[DGD]ansi again (sorry Erwin)

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, E. Harte wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Imo Wright wrote:
> > What does everyone have against ansi?  Maybe it's just because i'm female,
> > but I think all the colors are pretty :)
> 
> The fact that people that _use_ it also seem to have a tendency to turn it
> on by default and then pick colour schemes that don't take into account
> that others might have different background/foreground colours. :-)

I agree with Erwin's answer, having had serious problems with
that the last time I was a mud admin, but I also have three
different reasons:

1) Teaching wizards how to use it properly, especially those
with little or no computer background, is a major hassle.

2) There was a time when the art of mud design devolved into
a contest to see who could use the most ANSI. It lasted for
the better part of a year and it was depressing. I personally
chose not to play that game and focused on aspects of mud
design that, MAO only, were of substance and not of flash.

3) At least with MudOS mudlibs, the ANSI control code within
the mudlib was a crawling horror that ate up mondo CPU and
that no one I knew except the original author (who was not
a wizard on the muds I was on) understood well enough to
hack, although there were a few people (me among them)
who could go into it if they had to; but it was not a
pleasant experience. No gripe against the author - if I
wanted something better, I could and should have written
something myself, and I did not - but it was a road that,
IMHO, was not worth going down in the long run. Obviously
most people felt differently about it than I did....

The root of the last problem is that, if you give players
the option to turn ANSI off, then every time the mud sends
a message, the mudlib has to walk through the string being
sent once for each player receiving the message, checking
each character to see if it's ANSI and removing it or not
if so. That was a lot of characters, especially when a
combat broke out in a room with 20 players in it (and yes,
we did have ANSI in our combat sequence, although the code
would have checked anyway even if we hadn't).

DGD being DGD, I'm sure it handles this a lot more efficiently,
but that's a historical reason why some people have chosen to
avoid it.
 
Steve 

"Bill Gates' biggest fear is not that some kid is brewing up the next killer
app in his garage in Kenosha. His biggest fear is that some kid will brew up
the next killer app in his garage in Kenosha and Microsoft won't own it."
	Seattle Times, 4/1-7 2000






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