Thanks to Jeff Waugh I am all set up again to use this blog. I have lately been doing an absolutely ton of work on gnome-mud. Jordim thinks that I should give Foundation membership another go once the .11 release comes out and that I should easily become a member. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much I suppose but its exciting to hear anyways.
Anyway, the .11 release of gnome-mud is imminent! It represents a huge amount of work as it is essentially a complete rewrite of gnome-mud from the ground up. .11 could be considered the ‘KDE 4.0’ release of GnomeMud in as much that we lose a few features (very few luckily) but have a much stronger base to work on for future development.
Some of the big new features in GnomeMud 0.11 are:
- Full MSP (Mud Sound Protocol Support) – We use GStreamer for this, playbin is absolutely amazing for how simple it is.
- SOCKS Proxy Support (Finally! Version 4 and 5)
- Zenith Mud Protocol (ZMP) Support – Just the core package for now but that’s only because noone is making packages for it. This is a real shame. ZMP uses the TELNET protocol 100% correctly by passing all information through Telnet’s subnegotiation mechanism. This is in stark contrast to more popular MUD protocols like MXP and MSP which send all their information in-band so the client has to strip it out or the user will see the output. They also use a really cumbersome pseudo-html/xml format that is a real mess. The only benefits I honestly think they have is that they are the most used extension protocols. Sigh.
- Full Encoding Support – We now support proper encoding for our VTE widget so character sets can be rendered correctly. We also support the TELNET CHARSET option which allows for character set negotiation (which is pretty cool), but mud server programmers being mud server programmers, noone actually uses this great option.
- Auto-sizing text entry widget – This works like the entry in Gossip. It automatically changes its height based on the amount of text entered. We have it set to a 5 line maximum at which point it’ll start to scroll. A minor but neat feature 🙂
- Input History – We have bash style input history on a per connection basis now. Woo!
- Nice new icon – Andreas was nice enough to give us a great looking tango-fied icon for this new release.
For the full list just visit our wiki page. This gives us a great base to start on. We’re still a long way from GnomeMud 1.0 but after this release comes out we are much closer because this is officially our Not Dead Yet release that’s going to kickstart the new era of GnomeMud development.