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MXP Image

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Posted by Eos   USA  (52 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #15 on Mon 14 Jun 2004 07:47 AM (UTC)
Message
I already tried the font idea. The flaw in that is:

A) Everyone has to have the font (not so hard)
B) Mushclient can only display 1 font at a time (harder to overcome when the map has text as well).

Now if mushclient could handle switching fonts/multiple fonts that would be a viable solution.
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Posted by Flannel   USA  (1,230 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #16 on Mon 14 Jun 2004 08:01 AM (UTC)
Message
the new windows will be able to display multiple fonts. So youll be able to have a "map" window, as well as normal output.

However, Im wondering how the "clear" works, it just scrolls a bunch of lines? Do they set the scroll? or what.

Pity the person who has a slower connection. Especially with the pictures downloading.

But yes, this will be able to be done Id assume in the new windows.

~Flannel

Messiah of Rose
Eternity's Trials.

Clones are people two.
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Posted by Shadowfyr   USA  (1,790 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #17 on Mon 14 Jun 2004 08:03 AM (UTC)
Message
Why hasn't Pueblo taken off? Simple answer - I takes skill that most story writters don't actually have to make graphics that doesn't look totally lame, so it is easier to not bother. This doesn't mean it was a bad idea, just that it is harder to do than producing pure text. Something like Eos' map though is actually easy to do, from the perspective of the mud, since it only replaced single letters with images. There is no need to design a special graphic for every room, just make several dozen small ones and overlay them on the world. This is imho really an iteresting idea, though like you I have no clue how the heck it works in the client with other things happening, unless it uses something similar to the text based games of the old BBS days, where only the 'visible' region was redrawn and then only those letters corresponding to the areas explored. This was quite common.

As for the use of a special font.. That would require actually supporting extra fonts, which is currently not an available option either, but it is quite similar to what appears to be happening with the images in this case. It is also very limited, in that it can only use one color. Oh, and good luck managing to create the font without shelling out a chunk of cash for the software to make it.

To cover your points nick:

Quote:
Say you move around the map, does the image change? So if you scroll back, do you see the earlier maps before the move or where you are now?

I expect that the image changes, but I may be wrong. It is how most muds and the like handled it, only changing the part of the image that actually differed, unless a redraw of the whole thing was actually needed. This saved bandwidth, but is probably less of a concern now than it was before. However, it also means that Mushclient's non-support of positioning codes would kill it too.

Quote:
Do I support GIF, PNG, JPG, BMP, TIF or what else?

Well.. Usually jpg, bmp and gif. Though png is a good idea too. The other formats will never be used anyway, even by other clients. Personally I wouldn't even include bmp, if for no other reason than because only idiots would use an uncompressed format.

Quote:
Do graphics get downloaded on demand? From a HTTP proxy server if necessary?

If not available in the local cache, then yes they are FTPed on demand. Most sites provide a .zip or the like with most, if not all, of the needed images you can save into the cache to start with though.

Quote:
What happens if you select some text with inline images and do a "copy"? Do they end up on the clipboard?

Yes, no, maybe... If the client uses the standard and slow RichText control, then this is likely a yes. Imbedded images is part of the RichText controls copy function. Imho, I would have it copy the link, so if posted as HTML it will still display the right image.

Quote:
What if the image is too wide for your screen? Does it get resized?

Umm. I would say optional. There may be cases where a too big image is intentional, but it is not a good idea to use anything bigger than a few hundred pixels. I doubt most places would exceed a reasonable size, or that people would keep playing if they got hit by a 800x600 image a lot. I don't think anyone would scream to badly if some same limit was placed on it or images that didn't fit got resized.

Quote:
Do we have horizontal scroll bars?

Probably not necessary.

Quote:
What happens if I get a "bad" GIF image (eg. bad compression)?
Mushclient crashes? lol Seriously, if some compressed file types are damaged, or even incorrectly named, then some decompression libraries for them have been known to buffer overflow. A concept I find totally stupid, since you would think they would have put something in to check that the decompression never attempts to exceed the actually data loaded...

Quote:
What happens if the image isn't where the link says it is?

Take a page from most browsers and display an image that is sort of indented looking with a red box, with a white x, in it.

Quote:
What happens if the image requires 32-bit colour and you have 256 colours (8-bit colour)?

Planing to write the entire graphics library for it yourself too? This is something the OS is 'supposed' to deal with. Admittedly it usually does a crappy job at it, but it is supposed to do the conversion itself anyway.

Quote:
Do the images get cached? If so, where? What happens if the disk is full?

