MXP was listed by some as a "first rip out" thing. So in following some advice that was given, I've decided to poll for whether or not you think AFKMud should continue to support it with 2.0 and beyond.

I'll start off by saying that I am displeased with the lack of progress with MXP and the lack of proper standardization of it. It's become a lot like the web browser problem. Pages that render ok in IE fail in everything else, and pages which conform to the standards will sometimes fail in IE. I see the same set of circumstances having occurred with MXP. Zmud produces one set of results, while everyone else who follows the published standard ends up with something a bit different.

What this means for codebases and mud admins is that MXP support cannot be guaranteed to work properly in Zmud if you follow the published standards. If you code your MXP to work in Zmud, you often end up excluding people who use other clients such as MushClient, SimpleMU, or Kmuddy. Numerous patches have been produced which give favorable results only in some conditions.

Long story short, personally I feel it isn't worth being caught in yet another "lets disobey our own standard" problem. It hasn't gotten any better over the years.

MXP looks like HTML wanna be to me.

It is a form of HTML wannabe, and like Samson said, it doesn't work right in zmud which originated it, but it's still a cool concept and if you follow the actual standards for it then it does work right in the other clients that support it.

I think AFKmud should product its own 'mxp' if you will, and their own client to go along with it, that way, the mudding community needs a stable version of mxp, and we all know samson would make it work, and properly, and stick to its setup, unlike zugg of mxp.

That being said, GO SAMSON

MXP seems to be a very nice add-on for muds, I use it allot as do players. Excluding what it may "look" like, for simple things as web links, possible actions, and other things, I've found it to be very handy device. It allows easy access to webpages and commands players might not otherwise use.

I think Darien may have more in mind than Samson's willing to consider.

We use MXP in quite a few places for SlothMUD. Some of the ideas for usage came from logging in to AFKMUD and playing:-) I can't see any harm in leaving it in your codebase if you allow the players to toggle what options they want to use.

One of our creators is Wlliam Lees, the author of wintin95 and the newly released wintin.NET which fully supports MXP. Between ZMUD and wintin.net, the majority of our players use( I track it through a cmd to assure it wasn't a waste of my time to code) mxp( Avg about 40 players).

I understand the frustration with zmud and MXP. I have found it near impossible to get Zugg's attention when I have a problem with his "interpretation" of his own protocol. Wintin.net used Kmuddy's MXP library and extended it from there. It has taken quite a bit of time and effort but our system seems to work with most MXP capable clients at this time.

Splork

I say take it out, I never use a client that has it. And now that Zmud is trying to charge me again, no thanks. Save the resources and rip it out.

Well, there are still tons of Mushclient users who do use MXP, anyone who knows how to work it seems to like/use it when I've previewed my mud off. I think it its a nice extra feature that should be continued.

Again, something that should be a snippet/add-on

Not when its already in, it would be pointless to create a snippet for it when its already in and being used. As far as resources I'm sure its barely even effects the resources as the only big thing is the Overland code, and resources really shouldn't be a issue as it is a mud and barely uses any as it is.

I could see if it were being debated about including it or snippetizing it or leaving it out altogether from SmaugFUSS where it's not already in, but in AFKMud, it's already there and it works just fine for all te clients that support MXP except zmud. If an admin doesn't want to use it, they can rip it out, as many have expressed that they've chosen to do, but I see no reason to pull it from AFK altogether so that admins who do want it can use a snippet to re-add it.

It really depends on admins who will use it vs admins who wont use it ratio.

I'm not very familiar with this code base but SlothMUD has a ton of special configs we can toggle on and off when the game starts( or during). We do this for various reasons but why not simply add a config to the code base that the admins can turn on or off?

Ripping something out that appears to work quite well and that others can build upon seems rather silly to me.

Splork

Well I'm not entirely sure it does work all that well. But I don't have time to worry about it either way anymore. It's unlikely I'll remove it, but equally unlikely I'll add to it without user contributed patches down the road.

Old topic I know, but hey. There's a huge 8 month gap in a lot of things now. After continued work on the std::string conversion I've come to the conclusion the MXP code is just too bulky and unfriendly to try and fix, so I'm going to be taking it out as of AFKMud 2.1. If it's something people later decide they can't live without, I'm sure someone who knows C++ and the protocol will cook up a snippet for it.

I converted the MXP stuff to my own C++ code; it wasn't that bad... where are you having trouble with it?

Unfortunately I can't really just share it as is, or at least, it wouldn't be terribly useful, since most of it is based around my own very heavy modifications to the networking structures.

I wasn't happy with the code even just as C strings. The parser for it was big, ugly, and I didn't understand it. And not being able to understand what it was doing, I couldn't convert it either. So I yanked it out. I figure there's a better way to handle it all anyway for people who end up wanting it.

In the end, MXP is largely useless. It hasn't brought about anything more than "click me" menus and clickable command links in the games I've seen it in.

I've found the clickable menus to be very useful... they make for a lot of building shortcuts and make flag setting and stuff like that a lot easier.

This is just for AFKMud right?

Yes, this is just for AFKMud. Obviously SmaugFUSS doesn't have MXP support.