I was wondering if anyone has been able to put this system into a smaug codebase. and how to go about it I was looking at Kavirs protocol snippet, but its not what I want. I want to be able allow players/builders to use the colors and for clients who don't support the system to automatically switch to the best ansci color. Any push in the right direction would be extremely helpful. I know Gatz of narutomud has done it so its not impossible.

I started adding this, but got distracted and would have to start again.

If you want a place to start, this is a perl script I wrote to generate the fast lookup tables for several terminal type options. It was mostly written to generate LPC code, but it also emits a C section which would be suitable for use in a Dikurivative.

SmaugFUSS uses some old color code of mine that has the concept of symbolic colors like &[blah], and it would be fairly easy to map pinkfish names into that space, which is what I was doing when I got distracted. I rather dislike C/C++ these days though, so it may take a while for me to get back to looking at it.

yeah that confused me.

Which?

The perl script? The C code the perl script produces? The Smaug symbolic color code? My post? Or all of the above?

all the above lol.

Well, I probably can't help much with the first two. If you don't know perl, you'll likely not enjoy trying to read the script. If you try to really read the C code it spits out, you'll find it mostly large chunks of data since the point was to generate something that worked FAST, knowing that RAM is cheap these days.

As for the symbolic color code... that really is pretty simple.

If you look in the SmaugFUSS distro, you'll see my name in some comments down somewhere in color.c, and somewhere in the code that parses the color tokens, you'll see that it treats codes like ^[ or &[ as special things. Namely, it reads whatever comes after the [ up until it sees a matching ], and looks THAT up in a table to see what actual color you wanted.

So, while &r might be red, you can also get the same ANSI sequence output with &[red], and if you define your lookup table right, you could do &[damage] and have that also end up as red.

Why? Because it lets you avoid hard-coding stuff in the rest of your code. If you use &[damage] for things that cause the player damage, the player themselves can have the option to specify what color those messages actually show up as... perhaps they're color-blind, or perhaps they simply don't like red, or maybe they play on a white background and want it to be bold+red or something.

So, using that same system, you could implement a bit more hackery and allow xterm256 color names to emit xterm256 specific sequences (or downcode to ANSI if not supported).