[MUD-Dev] FIrst LOgin REview (was attracting players)

Wed May 10 19:48:19 CEST 2000

[adam at treyarch.com:]

> Have you had any trouble with certain client programs not recognizing, or
> worse yet, responding incorrectly to your autodetection?

Here's a chunk out of my 'telnet.txt' documentation, where I summarize
what I learned from experimenting with various clients. Note that this
is a couple years old now. The references to "**" commands and some
features are specific to my MUD.

Status of Various Clients

This section should contain information about using various clients with
this MUD server telnet code, and how well it worked. Note that I am not
an expert on any of these, so folks more familiar with them may be able
to make them work better. The various MUD clients were obtained from the
kanga.nu archives.

Linux 'telnet'
    The later development of the code was done with this client. Everything
    works pretty good. There are some things that you can do with that
    client that confuse it, however. I *think* they are bugs in its code,
    where it gets its flags mixed up. For example, some combinations of
    ECHO requests result in it displaying typed control characters (like
    carriage return and linefeed as ^M and ^J). This client supports
    BINARY, ECHO, NAWS, TERMINALTYPE, LINEMODE, FLOWCNTL, STATUS and
    NEW_ENVIRON. This behaviour is likely the same over most UNIX
    telnet clients, unless the vendor has replaced it with a new one.

Amiga 'telnet'
    This telnet comes as part of the AmiTCP/IP package. It works much
    as the Linux 'telnet', but does not support BINARY, NAWS or
    TERMINALTYPE. This client prints the message "Entering line mode"
    when negotiation puts it into pseudo-linemode, and "Entering
    character mode" when taken out of it. It will *not* go back into
    character mode unless manually put there, so after the initial
    password entry has put it into pseudo-linemode, password blanking
    does not work. If a subsequent password entry is needed, and it
    is important that the password not be visible, you must manually
    force the client back into character mode by using the line-mode
    escape character (^C), then entering 'c' and RETURN.

Amiga 'napsaterm'
    This client is also a part of the AmiTCP/IP package. It supports
    NAWS properly, but only does TERMINALTYPE once, even if asked to
    do it again. BINARY is not supported. With this client, all
    echoing must be done by the server, unfortunately. The client
    responds to the MUD server's "WONT ECHO" with a "DONT ECHO", but
    does not itself echo. So, the user must manually enter "**echo",
    to go back into server echo mode.

Windows-NT 'telnet'
    This is the default Windows-NT telnet program which comes with the
    system, rather than a third-party enhanced version. This client
    supports TERMINALTYPE, but not BINARY. Also, this client will not
    respond as needed to echo control attempts. On first connect, the
    MUD server is echoing, as usual. After finishing password input,
    however, the client does not respond to the server's offer of
    "WONT ECHO", and so neither end echos characters and the user
    can't see what is typed. Trying "**echo" to re-do the negotiation
    has no effect. The user must enter "**fecho" to forcibly tell
    the MUD server to echo, without doing any client negotiation.
    (What happens is that the MUD sends "WONT ECHO", trying to get the
    client to echo, and the client responds "DONT ECHO", but does not
    start doing local echoing.) So, the answer is to use "**fecho" to
    force the server to start echoing, without any negotiating.

TF/TinyFugue (Version: 40a4)
    Tested on Linux, tf works fine with this telnet code. The one minor
    exception is that anything typed before the first password cycle is
    not echoed. You can make it echo by entering a "**echo" command
    before typing the initial stuff. This client supports BINARY and
    NAWS, but not TERMINALTYPE.