Yes. See above. If the disk gets close to full, you stop caching. However, this is Windows we are talking about here. If the disk space starts to gets that low, the OS will likely crash long before Mushclient needs to worry about telling you it is running out of space. ;) lol But in any case, I wouldn't allow caching to exceed some set size, just like browsers or anything else that caches data. Unless some mud went totally nuts, odds are this wouldn't be a big issue though.

In any case. This is one thing I suspect isn't going to happen anyway, unless someone else comes up with a output system that they can show Nick, which works and does the things Nick insists he just doesn't understand how to make work. Most importantly, one that does it reasonably fast. He would need to drastically rework the existing system anyway and it won't help him *or us* to complain about what it missing, if we have even less clue than he does how to make any of it work.

This is why, when I can, I try to describe how I think things could work in some detail or provide him with links to things that appear able to solve a percieved problem. He is only one person, not an entire staff dedicated to finding ways to add every thing we want. This means that we often get a better product, but it also means he can be obstanant, short sighted or even clueless about how to solve something. I don't see a whole lot of the rest of you actually suggesting actual solutions. If I had one for this, you can be sure I would be posting it.
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Posted by Eos   USA  (52 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #18 on Mon 14 Jun 2004 08:04 AM (UTC)

Amended on Mon 14 Jun 2004 08:07 AM (UTC) by Eos

Message

Quote:


1) Say you move around the map, does the image change? So if you scroll back, do you see the earlier maps before the move or where you are now?
2) Do I support GIF, PNG, JPG, BMP, TIF or what else?
3) Do graphics get downloaded on demand? From a HTTP proxy server if necessary?
4) What happens if you select some text with inline images and do a "copy"? Do they end up on the clipboard?
5) What if the image is too wide for your screen? Does it get resized?
6) Do we have horizontal scroll bars?
7) What happens if I get a "bad" GIF image (eg. bad compression)?
8) What happens if the image isn't where the link says it is?
9) What happens if the image requires 32-bit colour and you have 256 colours (8-bit colour)?
10) Do the images get cached? If so, where? What happens if the disk is full?


1) This is up to the MUD. Your program doesn't support screen redrawing anyhow, so I assume most MUDs will find their own answer for that. In my case I use 50 or so linefeeds so the previous information remains in place.
2) BMP and GIF, as per the protocol specifications.
3) Yes, As per the protocol specifications.
4) I'd say no. Really up to you though.
5) I'd reasonably assume yes.
6) Shouldn't be neccessary if screen width is limited by a character limit and images are resized to fit within the available limit (or in the case of multiple images on a single line, wrapped to next line as per text)
7) Standardized image placeholder indicating bad image, Sized and positioned per IMAGE tag specificications if any were passed.
8) See #7
9) You lose image quality. Last I looked that wasn't exactly a crashable bug, and is generally handled by the users display drivers/video card.
10) Yes. I'd recommend caching in worlds/worldname/images/ myself. But then I tend to keep all my worlds in their own directory anyhow, so they don't interfere with each other and I don't have to bother with unique filenames for all their scripts, etc. In the event of disk capacity an erorr message generally would be appropriate, as well as #7 in place of the image.

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Posted by Eos   USA  (52 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #19 on Mon 14 Jun 2004 08:13 AM (UTC)
Message
Quote:

However, Im wondering how the "clear" works, it just scrolls a bunch of lines? Do they set the scroll? or what.

On most clients a simple: "\x1B[;H\x1B[2J"
Does it, however since mushclient does not support that I use a more drastic combination of that and many \n\r so that all clients come out with the same results.

Quote:

Pity the person who has a slower connection. Especially with the pictures downloading.


If done to protocol, the pictures should be installed to begin with. Otherwise the pictures will only download once not every time viewed, and being relatively small tiles are not sufficient to slow even a 28.8 modem.

Speed is something I considered early in my MUD, players are able to set the speed at which the MUD sends them information, any where from 512 bytes per second to 5kbps, aside from the built in pager and the choice between html and non html views.
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Posted by Shadowfyr   USA  (1,790 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #20 on Mon 14 Jun 2004 08:24 AM (UTC)
Message
Hmm. Just looked at the other link. Yep, this is a non-scrolling mud. I.e., it uses, at minimum, the clear command. This has also been hammered to death, mainly due to it being one of those things I mentioned that Nick can't wrap his head around. We need to give him a good old pre-telnet client and point him at something like Land of Devastation. ;) Though where you would find either one...

If I remember right. Anything 'on the screen' is updated in memory by such clients, while they log what changes as it happens. The actual scroll back buffers treated each page as completely seperate events. I.e., it only 'saved' the state of the screen into the scroll back if a) a 'clear screen' command was recieved or b) as each line passed off the 'visible' area. This was generally expected to be 25 lines, since most client couldn't show more than that in the old days. Most non-scroll muds probably still use that standard. But it doesn't matter, since as soon as you got a clear command, it would buffer the current state anyway. The only big issue is keeping track of things that change *on screen* in cases where you are looking at the contents of that back buffer.

