Out of curiosity, is there a particular reason the png format was left off the list of acceptable formats?

Personally, I find pngs end up looking the best in the final format, so I was mainly wondering if this was just a preference thing or if there was really a valid reason against it.

[Edit:] Also, why only 32x32? That's an awfully small image, and they're a little hard to see especially at the resolutions most people have nowadays.

I believe the size and format are designed to be compatible with ZMud/CMud.

However there's no reason why you couldn't add additional fields for differently sized icons.

What KaVir said, though I've observed it's tricky to get people to follow the specification.

Roughly a third of the muds I crawl have errors in the MSSP values they return, particularly when it comes to the 32x32 icon, which either points to a non existent file or contains an invalid image.

I added some sanity checking and the crawler page highlights incorrect fields in red.

So I think it's pointless to make up new variables unless you have a mudlist that uses them so people will have an incentive to both report the variables, and report them correctly. It'd be nice if mudbytes' mssp implementation would add some sanity checking and notify muds when they're sending useless output.

Hmm, it sounds like maybe the standard was pushed out a little quickly, before people had settled on what variables would be useful.

I believe 32x32 is an acceptable size for the favicon.

On my screen, a 32x32 favicon is downright enormous. I agree that in general it
seems like it should suffice. However, I use a relatively small resolution. Some people
use a relatively large resolution, and 10 years from now my guess is that resolution
may be such that 32x32 seems a bit quaint for a favicon.

I don't know for sure, but it can't hurt to accommodate such a thing.




Funny thing about a community spec. If you don't actively seek consensus in good
faith from the start, you wind up seeing consensus later anyway, but without your input.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Considering that most forum avatars are at least 80x80, and often 100x100, and are also generally 24-bit jpeg/bmp format, I think a 32x32 icon is probably only marginally useful.

I know if I cared about advertising my game, I'd want a good-looking image on the listing page. It might be nice to have that tiny icon for clients, but if the protocol is designed primarily for mud listing services, those icons are unlikely to see much use.

A BANNER field sounds like a good idea.

BTW, hey Scandum, Wodan added telopt mssp support to FluffOS, meaning any mud
on http://lpmuds.net/intermud.html that you see as running FluffOS 2.16* can be added to
your MSSP page.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Your server is the only one that intentionally does not follow my specification, the errors in the other listings seem just that, errors.


Only a few of them, pretty much all of the dead-souls ones report garbage, nice job crat. I'll simply remove your entry and individual lpmuds can email me once they get their act together.

I'd say something about ghosts of consensus past, but somehow I figure it'd be wasted effort on you. Ah well, maybe we'll just have to take care of this ourselves again until you come to your senses. :rolleyes:

Please explain what you mean by "garbage"

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Went looking, and Zugg doesn't seem particularly interested in supporting MSSP in either client. So the 32x32 size restriction seems moot. If the icons are to end up being used in some fashion on listing sites, I'd say going as high as 100x100 would do nicely.

I think it might be nice to have set sizes, with a few being perhaps required, and then an optional scalable version (.svg for instance). Of course, you'd have to either fix an aspect ratio of some sort, or at least suggest one strongly, so that people know what to expect and how to avoid funky stretching or clipping of their images.

As long as the telnet servers don't start kicking off any client that negotiates mssp it can always be added to mud clients on a later date.

I'm not an expert, maybe someone with experience in this area can share what the most useful size and supported formats should be.

How about 100x100, allow gif, png, jpg, bmp, and a maximum filesize of 32 KB? This would be for the current ICON variable.

Helloo?

Not sure how I'm supposed to get my act together if you don't tell me the problem…?

-Crat
http://dead-souls.net/looks_fine_to_me.t...

My personal opinion is that you shouldn't change the field definitions in such a way that existing muds have to update their entries. Instead, I'd suggest either leaving ICON as it is now (32x32), or relaxing the requirements and saying the icon can be any size (up to some reasonable maximum), the implication being that listing sites can always resize the image if they can't find an alternative of their preferred size.

I'd then suggest defining a standard for different image or banner sizes. Perhaps something like "IMAGE 468x60" (you could use "BANNER 468x60", but I'd favour something more generic).

Then if Bob's Mud List site decides to give each listing a free 333x66 banner, it's up to the muds on his site to add an "IMAGE 333x66" field.

So what's bad in Dead souls mssp?
is it the keys/values or protocol?

I'd like to see this answered as well even though I don't run one.

I guess I could require the icon to be square, use the gif, jpg, bmp, png format, and be less than 32K. That'd be backward compatible.


As I told Crat over a month ago in a PM it reports "N/A" where it should report "-1". It also reports an invalid genre: "Adventure".

FluffOS muds that use deadsouls report "dead-souls.net" as their hostname, and "http://lpmuds.net/favicon.ico" as their icon. Pretty much everything else seems to be a carbon copy with the exception of uptime, players, port, email address, and mud name.

-1 is a bad default for numeric values because it could be an actual response; if something doesn't apply, N/A is a far better choice – actually, better yet would be saying nothing at all.