Zugg Software :: View topic - Russian (and possibly other non-English) language broken

Newbie Joined: 22 Aug 2018 Posts: 5

There are a few issues which make using CMUD for Russian users difficult Sad

:
1) The cyrillic (Russian) letter "я" does not work properly. It was always the case, since I used zMud v6 back in 2002-ish. Many Russian MUDs even adopted a special setting which replaces "я" with latin "z" specifically to allow people to use zMUD (because zMUD was awesome and superior to all other clients). This "z" workaround works, but it is inconvenient to read, and also makes copy-pasted stuff usearcheable on the internet and difficult to communicate to other users.
The reason why letter "я" is problematic is because its numeric code in windows CP1251 (ANSI) codepage is 255, or hex FF. This coincides with Telnet's IAC (Interpret as Command) special character. I haven't checked the Telnet spec, but I believe that when FF is part of the data, it must be escaped with IAC itself. At least this is what Russian MUDs do by default and this is handled properly by other telnet/MUD clients like putty, JMC etc. CMUD does show this escaped "я" letter correctly, but then for some reason it deletes the letter next to it from the data flow.
2) There is another similar problem which new in CMUD: cyrillic letters "ч" (hex code F7 in CP1251) and "Ч" (D7) cause problems with a mapper. The mapper considers as empty (hence paragraph break) any lines where one of these letters is the first non-space character. I don't understand where this comes from. I've tried to disable all extra protocols including ANSI colors, but the problem persists.
3) When editing triggers, macros, aliases etc, when I'm trying to type something inside the script editing field using Russian keyboard layout, something weird happens. I've recorded a video as it's difficult to describe what exactly happens:
https://youtu.be/iV9dYvQhm0o
Basically when I'm typing, instead of Russian letters I get various punctuation marks, special characters, latin letters and non-printable characters. However, when I copy-paste Russian text into this field, it is displayed correctly - subject to setting Russian language in windows language settings for non-unicode programs. The script itself works fine with russian letters. It's just typing that is broken.
This used to work fine in zMud, as far as I remember.

Newbie Joined: 22 Aug 2018 Posts: 5

By the way, what happened with the plans of unicode conversion?
You mentioned it here long time ago: https://zuggsoft.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=165731
Is it completely abandoned?

Apprentice Joined: 03 Jul 2006 Posts: 108

All CMUD development ended several years ago, so yes, any changes that were hoped for can be considered abandoned.

Newbie Joined: 22 Aug 2018 Posts: 5

Fair enough...
OK, let's have a look at this Tortilla client then. At least it's open source.

Newbie Joined: 22 Aug 2018 Posts: 5

Gosh, I didn't realize that the latest CMUD release was more than 7 years ago. It would be a shame if this project goes nowhere. Any chances of Zugg releasing it to public domain, if he has no intention of developing it himself?

Apprentice Joined: 03 Jul 2006 Posts: 108

Pretty much no chance of that. Even if he wanted to release his code for it, he uses modules from other vendors for which he purchased licenses to use. He would be unable to publish those elements of the code.