Same situation in that case though. The current 'visible' area gets updated (which is to say the current screen, not what the user is looking at), until one of its lines scrolls off that area or it is cleared and the whole thing needs to be shoved into the buffer. This meant that you couldn't watch the buffer to see what or how something happened, but if you reloaded the logged ansi later on, you could literally 'play back' everything as it happened. I am pretty sure existing clients that support those positioning commands do the same thing now. Trying to allow all the changes to play back as you scroll up isn't all that practical or even really preferrable.
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Posted by Eos   USA  (52 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #21 on Mon 14 Jun 2004 08:33 AM (UTC)
Message
Actually it is a scrolling mud.
It just has some sections (account login, profile management, and overland) that are non-scrolling sections.
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Posted by Flannel   USA  (1,230 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #22 on Mon 14 Jun 2004 07:38 PM (UTC)

Amended on Mon 14 Jun 2004 07:41 PM (UTC) by Flannel

Message
Just a comment about font software:

http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/
http://doubletype.sourceforge.net/

downloaded them both, played with them a bit, no idea what Im doing yet, so I cant suggest one or the other, there are plenty more on sourceforge, but these are the most active. I just didnt want to have tons of them, many of which are underpar or not useful, or whatever.

So there you go Shadowfyr, maybe youll redo your modterm font now, I remember when you did it you were complaining about something or other.

Edit:
Oh yeah, some of those pages have links to other font utilities, I havent explored much, but theres plenty there to chew on.
It also looks like fontforge is the better of those two, I couldnt get doubletype to do much.

~Flannel

Messiah of Rose
Eternity's Trials.

Clones are people two.
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,133 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #23 on Mon 14 Jun 2004 10:14 PM (UTC)
Message
OK, I see from the example page what you are talking about. It is really a map made up of special font characters, not a GIF image as such.

And, I presume, it needs to be in its own non-scrolling window with the text underneath, so you see in the map where you are, and the rest of the text (chats etc.) scroll by underneath.

MUSHclient doesn't currently support different "panes" (non-scrolling map, with scrolling text underneath). You could probably write a standalone window in VB, like Poromenos has done for his extra windows. Then using a trigger you could capture the map data and send it to the extra window.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Shadowfyr   USA  (1,790 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #24 on Tue 15 Jun 2004 12:55 AM (UTC)
Message
It isn't a 'pane' Nick. The mud, as near as I can tell from the description does what I described about the clear screen command. It blanks the existing page of text, then redisplays a new one, with the updated text and images. In this case, each 'page' would get saved in the buffer in the clients that support them. In the old days of BBS systems, such games would save bandwidth by repositioning the cursor and changing one character. The buffer space kept the last 'state' of the display, but each change would be saved into any ansi log file. So, if you page-up, it would show the last 'page' in the final state in had, just *before* the clear screen command.

This is what his does in a way. The difference is that badwidth is not as critical for telnet, so it clears the entire screen (which a client would then save in that state in the buffer), then redraws everything, including the text underneath. It simply places a graphical map into the window, instead of printing the ordinary text that is usually there. It doesn't use any sort of panes, windows, etc., just a direct replacement of the text with the small images. The scrolling happens only in the sense that all of this 'scrolls' off the screen if a lot of things happen before the player moves from the room and causes the entire screen to redraw.

Understand now?
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,133 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #25 on Tue 15 Jun 2004 04:13 AM (UTC)
Message
Quote:


Eos:

I begin to suspect some of you have no clue what overland mapping is, and that is half the reason you're not getting what I'm saying, So here is a webpage explaining in the hopes it helps:

http://www.auricmud.com/Sample/overland.html

...

It just has some sections (account login, profile management, and overland) that are non-scrolling sections.

...

Shadowfyr:

It isn't a 'pane' Nick. The mud, as near as I can tell from the description does what I described about the clear screen command. It blanks the existing page of text, then redisplays a new one, with the updated text and images.

...

The scrolling happens only in the sense that all of this 'scrolls' off the screen if a lot of things happen before the player moves from the room and causes the entire screen to redraw.

Understand now?


Shadowfyr, Eos said (see above) it "has some sections ... that are non-scrolling". Since he is talking about the "overland" part (the map), I take it, that he is talking about a non-scrolling section (pane) that is the map.

I understand about cursor addressing and telnet apps, I used to use "dumb" terminals that didn't scroll at all, you could only address 80 X 24 characters.

