[DGD]ansi again (sorry Erwin)

[Matthew Jenkins]

I got round this problem by implementing my own "write" functions (all
rolled into player()->tell_me().

This function handles lots of manipulation of the output string (
including filtering out the escape sequence so wiz'z etc can't use ansi
directly, and changing character pairs (^R ^G ^b ^H etc) into a
pre-defined set of "safe" ansi sequences.  This also has the advantage
that normal users can use colour in their "says" and "tells" etc, safely.

It also handles filtering out of swear words.

Colour is important in real life - why not make it so in virtual-life as
well?

Matt

On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Stephen Schmidt wrote:

> 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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