Subject: Re: Mud Transfer Protocol (Future of Mudding?)
From: "Erwin S. Andreasen" <erw@dde.dk>
Date: 29 Mar 1999 13:04:08 GMT
Type: Feature
State: Unclassified
See also: bugs/MudCompress/... for the mentioned protocol and example code

At least for normal MUD connections, compressing the output to about a quarter
of its size does give significant speed advantage. This is especially
noticeable if you connect from another part of the world, as experienced
by users from New Zealand and Brazil - less packets means less chance
of packet loss and faster connection.

The protocol was developed by Oliver Jowett and can be seen at:

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~icecube/compress/

There is a fairly portable[1] proxy client which works as described elsewhere
in Matthew's letter: the proxy client connects to the MUD and negotiates
a compressed connection, and you just use your favorite MUD client to connect
to the proxy client.

But you can also build the compress easily into your MUD client - this was
done with mcl (http://www.andreasen.org/mcl/), tinyfugue and muschlient.

Negotation happens via telnet options.


[1] It runs on UNIX and Windows and could probably be made to work on any
other platform where sockets and zlib - the compression library used - are
available.

--
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Erwin Andreasen   Herlev, Denmark <erw@dde.dk>          UNIX System Programmer
<URL:http://www.andreasen.org>              <*>         (not speaking for) DDE
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