Zugg Software :: View topic

Newbie Joined: 04 Oct 2002 Posts: 2 Location: China

Before version 5.x, such as 4.62, there is no problem in handling multi-byte mud. But after 4.62, it seems all the zMUD versions can't handle multi-byte mud correctly.
I have searched all the forums, it seems the reason is zMUD don't support UNICODE. I wonder why zMUD don't support UNICODE. Is it difficult to implement?

Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2002 8:42 pm

Actually, 4.62 didn't support it either if you tried to make unicode triggers, etc.

zMUD is written in Delphi and was originally written for Windows 3.1 way back in 1995. Back then, nothing supported unicode, not even Windows. Over the years, Delphi finally added Unicode support (fully in Delphi 5), which was a couple of years ago. However, by then, much of low-level sections of zMUD had already been written. In particular, the scrolling MUD output display only stores one byte per character. Converting this to support Unicode would be a major task.

So, yes, Unicode *is* very difficult to implement, once code has been written before unicode existed. Some of us old-time programmers are just used to treating strings as byte-arrays, and end up doing lots of stuff for speed and efficiency that just doesn't work with unicode. Between the screen display, the trigger pattern matching, the script parsing, etc, there are lots and lots of places where unicode would have to be added.

So, I'm afraid that at this point, it's probably never going to happen. Sorry.

Newbie Joined: 04 Oct 2002 Posts: 2 Location: China

OK.I can understand the difficulties for Zugg to implement the UNICODE version of zMUD. However, I still wonder why 4.62 has no problem in handling multi-byte mud, but versions after 4.62 have problems in handling multi-byte mud.