Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2007 3:32 am

According to what I have heard, Stormfront was barely done (if at all) when zMUD support first came into being.

Although its hard to be sure, I can no longer find any reference to zMUD/CMUD at all on the Simu site. Though it was on the front page for many months.

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2007 4:52 pm

Yes, that's true. When Simutronics support was added to zMUD, they just had the Wizard client and hadn't released StormFront yet. The reason there probably isn't any mention of zMUD/CMUD anymore is that Simutronics wanted to continue out contract where they could get an icon in zMUD/CMUD and just pay me as a normal affiliate for people who sign up for a *new* Simutronics account using zMUD/CMUD. Since I switched to the auction method for doing icons, Simutronics declined to participate in the auction system, and it wasn't fair to the other MUDs in the auction to give Simutronics free icons for all of their games.

So, our contract with Simutronics ended. I have no idea if they are interested in any relationship these days since my contact at Simutronics left a while back.

I continue to wonder why MUD companies like Simutronics spend resources on their own client instead of just working with Zuggsoft to get features added to zMUD/CMUD. Seems like their time and resources would be better spent improving the games themselves. But it seems that Simutronics has moved away from the text-based games anyway. Maybe someday we'll come up with another relationship. I know that they still get new players because of the support in zMUD/CMUD.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand: So Matt: what setting are you using in the GSL Client field for stormfront mode on DragonRealms?

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2007 7:16 pm

The wiki thread may not be hard case official, but the person who made that post (Ildran) is a simu staff member. So there is a good bit of weight to it.

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

I just use "stormfront", though I never tried variations (not even "Stormfront"). Sometimes I've "remembered" to uncheck Enable GSL, but I think you said elsewhere that you don't bother with that setting if client type isn't one of the three predefined GSL client modes (wizard, zmud, or browser_fe).

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2007 10:14 pm

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2007 11:53 pm

OK, I guess I'm just confused on how MattLofton has it working even with sending "L PLAY" instead of "L STORM". What I might do in 2.0 is check to see if you have "stormfront" set for the GSLClient field, and if so, then it will send "STORM" instead of "PLAY" at connection. I just don't want to mess this up for people who seem to have it working already (like Matt)

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2007 12:11 am

you could always introduce stormfront_p and stormfront_s varients so both can be tested

Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2007 3:05 am

I was going over some #DEBUG stuff with Matt and I noticed that several steps listed here are skipped.

Steps 'M' and 'F' are skipped and replaced with a 'B' step (which looks to produce an error).

Step 'G' goes off without a hitch. Then step 'P' is skipped.

Thats all I see as far as following the order of steps.

Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2007 4:55 pm

The 'B' step is used to check for various billing errors, such as a banned or locked account. The 'M' part is to query for the list of games. In zMUD/CMUD, the game code is encoded along with the hostname in the form hostname|gamecode, so CMUD doesn't need to query for the list of games. The 'F' code queries the game for account status, which I don't do anything with. The 'P' step is also optional and just returns pricing information.

I can see where the 'M' query might be useful to determine whether STORM is supported. But otherwise I don't see a big problem. Not sure why 'B' produces any sort of error...maybe you can be more specific about that.

I'm hesitant to change the existing protocol since it comes from official documentation within Simutronics, and I don't want to do anything to break existing connections which seem to be working fine.

Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2007 5:08 pm

From the test.raw file i made with #DEBUG:

out ( 3) 08/15/07 21:11:29:437 : B

in ( 10) 08/15/07 21:11:29:515 : B<9>UNKNOWN

out ( 7) 08/15/07 21:11:29:515 : G<9>GS3

in ( 732) 08/15/07 21:11:29:609 : G<9>GemStone

Its not so much an error as that it returns UNKNOWN. I thought that meant that the 'B' tag was an unknown, especially since its not mentioned anywhere in the connection procedure list that was provided by Simultronics Staff.

Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2007 5:20 pm

Looks like that changed it. The codes that I have documented for 'B' are:

'EXPIRED' : 'Your trial account has expired.'
'NOACCESS' or 'NO_ACCESS' : 'Your account is locked.'
'NEED_BILL' : 'Not enough billing info'

I also have a line that checks for 'UNKNOWN' and continues with no error, so maybe this was something that they documented and then didn't even implement.

Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 9:20 pm

OK, I need some more help from the Simutronics people on this.

In the 2.03 version of CMUD, I have added an option to send "L STORM" instead of "L PLAY". However, using "L STORM", I cannot connect to the game.

The Wiki link that was given above has the last step as simply: