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Newbie Joined: 19 Oct 2002 Posts: 2 Location: Sweden

Hello there!
There is curretly a bug with Cyrrilic muds and ZMUD. In cyryllic we use a letter which have same binary value as telnet backspace I think (in numeric it's 255). So... It's would be very great if there'll be a option for interpreting 255 not as telnet backspace but rather as ascii char.
Just my 2 cents.

With the best regards, Eugene

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

Is your font a Unicode (two-bytes per character) font? zMUD doesn't support this and considering the amount of work that including this would require, Zugg has says that it won't support it anytime in the near future.

Also, character 255 is the null character. This character is used internally to terminate a string of characters. The computer knows that it has reached the end of a string of characters that starts at memory address X when the next character it reads from memory is the null character. Nothing much that can be done about this.

Kjata

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 873 Location: USA

quote:

Also, character 255 is the null character.

No, ASCII NUL=0, not 255.

255 is the telnet IAC (interpret as command) character. It's used for a lot of things, including telnet option negotiation. I doubt if anyone would use it for backspace, since there's already a backspace in 7-bit ascii (8), but weirder things have happened.

There are several Cyrillic alphabets, some of them single-byte. If you're using single-byte cyrillic, it should mainly be a question of loading up the proper font (I am not guaranteeing this, however).

When I test zMud by putting char 255 in the middle of a sent string, I get no change in the display at all vs not using it (as if the character were missing). This may be a result of the font I'm using, Courier, though I also tried it with Terminal. If you've got pointers to some good Cyrillic fonts, hit me.

On the other hand, when I _incorrectly_ send zMud a single char 255 in the middle of a string, the following character is 'eaten' by zMud rather than displayed (as it should be). Because 255 is IAC, you have to escape it first if you want 255 to show up on the terminal. (Send it twice). You might want to talk to the mud admins to make sure they don't have a bug. I think most of the stock codebases would have this bug, because 255 isn't used for anything in English and thus they probably don't check for it in room descs, command responses, or helpfiles before sending it out.

RFC's 1489 (Single-byte cyrillic) and 854 (telnet) are quite helpful.

-Tarn

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

Yup, Tarn is right. I was wrong.

Kjata