I have made a YouTube video demonstrating various suggestions I have been making in this thread:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=10043

The general idea is that the server can send extra information to the client using telnet subnegotiation (and yes, I know the idea is not new).

The video demonstrates an actual working version - a somewhat modified version of SmaugFuss 1.9, MUSHclient 4.50, and a number of plugins that draw things like the map to "miniwindows" which are parts of the output window you can set up to draw into using graphical primitives (like squares, lines, etc.)

The code is available here:

http://github.com/nickgammon/smaugfuss

I forked off a version of SmaugFuss, made a few improvements for C++, fixed a few bugs, and then got stuck into handling the telnet negotiation and other things like sending messages to the client when you move around.

You need to select the status_messages branch to get all the stuff about the messages.

Don't mind my edit, just updating the Youtube tag handling for XHTML 1.1 compliance .........................
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Necro'd

I've been messing with my SWR and have been slowly converting it to C++. One thing I'm very interested in doing is instituting a lot of what you've done here by way of telnet subnegotiation and waht not. However, I have absolutely no experience with this. What is the best way to go about this?

One of the big things I'm interested in doing is creating it so while in space (and specifically space combat) you can have a status bar much like that of the HP/etc bar you've displayed here. So, that's kinda just one of the small goals I am aiming for.

Any tips would be great.

Nice Job Nick! .........................
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I tend not to read this forum very frequently, as I have to keep an eye on the MUSHclient one.

If you want to ask me more questions about it, you would get a faster response there:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/

Basically though, if you want to send stuff for status bars etc., you have some sort of protocol (eg. ATCP, Lua, JSON, B-encoding, MSDP) which is a method of encoding your information (eg. hp=22;mana=33). Then you may well want to send this extra stuff "out of band" so-to-speak, so it doesn't clutter up the main screen. Telnet subnegotiation is one way of doing that, which is what I used in the above demo.

Once you decide on a protocol (my example code for the above demo used a combination of telnet subnegotiation, and Lua) then you need to have a plugin (or other method) at the client end to pull the data out of the incoming data stream, decode it, and display it usefully (eg. a status bar).


Some useful links:

http://www.ironrealms.com/rapture/manual/files/FeatATCP-txt.html
http://www.ironrealms.com/gmcp-doc
http://json.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bencode
http://tintin.sourceforge.net/msdp/

This post by me puts it all together somewhat:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=10043

Note that my suggestions were not universally accepted.