Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2010 10:11 am

Slipped on some ice last night and tweaked my back. This put me on heating pads, on the sofa, forced to MUD off my laptop. Long story short, I got tired of trying to talk to a hand full of people on different MUD's using Trillian. constantly swaping back and froth between that and CMUD. I always knew IRC should work in CMUD but never tried to merge the two together. Last night I did. The first very basic package is in the library if anyone wants to play around with it. I think I left it set to the coldfront server but you can use any server with ease. Just change the host and port if necessary, in the advanced tab of the IRC window. The description should explain the rest. There's not much to it at the moment, but it does work

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2010 5:17 pm

Cool stuff. I've actually thought about putting official IRC support into CMUD in the past but have just never used IRC enough to really know exactly how it should work. If you want to use this thread to discuss how best to add IRC to CMUD, I'd be willing to have a discussion about how it should work. I'm a complete IRC newbie and don't even know how to set up any IRC test server to play around with it. Just never had the time.

But I'm interested more these days because I've been doing some Drupal web site stuff and a lot of Drupal people hang out in various IRC channels.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2010 1:26 am

Yes Rorso, I know that. I was more interested in hearing from people on what sort of features and user interface they wanted.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2010 6:15 pm

I'd personally use it as an alternative to mIRC, because the last time I looked, mIRC wasn't free. If I'm already using CMUD/TeSSH for my sysadmin and Drupal web development command line shell, having IRC would just be convenient.

I'd also certainly implement it in a general way to allow other chat protocols, such as zChat or Jabber. So yes, it would be the start of adding built-in chat to CMUD. However, I have no plans to implement proprietary protocols such as AIM, IRC, or MSN. I'm not going to build Trillian into CMUD...that's just overkill (not to mention too much work).

Seems like it just needs a window to select a "channel" and then a way to tie a chat window or the main command line to that channel. I'd like to be able to use the multi-window interface in CMUD to have multiple chat windows open at the same time but connected to different chat channels. For MUDs, a simple way to add a command "prefix" and "suffix" to whatever is entered on the command line would allow you to create a chat window for sending tells to a specific player, or guild chat, etc.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2010 11:03 am

I used mIRC forever. I still keep the latest copy around just for the heck of it but have switched over to iceChat in the last year or so.

I've been working on this off and on, when I'm not knocked out from the medication I was prescribed, the package containing everything is a real mess right now lol. It's a pretty simple system though. you create a session for the server you wish to connect to and have it load the package. Or you assign the package to a session already created and set the IRC server in the main window of the package. Once you connect you are prompted for a NICK and real name which are both required to log on to the server of course the real name can be fictional if you wish. You are also prompted for a password for the NICK. This is only needed if the NICK you enter is registered on the nickserver. There's a trigger to respond to pings from the server with pongs and the correct info which is sent with the ping. Joining any channel is as simple as typing join <channel name>. The channel name can either be just the name or the correct format of #name. A window is then created for that channel. Typing msg <message> in the channels window will send that message to that channel. You can also use the window name:commands format in any window where the commands are msg <message> to access any channel from any window. Chat is captured from the main server window, cleaned up, and redirected to the correct channel window with triggers adding a time stamp in the process. Private messages are sent using PM <recipient> <message> from any window. Both your message and any replies are captured to one single PM window for now. I just started on color codes, both coming from the server and the sending of them in messages. I hope to make some progress on that today. Typing PART in any channel window will throw up a menu where you choose to either quit and keep the window open or quit and close the window. A channel list window shouldn't take much more than a multistate trigger with three states and a little mxp. I'm starting to drift off so I'll better send this before it gets left unfinished on my desktop again.

Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2010 10:39 pm

Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 3:03 pm

I got some much needed additions made this morning and cleaned things up a little. The package now supports basic ansi color for channels and private messages, which seems to match up with what is displayed in both mIRC and IceChat, so I'm guessing the colors will be the same for other clients too. I will admit I was a bit lazy and just used CMUD's brown to represent the orange, users of the above clients will see/use. I plan on fixing this but it's not real important at the moment. There's still more I want to add and things that could be optimized/cleaned up a bit more, but it works ok for what it is I guess at the moment though.

Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 6:09 pm

I tried iceChat today and it worked pretty well. It's pretty ugly, but it seems to work and helps me understand a bit more how IRC works in practice (rather than in theory, which is all I get from reading RFCs).

Since I personally need to use IRC in conjunction with TeSSH for sysadmin stuff these days, there's a good chance you'll see some IRC support in CMUD 4.x. But I really need to do the Unicode stuff first, as boring and annoying as that part will be. So it will probably be several months before I can get back to fun stuff like this.

So keep working on your package till then. I'll look at your package and some of the other chat clients to start playing with a built-in chat interface sometime this Spring.

It's actually great to hear that CMUD is already powerful enough to do this kind of feature within a user-provided package. Nice work. (hope you feel better soon)

Beginner Joined: 10 Jan 2008 Posts: 13

I'm glad this topic came up! I've searched for it before.

I would -love- to see something implimented that would allow me to play games where IRC color codes are sent directly to color certain mud text.

I prefer using Cmud to anything else but

+You see a i=0,205,32orticoi=0,0,0to the i=0,205,32asti=0,0,0and
i=0,0,0o the i=0,205,32esti=0,0,0" -- is pretty ugly. (I'm not 100 percent certain, but I believe that there's also trouble with linebreaks and paragraph recognition)

I've tried to sub these little i= commands out but because they often cut off the first letter of the word after them it makes for difficult reading. I don't know anything about coding with IRC but there also seems to be a problem where something is handled like an ansii code and turns my font from white forground and black background to italic with a grey background and black text. In General Options, the Ansii codes can be disabled, however there is an option for everything BUT italics, which cannot be turned off that way.

(I've solved this with a #TRIGGER {^*$} {#color white}, amature, I'm sure but it makes it readable where it otherwise would not be)

Also, please insert an action

Newbie Joined: 14 Jul 2009 Posts: 6

With proper scripting and CMUD Pro, you can have your ssh and Irssi launched in one window and redirect input/output to and from your main MUD session window. A bit tricky due to Irssi's interface and constant refreshing of all window when changing channels/private chats, but I think with some Irssi scripting, you might be able to have everything in one Irssi "window" that you would operate on in your CMUD. Oh - and Irssi is free.