[DGD] Question: Implementing ANSI

[Par Winzell]

Trance Junkie wrote:
> Hello again, and thanks to everyone who answered my last query.
> 
> This might sound a bit backwards after my last question, but I do tend 
> to think/do things in strange ways sometimes. Basically, I'm wondering 
> if there's a relatively easy way to add ansi colour capabilities to the 
> DGD driver. There's a bit of documentation on the SourceForge site on 
> this, and some more on Dworkin's DGD FAQ, but again I have stumbled into 
> a couple of hurdles.

To summarize what's already been said and add some of my own --

The DGD driver has 'telnet' ports and 'binary' ports. The telnet ports 
have an implementation of the Telnet protocol inside DGD itself. I'd 
probably argue a modern mudlib should implement this on the mudlib 
level, but it's convenient to have it in DGD, especially because it's 
such a confusing protocol with so many broken implementations out in the 
wild. The ANSI patch to DGD, as far as I can remember, just removes a 
few lines of code in DGD that explicitly strips escape sequences such as 
ANSI colour codes.

As you seem to have already figured out, there's two substantially 
different ways to compile DGD for Windows; one's native to Windows, uses 
the Windows API, and requires Visual C++... and one compiles DGD as a 
Unix application, on top of Cygwin. Presuming you can't find somebody to 
compile DGD+ANSI for you using Visual C++ (I loathe the Microsoft IDE's 
and try hard to keep them away from my computer), by far your best bet 
is to use Cygwin. So...

... first of all, DGD compiles cleanly under Cygwin and runs without 
trouble. It does need to use the 'SYSV' Makefile in dgd/src/host rather 
than the 'BSD' one. I understand you were frustated with Cygwin by the 
time you quit, but I suggest you persist. If things continue to go 
wrong, please let us know what 'missing files' actually means. 
Meanwhile, these commands should fully compile DGD under Cygwin, if you 
have a sufficient installation:

   *  wget --passive-ftp ftp://ftp.dworkin.nl/pub/dgd/dgd-1.2p4.tar.gz
   *  tar -xzvf dgd-1.2p4.tar.gz
   *  cd dgd/src
   *  cp -p host/Makefile.sysv host/Makefile
   *  make install

If all goes well, you will have a binary in dgd/bin/driver. The Cygwin 
version, not being a native Windows application, is also not a GUI one; 
you'd do

   * cd ..
   * bin/driver mud.dgd

after modifying mud.dgd with the correct absolute path(s).

Finally, please don't worry overly much about installing Cygwin on your 
machine. It's not going to do any harm and I don't think it gets into 
the guts of your installation. You don't even really need to uninstall 
it if you get tired of it; delete i.e. C:\Cygwin and remove the links 
from the start menu, and I believe it's pretty much gone. You might even 
find that you get used to having it around. As tools go for making 
Windows sane, it's unparallelled in competence.

And please dump Wordpad!! :)

Zell