[MUD-Dev] Re: Ansii color, needing some specs and or pointers.

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Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com> wrote:
> On 09:18 PM 7/27/98 -0700, I personally witnessed Ben Greear jumping up to
> say:
> >
> >The players keep yelping at me to provide some ansi color, 
> 
> Addendum: In the days when no one used Windows terminals, sending ESC[6n to
> the client retrieved a cursor position report. I don't know how many people
> code this in modern clients, but it's pretty much the only ANSI autodetect
> process available, and most Unix and DOS clients still support it

No mud clients support it as far as I know. A brief experiment reveals
that
unix telnet in an xterm will happily send the code back but tinyfugue
won't,
and neither do zmud or gmud on win95. 

The most reliable way I've found to automatically detect whether a
client can 
cope with ansi is the terminal-type part of the telnet negotiation. The
problem 
here is again that "proper" telnet clients, both unix and windows/dos
ones, 
tend to reveal their terminal type when asked to by telnet protocol, but
mud 
clients generally don't. I guess their implementation of telnet protocol
is
too minimal.

Generally I'm assuming the connection is plain 7bit ascii unless
(a) the player tells the mud otherwise via the 'term' command or
(b) the terminal type is detected via telnet protocol on login.

This means that unless you connect with a decent telnet client you'll
never see the colour login screen because at that point the mud has no
idea who you are so it doesn't know if you want ansi or not. I can't
see any way around this unfortunately. I don't want one of those lame
"Do you want a colour login screen? (Y/N)" prompts as the first thing
people see either.

*growls at lazy client writers*
--
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