Mud Clients – 256 Xterm Color Mode

Syntax     : xterm              - Turn 256 color mode on/off.
             color 256          - See a table of the colors.
             color raw256       - See table of colors with no mud parsing.

Aardwolf now supports Xterm 256 color mode. Whether or not you can see Xterm 256 color depends on your client. See the bottom of this helpfile for a brief list of clients known to work with 256 colors. A sample of the colors is below:

Every xterm color has a corresponding “closest match” in ANSI so that players without xterm support are not affected.

To use xterm colors use @x[color] where [color] is any number 0 – 255. The first 16 colors corresponding to their ANSI equivalents and colors 232 to 255 are varying levels of gray. An online chart of all 256 colors can be found at:

It is possible to use either @x020 or @x20 but the 3 character version is recommended to avoid conflicts with color codes followed by numbers that are part of the actual message.

All codes from 0 to 255 can be used with @x but some colors considered too dark to display on the average screen will be automatically brightened. To see this, compare ‘color 256’ to ‘color raw256’ noting the difference (for example) in colors 0, 52, 53 and 232.

Clients:

Clients known to work with 256 color include Mushclient, Mudlet, CMud 3.x, Tintin++, Tinyfugue, Atlantis and the Blowtorch Android clients. Note that Zmud does not work with Xterm 256 colors. To see if you have 256 color support, type ‘xterm’, if you see Orange then you have it.

Known Issues:

• Kind of obscure, but if you have GMCP rawcolor mode on but do NOT have xterm, the GMCP data is still going to show @x123. There is an overhead involved in fixing this that may make it not worth it. If you’re using rawcolors via GMCP then you have a means to process color locally even if you can’t actually display 256 colors.
• Whoname cannot currently use 256 color mode.
• You can use these colors in strings in the editor (object names etc) but not in editor fields specifically requiring a color name such as the default map color for an area or in sector editing.