After several months of work by Johnny and I we have rolled out xterm256 color support into the MOO and the web client.
WEBCLIENT
The webclient requires no configuration. Your colors should just work. If you notice weirdness with colors, let us know on here or on xhelp. We're still tweaking and expect some wonkiness here and there. Screenshots definitely help. If you're going to post them on here, make sure they don't have IC info, if you can't manage that email them to [email protected] with your browser and OS.
FALLBACK SUPPORT
For those of you using VMOO or older gaming clients, your clients may only support the colors we previously used, which are ANSI. That's OK. We've wrote fallback support for every one of the 256 colors. That means you can: @ansi ansi and go back to the old colors. You will miss out on the colory goodness but if we are saying something is REDBLOOD, you'll just get red. NBD.
You can also @ansi off to disable colors all the way, which was already an existing feature.
@256-COLORS
You can view all the pretty colors with @256-colors.
COLOR CODES
Instead of colorizing the text when we ask for a color, we use color codes which can be modified or stripped out whenever we want. This gives us finer grained control over the color, and also lets us do the fallback support more intuitively. This required we rewrite some core verbs that format text so if you see issues with formatting, please let us know on this thread or in an @bug.
WHAT NEXT?
Well, we aren't actually done with the changes. We've activated 256 colors, and updated a lot of the code that was using the old style code-- but there are still plenty of places in the MOO that are still using the old color codes-- stuff hard coded into room descriptions and recorded content and photos. We're going to be slowly migrating these to our new style of colors. When we are done we will remove the old hacky code and the MOO will run faster and be healthier.
We also plan to roll out these new colors in different places in the game over time, all those tailoring colors you've been working with that were just different names for 'red' will actually be different colors at some point in the future!
This was a giant, huge, project, one of the biggest and most complex we've done due to all the systems and code it touched. Thanks to Johnny for working with me many full weekend days to get this up and running! Thanks to the rest of the staff for stepping up when Johnny and I were in developer land for days on end. And thank you all for working with us as we resolve some of the lingering issues with supporting these new colors and revamping this entire color system from the ground up.