Zugg Software :: View topic

Apprentice Joined: 13 Aug 2007 Posts: 166

The colors that come in from the mud seem to be pale.
I don't know if that's intended.

D

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 2:25 pm

Confirmed. Here are some screenshots:

zMUD:

CMUD:

The ANSI colour menu has the right colours - the screen doesn't. I could see how this could be deliberate - I personally find reading the CMUD colour much easier than reading the zMUD colour. But the ANSI colour menu lists the wrong colour.

Magician Joined: 17 Apr 2005 Posts: 496

Fang, just to confirm, it's only the blue at the bottom that's different, right? (63, 63, 255) instead of (0, 0, 255)?

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 3:23 pm

I wouldn't trust the RGB values from those images, they could be distorted. The blue is the only one I've seen that's different.

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 3:58 pm

Yes.. there still a few issues there. It's not as bad as before, I actually stopped playing one my LP-based MUDs because the colors were so off (Check out silverbridge.org:6666 for a good test) and I didn't want to give up the CMUD goodness. It's better now, but a few things still linger.

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 5:24 pm

OK, I need more information on this, or something better that will show me the problem. I can hardly see any difference between the two images above. CMUD takes the exact color from the ANSI Color settings. There isn't anything in CMUD that would suddenly make the colors "pale". It would take a lot of special algorithms to tweak the colors like that.

Tech: If you say the colors in your LP MUD are "so off", then I need to see an example of what they are *supposed* to look like. I can log into the MUD that you gave (and it's one that I used a lot in my testing), but I obviously have no idea what the "proper" colors are supposed to be.

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 5:36 pm

Colour problems are really annoying. I had a 20-minute argument the other day about whether something was blue or whether it was white. Eventually, I had to get out a tool that tells you the exact hex values of whatever colour your mouse is on to prove that it was indeed blue. On his monitor, the colours were too similar to tell the difference.

In that vein, gamma_ray's colour values are right - 3F3FFF vs 0000FF.

The weird part is that according to the ANSI colour menu, 9 really is 0,0,255.

The tool, if that'll help, is called ColorPix and it's from the same people that do that ColorSchemer thing.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

The red # is correctly not shown in cMUD. I used a character that didn't have "detect doors" to take that picture.

Edit: Here is another :-)

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 6:11 pm

It'd be awesome if you could get #debug files for that output as well, Rorso, so Zugg can reproduce the output at his end.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 7:11 pm

Rorso you rock. BTW I'll be able to get back to mudding on SB now. I'll put together my packages again too.

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 7:14 pm

When you do a debug:

#DEBUG test.txt test.raw

send me the test.txt file as an email attachment so I can replay it here. I can't copy/paste the text shown above because of the control codes.

One difference between CMUD 2.0 and older version (and zMUD) is how CMUD now handles the ANSI ESC[0m "reset" code. In v2.0, CMUD "resets" the colors to whatever your default session text style is. So if you have the green on black text in your Session Style preferences, then you will see green on black instead of the normal gray on black. So make sure you have set your default session style color to what you want the MUD to use for default text.

You'll also notice that zMUD had some bugs dealing with black text on colored backgrounds. In zMUD it would use the default green text instead of proper black text. So there are some cases in your screenshots above where the CMUD colors are more correct than zMUD.

But I see what you mean by the color differences. That's really odd, especially since I don't know any change that I made which would have that kind of effect.

If you can capture a #DEBUG output of your color chart, that would be great. The one at the bottom of Rorso's screen shot that shows all of the different colors. If I had the test.txt debug output for that, then it would make it really easy to try and fix this.

As I mentioned in my blog entry, this can be really tricky to work on. Allowing you to set a default style for your default text and background is a feature that just isn't supported in normal ANSI colors. I just need to find a way to make it work better than it is now. And I certainly need to fix whatever is causing the color hues to be so weird.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

I've uploaded the #debug log to http://www.silverbridge.org/~varmel/zmud/forum/bugs/colorerror.zip

Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 6:25 pm

OK, I got the files (thanks Rorso!)

And I've confirmed the problem. Looks like there are several problems here, but the main one about "Pale" colors applies to the "highlighted colors". CMUD added an algorithm for creating the highlighted version of any color (not just the 8 ANSI colors). This allows you to highlight MXP colors, for example. But it looks like it's using this algorithm even for the 8 foreground ANSI colors.

In other words, if you change the ANSI Foreground color for the Highlighted Blue, nothing happens. But if you change the ANSI Foreground color for the lower (dim) blue color, then you'll see the highlighted blue change on the screen too.

Anyway, it's on the bug list and I should be able to get it fixed in the next update. I'll also try to improve the highlighting algorithm so that it isn't so "pale".

Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 6:10 pm

Rorso: I'm working on the color bugs right now. But I wanted to point out in the #debug files that you sent me that the MUD you are playing is not using the Telnet Protocol properly. The MUD is sending LF/CR instead of CR/LF at the end of each line (see the test.raw file). If you have any control over the MUD or know the coders, you should point this out to them. It's a pretty gross violation of the telnet standard and MUDs like this make my life difficult.

Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 7:51 pm

OK, I think I have the ANSI colors fixed now.

However, I ran into several issues with some of the ANSI codes being sent by some MUDs. People should be aware that some MUDs force the black background color by sending <ESC>[40m code, instead of just resetting to the default color using <ESC>[0m. This is actually a bad practice by the MUD since it will override any default Style that you have set for the screen background.

In zMUD and in past versions of CMUD, CMUD would change the 0th ANSI background color to the background color of your default session text style. I decided that while this helped preserve the user's background color style preferences, it wasn't the correct thing to do wrt the ANSI standard. So in v2.02, CMUD no longer adjusts the ANSI color 0 to match your Style background. So if the MUD sends the <ESC>[40m code, you will still get a background of black no matter what your default session text Style is set to.

To overcome this problem, you can go into the ANSI background preferences and change the black background to your preferred background color manually.

In zMUD, a similar situation occurred with the ANSI foreground color #2. If you changed the default session text color to something other than green (in zMUD this was in the Color Scheme section), then zMUD would change the ANSI foreground color #2 to match your default text color. In CMUD, your default session text Style is only set when the MUD sends the ANSI <ESC>[0m reset code. The session text Style will no longer overwrite any of your ANSI color settings.

These changes will make CMUD more ANSI compliant than zMUD (or previous versions of CMUD). But if the MUD is forcing particular colors, you might need to manually tweak your ANSI color settings to get them to match your default session text style settings.

Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 9:03 pm

Funny part is I like the new colors after using them for a week.

Wizard Joined: 15 Jan 2002 Posts: 1644 Location: USA

Is this bug also affecting the use of linecolor in triggers?

#TRIGGER "test" {test} {#SAY OK} "" {line=7}

seems to only fire sporadicly on white text Usually when I am getting the "pale" colors

Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 11:31 pm