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mxp

Discworld player help

mxp

Name

What is MXP?

MXP, short for MUD eXtension Protocol, was devised as a way to give MUDs a way to have, when a compatible client is used, greater control over formatting and provide more ways of for players to interact with the MUD output. On Discworld, this means two things: support for far more colours than the ANSI standard (millions!) and clickable links and dropdown menus in the MUD output.

Colours

MXP provides support for approximately 16 million colours. To enable MXP colour mode, you will need to change your terminal setting to MXP by using "term mxp".

Colours in MXP are encoded using the HTML-like #RRGGBB syntax, with each of the three colour fields holding a hexadecimal value from 00 to FF. This means that you will be able to specify any colour MXP supports in any options colour setting, as well as in output that uses colour codes.

Standard colours ("blue" and so forth) are automatically converted into the appropriate MXP/HTML colour codes by the MUD driver. To control the appearance of these, the "mxp" command can be used. The "mxp <colour name> <colour code>" syntax will map that name to the colour code provided, while "mxp defaults" will restore all the colours to their default values. In some cases, mxp colours can disappear when you lose your link (i.e. go netdead), which "mxp restore" will fix for you should it occur.

Interactive Output

In addition to more colours, MXP provides for clickable things in the MUD output. These fall into two categories: links and dropdown menus.

Links are enabled by default whenever MXP is enabled. These, when clicked, will either send a command to the MUD or open a webpage (though the latter is not currently used on Discworld). To enable or disable this, along with the dropdown menus, use "options mxp enabled = <on/off>".

Discworld's MXP implementation also provides the capability to enable dropdown menus with commonly used commands (although not all of these will be applicable to the object in question) when the name of a person or object appears. These are toggled separately for living and nonliving things, with "options mxp livingmenus" and "options mxp objectmenus".

How can you use MXP?

A number of MUD clients have built in support for MXP. MUSHclient, zMUD/CMUD, and coldbeer all have native support for MXP. Refer to your MUD client's documentation for information on how to set this up in your MUD client.

See also:

term