocol specifications, but maybe have an option to 'render' mxp colour information differently, e.g. if you get sent colour value A, the client will translate that to value B).

E.g. #abee11 will be translated to #a00000. That way, after a line ends the colouring won't end, but rather the strings inside the tag will be coloured completely with what colour the user wants to use.
Top
Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,158 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #4 on Mon 06 Sep 2004 10:19 PM (UTC)
Message
I hadn't really thought of trying to map colours from MXP to something else, because there are potentially 256 * 256 * 256 colours (16,777,216 RGB colours).

However a MUD probably would not use all of those, and in fact in all likelihood only use 20 or so, so it might be possible to have a mapping table, where MUSHclient maps colour A to colour B, and if not found, leaves it alone.

This would probably handle 99% of cases.

I've added that as suggestion #528.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
Top
Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,158 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #5 on Sat 27 Nov 2004 04:15 AM (UTC)
Message
Version 3.54 now allows you to specify, in scripting, mappings from the unwanted colour to a replacement colour. See the script function MapColour.

eg.

MapColour (ColourNameToRGB ("red"), ColourNameToRGB ("green"))

MapColour (ColourNameToRGB ("darkslateblue"), ColourNameToRGB ("mediumslateblue"))

You can do that for as many colours as you want, within reason (ie. I wouldn't try to do thousands of them).

The "Text Attributes" dialog box has been enhanced to tell you the colour of the current text that you have selected, to make it easier to work out the "from" colour.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
Top
Posted by David Haley   USA  (3,881 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #6 on Sat 27 Nov 2004 04:20 AM (UTC)
Message
Quote:
I suggested that it would be preferable for MXP to send "style" information (like, this is a room, this is an inventory), rather than "use colour #AB123C" because not everyone might like that colour. However it was deemed that MXP would be used to send actual colour information, and hence it isn't really practical to change it.
It does sound fairly odd to be sending color directly. It puts the burden of customization on the server and not the client.

Now, some servers can still allow complete customization of color, and send colors in the MXP. This would be, for the client, the same desirable behavior. It just means that the server has to store everybody's color preferences, which does seem less desirable (for the server) than sending style names and letting the player sort it out.
David Haley aka Ksilyan
Head Programmer,
Legends of the Darkstone

http://david.the-haleys.org
Top
Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,158 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #7 on Sat 27 Nov 2004 08:02 AM (UTC)

Amended on Sat 27 Nov 2004 08:07 AM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message
An interesting effect you can get, is to change the background colour (normally black) as a visual highlight if you are getting injured. For instance, you could make a trigger that does something like this:


-- find old colour for black
oldcolour = GetMapColour (0) 

-- test for what background colour to have
if hp < 50 then
  newcolour = ColourNameToRGB ("maroon")
else
  newcolour = 0
end -- if

-- update 'black' and redraw screen, if necessary
if oldcolour ~= newcolour then
  MapColour (0, newcolour)
  Redraw ()
end


You could change the colours to gradually become more red as your HP get lower. The test above for the oldcolour not equal to the newcolour is to reduce flicker.

If the colour changes (ie. your HP pass some threshold) then it changes the background colour (ie. the colour for black) and forces a screen redraw with Redraw.

This is quite effective. :)
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
Top
Posted by Feantur   (70 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #8 on Sun 28 Nov 2004 02:45 PM (UTC)
Message
For some reason the text attribute marking doesn't work when I'm marking text without a line break (I think).

I can reproduce this sometimes - for most of the times I'm clicking on the Display menu though the Text Attributes entry is greyed out.
Top
Posted by Feantur   (70 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #9 on Sun 28 Nov 2004 02:55 PM (UTC)
Message
P.S. Thanks for this feature, very much appreciated!
Top
Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,158 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #10 on Sun 28 Nov 2004 06:27 PM (UTC)
Message
It is grayed out if you don't have text selected. The attributes are of the first character of the selected text. Can you confirm it happens to you, if you have something selected?
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
Top
Posted by Shadowfyr   USA  (1,791 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #11 on Sun 28 Nov 2004 07:23 PM (UTC)
Message
Quote:
It does sound fairly odd to be sending color directly.


Actually.. Sending the color directly has much greater control when using ASCII graphics. In a client that actually has full MXP support you could use a 1 point font, the block characters in the original DOS font, or some similar character, and literally paint a picture with fine color gradients. You could almost do that anyway with the color names, except Mushclient only supports the 'baseline' colors for those names, while the full set under Unix actually includes about 663 or so, which includes lighter and darker versions of the same colors. If you limit colors to only 'known' names, then you limit what you can actually do with them. For a purely scrolling client like this one, it is pretty irrelevant, but one with text positioning and full color could even animate fade in and fade out effects of a ascii graphic.

Of course no one actually uses MXP that way that I have seen, but....
Top
Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,158 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #12 on Sun 28 Nov 2004 08:07 PM (UTC)
Message
Quote:

... except Mushclient only supports the 'baseline' colors for those names, while the full set under Unix actually includes about 663 or so


MUSHclient supports all possible colours in the format "#7FFFD4". See this:


http://www.gammon.com.au/mushclient/mxpcolours.htm


I'm not sure what list you are referring to as the "Unix" list. If you give me a reference to that list I'll look at including it.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
Top
Posted by David Haley   USA  (3,881 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #13 on Sun 28 Nov 2004 09:06 PM (UTC)
Message
Quote:
Actually.. Sending the color directly has much greater control when using ASCII graphics.
Sure, ASCII graphics are an application of using direct color, but a) we were talking about very different things :-) and b) as you said, nobody does that anyway. Of course it's useful to be able to send direct color, but most of the time it seems much smarter to be sending style information, not just brute color. As I said, sending brute color puts the burden of customization on the client, and then they can't split apart two things that are red into two different colors, whereas with styles you could easily do so.
David Haley aka Ksilyan
Head Programmer,
Legends of the Darkstone

http://david.the-haleys.org
Top
Posted by Shadowfyr   USA  (1,791 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #14 on Sun 28 Nov 2004 09:07 PM (UTC)
Message
Umm. Not what I meant Nick. I mean that the HTML colors are a subset of something found on a lot of Linux systems. Its like colors.txt or something. Instead of merely having Tan as a color name, you have in there:

Tan
Tan0
Tan1
Tan2
Tan3
etc.

With Tan itself being the same as like Tan5 or something. The color names are essentially the same, but lighter or darker, depending on the number designation. Mushclient only supports the 'baseline', because it has the standard HTML values in it, which are a subset of what I can only assume was the original list from way back when they where first defined. I have/had a complete list someplace, but not sure if it is still on this comp or I moved it to a CD to clear up space. It wasn't easy to find online, though finding it on a Linux install may be possible. Also, the POVRay raytracer has an 'almost' complete version in the colors.inc file that comes with it. I think it is missing a few though and the format is in <R, G, B>, instead of hex. I think they copied the original colors.txt file from Unix and used it as a template for colors.inc and later for the colors in browsers. It would explain why all of them have the same questionable idea about what Brown is supposed to look like. ;)
Top

The dates and times for posts above are shown in Universal Co-ordinated Time (UTC).

To show them in your local time you can join the forum, and then set the 'time correction' field in your profile to the number of hours difference between your location and UTC time.

64,361 views.

This is page 1, subject is 2 pages long: 1 2  [Next page]

It is now over 60 days since the last post. This thread is closed.     Refresh page

Go to topic:           Search the forum

[Go to top] top

Information and images on this site are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License unless stated otherwise.

Home