However from the screen shot on the link above, it seems to me he is describing a separate map section (pane) that doesn't scroll, and draws a map in a different font.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Flannel   USA  (1,230 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #26 on Tue 15 Jun 2004 05:57 AM (UTC)

Amended on Tue 15 Jun 2004 06:02 AM (UTC) by Flannel

Message
I think he was talking about there are parts of the MUD that arent scrolling, not the map.

The only scrolling sections are those three, Id assume things like chatting arent scrolling and such, I think thats what he was talking about.

But that is in a way scrolling, he redraws a scrolled picture every time, on MC, and Z. So, every time someone moves, the mud sends:
(a zillion blank lines) /*This is instead of a CLS*/
(a map with the current position of everything)
(Your little description thing)
(your stats)
He WANTS to be able to send a bunch of pictures, instead of the map. (basically a picture for letter conversion, which if he could get different fonts, he could do with a custom font. Perhaps he could write his own font with special characters being the map. Anyway, with the new windows, he can switch fonts, yes? So, that WILL work with what he wants to do, the person just needs to catch that, and throw it to the window in the "land" font.

He also wants a CLS, which is what shadowfyr has been talking about with buffers and such, which would save the need for a million lines. However, I think the new windows will work better from a users perspective, since theyll be able to have the writing underneath the map in the map window, or still on the world window with the map up in a corner, or whatever, and they can omit a bunch of the newlines, and plenty of other configurability.

Point being, the new windows and a custom font is all he needs.

Also, the different font, is in Zmud I assume, he "wants" it in MC, but the new windows will handle that. And the non scroll thing, isnt true, because you can see the line info (mouse over) with the fourth version, about a quarter of the way down the screen. And I think the symbols on that screen are photoshopped, or else he'd be able to do what he wanted already.

Itd be nice to see what its "supposed" to look like in Zmud. Or what it looks like in Zmud, or whatever. So we do infact know what hes asking for.

~Flannel

Messiah of Rose
Eternity's Trials.

Clones are people two.
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,133 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #27 on Tue 15 Jun 2004 06:07 AM (UTC)
Message
Yeah, let's see the whole enchilada, not just bits of it.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Eos   USA  (52 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #28 on Tue 15 Jun 2004 06:12 AM (UTC)
Message
Quote:

Shadowfyr, Eos said (see above) it "has some sections ... that are non-scrolling". Since he is talking about the "overland" part (the map), I take it, that he is talking about a non-scrolling section (pane) that is the map.


No Nick, Shadowfyr is 100% correct and you are the one over complicating and confusing things.

This is a feature I and several muds have had for months/years. How on earth could be doing this if it required your theoretical non-existant panes?

Our login menu is non scrolling.
Our areas work exactly like any other MUD. You walk around in them. You read. Entirely non visual.

Overland is purely connective. Think world maps in final fantasy games, or any other RPG, where you exit a town/dungeon and you're on a map. Thats overland.

When you leave the overland entering a town/city/tower/dungeon/area in general you go back to standard mudding.

Overland is non scrolling.
Standard MUD is scrolling.

Therefore my MUD does both.

Things stop scrolling when you go overland. Things resume scrolling when you go back into a real area.

Overland itself is nothing more than interactive virtual rooms connecting real areas.
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Posted by Shadowfyr   USA  (1,790 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #29 on Tue 15 Jun 2004 06:23 AM (UTC)

Amended on Tue 15 Jun 2004 06:28 AM (UTC) by Shadowfyr

Message
A custom font doesn't really fix it, since a) it is a whole heck of a lot easier to make pictures than making a font. Believe me, the FON are merely bitmaps and are a major pain, I don't even want to think about the stuff you can screw up developing a .TTF font... Also, his example shows several cases which are not simple colored images on a color background. In fact, a few use multiple colors in the individual pictures.

I do still think Nick is partly missing my point. He says that he previously used fixed sized clients for telnet that had text positioning. However, I used one called Telemate, which you can still find if you look really hard. It was the Mushclient of BBS clients, having support for scripting, full ansi logging, zmodem file transfer *and* a back buffer that works exactly like Mushclient's, with 5000+ lines, or whatever your memory could handle. However, it worked with *both* scrolling content and paged content, by buffering lines that scrolled of *or* 'freezing' the last known state of a page, then storing that in the buffer. Page-up and page-down actually jumped to the start or end of the 'current' page, then directly to the top or bottom of the 'next' page when pressed again. It worked extremely well and handled both types of content.

There is no need for a scrolling and static client to be mutually exclusive. The whole buffer issue was solved before with a lot of clients. Trying to keep track of every tiny little change and back into or out of them is way overthinking the needed function of the buffer.
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