New Blindmode color codes, Automatic note formatting.

New color codes to support VI / Blind users:

There are some new color codes that support blindmode. Anything between @A and @E will not be shown to users with blindmode on. Anything between @F and @H will only be shown to users with blindmode on.

These new codes will allow us to have different descriptions in extra descriptions, helpfiles, identify descriptions, notes and other areas of the game. It will also allow us to start to work through in-game commands to have different layouts when blindmode is on without having to have two sets of code for each command.

Some details on these codes:

1. Multiple commands had to be modified to not allow these color codes. Anywhere a player can set something that is later seen by someone else, so:

   from, email, www, mstatus, title, afkmsg, battlecry, enter msg,
   exitmsg, leavemsg, visitmsg (imms), graffiti, groupname, pet names,
   afkmsg, vote booth fields, clanadmin settings, channel usage
   (including channel emotes, *think, *say, whisper, etc).
   

2. A few areas such as descriptions, notes and clanadmin editmotd do allow these codes to be used so that you can put @A and @E around any ASCII art etc in your content. In these cases, it should be impossible to enter @A without a closing @E and the same with @F and @H.

A good example of how these are useful in the code game too is to check the ‘clients’ command with blindmode 0 then blindmode 1 – there is no actual difference in code for these two versions, only markup using these 4 new codes.

Note-autoformatting and new note read options:

These are a group of changes around finally dealing with longer lines in notes and formatting notes for those who still want it.

• There is no longer a line size limit when entering notes. Or, more accurately, it is the size of the max input the game will allow in a single line (just over 1000 characters). I don’t recommend you enter notes this way, it will be really annoying when you hit max.
• The game will automatically format notes that contain lines over 79 characters as you read them. You can turn off the auto-format permanently with a new config command: noteformat [on/off]
• Because note formatting will not always be useful, any note that has no lines over 80 characters will not be touched at all. This means that when writing notes you still have full control over your note layout if you don’t go over the previous limits.
• While reading notes, you can use the commands to turn on/off note read options for the current note only:

  note read f        : Format the current note.
  note read nof      : Don't format the current note - some notes will look
                       strange auto-formatted, use this to read them plain.
  
  note read #        : show line numbers in front of notes.
  note read no#      : dont line numbers in front of notes.
  
  note read prefix   : show | prefix on current note.
  note read noprefix : don't show | prefix on current note.
  

  Each of these options has alternatives like ‘format/noformat’,’lines/nolines’, ‘pre/nopre’ etc. I will put a full list of them at the bottom of ‘help notes’.

• When a you read a note and it is formatted automatically, you will see a line like this:

  Note auto-formatted…use ‘note ran’ to read unformatted.

  ‘Note ran’ is a shortcut for ‘note read again noformat’. If you don’t want to see these messages at all, you can use ‘config noteftag [on|off]‘ to turn these notifications off. There is no separate command for this one and it only shows in ‘config all’.

• Added a couple of commands that existed only in the description editor to the note editor:

      .ra  : Same as replace but replaces all occurrences.
  
      .size: Shows size of the note.
  

  That’s it for this round of changes – hopefully this will make reading and managing notes easier for everyone.

  MUD News