Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 12:15 am

I was playing around with 3.23a on Imperian (IRE Mud) today. I noticed that Imp is sending back URLs to images of maps within their Room GMCP package. Ie, %gmcp.room.info.map might contain www.imperian.com/irex/maps/clientmap.php?map=100&building=0&level=0 23 26. I've been %concat'ing http:// in front of this thing to add the protocol.

I'd like (using <IMAGE> or <IMG> dont' really care) to pull this picture into my session. CMud is apparently paying attention to filetype extensions and so while it will download the image it won't actually display it. I created a quick cgi script that just downloads the image data from IRE (happens to be in png format) from a preset url. I named this cgi script 'ire.png' and when I point Cmud at it the image is displayed just fine.

Is there anyway to either work around this problem, or maybe submit a feature request to allow IMG and IMAGE to function in this kind of situation?

Apprentice Joined: 15 Jun 2010 Posts: 121

As far as I know Cmud doesn't have any utility to pull images and I looked for quite a bit but perhaps someone else will know...

On another note I wrote a simple visual basic app a while ago using COM that would do this just for the fun of it.. its pretty simple since it doesn't do anything like resize the image or crop the window to a certain part of the map like you would see in the java client.. but since it doesn't show hidden exits or stuff like that I decided to forget about it and go back to my own map in cmud

Also you should realize that the MAP image does not show your current location overlayed on the map, it just gives you coordinates on the grid of where you should be, you have to do overlay a blue circle on your room to show you where you are...

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 1:54 am

Well it does work. The MXP <IMAGE> tag has a URL parameter you can use and CMud will happily go out and download the image before displaying.

ie,

Apprentice Joined: 15 Jun 2010 Posts: 121

edit:

after some checking looks like it actually does not like the question mark character.... so it doesn't even send the request....has nothing to do with the file extension

unfortunately ? is a reserved character so you can't do url encoding like change it to %3F /// it just won't work...

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 2:02 pm

Interesting! I misinterpreted what was happening. I saw the download window open and close and thought the download was completing. Well maybe this can be looked at, it'd be a nice capability.

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 4:11 pm

I'll take a look at this to see what I can do.

Can somebody post a real test URL for an image file that really exists to make it quicker for me to test this?

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 7:50 pm

Sure Zugg:

http://www.imperian.com/irex/maps/clientmap.php?map=100&building=0&level=0 23 26

That's a real url returned from Imperian via GMCP. Thank you for looking at this!

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 8:19 pm

That image wont even load in my browser, said it had errors... odd.

Apprentice Joined: 15 Jun 2010 Posts: 121

It depends on your browser but in that case, the spaces really should be replaced with %20

try
http://www.imperian.com/irex/maps/clientmap.php?map=100&building=0&level=0%2023%2026

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 10:08 pm

Well see, the problem with this is that CMUD needs to be able to download the image and store it in a file on your disk. And in the above case, what should the disk file be called? There isn't any file name there (except for maybe clientmap.php). MXP was only designed to download actual image file names and not "dynamic" image data created by a URL like this.

So I'm not sure what CMUD is supposed to magically do with this, sorry.

Apprentice Joined: 15 Jun 2010 Posts: 121

ah so it downloads it to disk to cache it? how about just replacing "?" with "_" and any other invalid chars with "_", that will still work right? you'll still get a unique file name from it

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 10:59 pm

That helps, but Windows still doesn't know the image file type. It needs a valid file extension to load the image properly.

What I've done in the next version to try and help with this is to add a "type" argument to the IMG and IMAGE MXP tags. So you can do:

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 11:08 pm

That looks like it'll work fine. Thanks a bunch for taking the time to get this in there. It was hardly high priority, just seemed a shame not to use what IRE was providing.

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 11:57 pm

Having looked at the maps from that URL, it's not really something you will want to draw in the main session window...it's a very large file. But yeah, it was worth cleaning it up.

Apprentice Joined: 03 Feb 2007 Posts: 170

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 2:00 am

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 3:46 am

Tell your friends Very Happy

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 1:09 pm

Ahem, with this latest change, it seems a script I have no longer works...

#MXP <image ./Images/clear.gif> used to show the 'clear' gif for displaying my local weather. Now all it does is attempt to download it each time and never displays it. Adding type doesn't fix it, either...

Charneus

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 4:44 pm

Yep, it's because of the . at the beginning of the name. I didn't support relative filenames in the latest change. Added to bug list.

See, that's what I get for trying to fix something at the last minute Crying or Very sad