Still under development? Some issues with terminal emulation

[eowmob]

High people,

I just came across this tool when someone logged in to our mud using it, I got a log entry about an unknown terminal type and I then went on to research about its capabilities to add it to our database.

It looks like a great tool, so congrats, but I'll probably not adapt it for us, as I already invested a bunch of time to make mudportal.com MXP / ansi compliant and then make it run independently s.t. our players mud sessions are not proxied in the clear over a 3rd party server. (you can check it out at mud.tap.de where you can also download the webclient source, but this is not meant as a commercial for it).

That said, I wasn't able to find a full working standard terminal emulation beyond 'dumb' for it. I'm not sure if someone is interested in working on that, but just as a quick remark, probably you should:

1. allow for some TTYPE handshake to negotiate a terminal type in addition to phudbase as https://tintin.mudhalla.net/protocols/mtts/ suggests. That would allow it to work better with arbitrary muds w/o special phudbase support. However I think it would be more RFC compliant to suggest from more specific and powerful to less, so I'd recommend a cycle PhudBase, "MTTS 1" and then "ansi", not more generic types as xterm or ansi B4 MTTS.
2. Regarding the ansi/colour emulation there seem to be some issues: ESC[5m for blink (or sometimes italics) is not parsed and shows up in the terminal right away. Underline ESC[4m is parsed, but has no effect. Bright and Inverse seem ok.
   
3. It seems that if several attributes are combined, they need to be individually reset. So if you set fore AND background colour, a single ESC[0m needs to reset both of them, not only the last one set (on contrary how xml or html would work). But I might be wrong, this is what I guessed from a visual glance at how it displays. At least it does not reset special text attributes proper in all situations.

Regards to all, have fun.