TinyTalk (Version: 117)
    This client doesn't work well with this MUD telnet code. Prompts
    do not show up. The client is not aware of the telnet prototcol
    at all. Empty input lines appear to be discarded. I have also
    seen some output get lost.

pmf (Version: 1.13.1)
    Wouldn't compile on my Linux box - it was peeking inside the FILE
    structure - I didn't chase it further. FILES list shows all files
    last changed in 1991. Does anyone use this anymore?

vt (Version: 2.15)
    Exact same problem as pmf. Last change dated 1993 - does anyone
    use this anymore?

mudlink (Version 2.7)
    Hmm. Not really a client.

lptalk (Version 1.3)
    Derived from TinyTalk, and has similar problems.

kaltint (Version 4.1)
    This is a version of tintin. It mostly works, but doesn't support
    any of the telnet negotiations. You must turn off prompt erasing
    (**eraseprompt) in order to see prompts. Some things can be hard
    to do, since this client sends an empty line after every command
    you send. That could be something as simple as it sending LF/CR
    instead of CR/LF or just one of them - I didn't investigate. This
    program is designed to trigger on the output style of Diku MUDs, so
    it made a mess on my screen (everything in two shades of white!)
    when I connected to my own MUD.

footalk
    Interesting. But, I didn't try to compile and run it, since the
    client.doc file indicates it is only setup to talk to 'chaos' and
    'Islandia'. I decided not to learn the foo programming language
    to try to make it connect to my local test MUD.

TUsh (Version 1.74)
    Mostly works. I found its habit of going to a new line as soon as I
    typed a character a bit annoying, but it does save your typed input
    from getting messed up by unexpected output from the MUD server. You'll
    want to turn off prompt erasure with "**eraseprompt" here. This client
    understands the telnet protocol, but only supports ECHO negotiation
    (that I noticed). You do not want to use "**echo" to get echoing
    done by the server, since then this client interprets everything as
    being a password and blanks it with asterisks.

mcl (Version 0.42.05)
    From the documentation, it sounds like this client should work
    fairly well, but unfortunately it didn't work out that way. The
    best results were with the server doing eching, and prompt erasing
    turned off. None of BINARY, NAWS or TERMINALTYPE are supported. If
    you have prompt erasing enabled, asynchronous output (e.g. when
    someone beside you speaks) does not seem to show up at all. I have
    also seen output get lost, in the middle of lines (perhaps not a
    large enough buffer?) Passwords are not blanked, and the prompt never
    shows up in the input line (only the MCL prompt). I would be more
    interested in this client if it didn't require a Linux virtual console -
    I *really* don't like forcing my monitor to resync all the time!

Hegemon (Java client)
    Although it was designed for a different MUD server, this client works
    reasonably well. It doesn't appear to understand any telnet stuff.
    Prompts appear in the output window only. Do not force server echo
    on, or you will get multiple copies of input commands. Password
    blanking does not work, and should be disabled.

Net Term (Version 4.2.8, WIN32, Windows98)  (thanks to Darrin Hyrup)
    Supports BINARY, NAWS and TERMINALTYPE. According to Darrin,
    everything works fine.

Win98 standard telnet	(again, thanks to Darrin Hyrup)
    Supports TERMINALTYPE but not BINARY or NAWS. Again, according to
    Darrin, everything works fine.

HP-UX 9.05 standard telnet  (again thanks to Darrin Hyrup)
    Supports TERMINALTYPE and NAWS, but not BINARY. Another one that
    appears to work fine.

SunOS4 standard telnet
    Does not support BINARY or NAWS. Does do TTYTYPE. Echoing, etc. OK.

Solaris standard telnet
    Seems to be unchanged from SunOS4.

AIX 4.1 standard telnet
    Does BINARY, TTYTYPE, NAWS and password blanking. For some reason,
    NAWS doesn't happen on startup - you have to twiddle your window size
    in order for it to send the size.

AIX 4.3 standard telnet
    Similar to AIX 4.1, except that it will not echo locally! If you
    use the telnet client's "status" command, it always seems to report
    that it is operating in "3270 mode", even after trying its local
    mode command to put it into line mode or character mode. Well, the
    3270 *was* made by IBM!

--
Don't design inefficiency in - it'll happen in the implementation.

Chris Gray     cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA
               http://www.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA/cg/

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