Basically, you got the scroll bar on the right side of the screen. That lets you scroll back through the output buffer, which is quite handy...
However!
On the mud I play, they have a Map Port, that has the up to date complete vMap of the entire world. Which is quite large. several hundred thousand vnums. The problem, is MC doesn't allow you to scroll side to side, If you disable word wrap, it'll go right off the screen, never to be seen. It took me an hour of playing with various fonts and sizes before I manage to get it to all fit on the screen.
Perhaps a horizontal scrollbar, so this doesn't occur would be handy.
Can't you just copy and paste the map into the notepad or something similar which has horizontal scroll bars? You want to keep it separate anyway so you can refer to it.
Yes, I see what you mean but I am reluctant to change MUSHclient in a fundamental way to accomodate a single map.
I tried using PuTTY which I use for SSH connections (and Telnet) however it also doesn't have horizontal scroll bars.
Also straight Windows Telnet doesn't either.
What is the width of the map (in characters?) I could always make the maximum width larger than 500, then you could copy it as HTML and paste into a dummy web page, and view it in that.
It doesn't look great in MUSHclient, because of no scroll bars. It doesn't look much better in zMUD, which although it has a horizontal scrollbar, still seems to wrap at the wrong place with its default settings.
The same applies in SimpleMU, however that also doesn't seem to have a horizontal scrollbar either.
Sounds like they have generated a map no-one can use.
I suggest you get the imms to improve their system, maybe generate a GIF picture every week and post that on the site.
Well, I ended up using Terminal @5pt and it looks normal on the screen. Granted... I have a massive desktop (1920x1440) so it works out well for me. I am not sure exactly how that map works, but I know the players use it often. Most connect to the map port first, then log in. It's handy to have open, especially when you are teleporting around.
It's the biggest world I've ever seen in a MUD. It's not a perfect vMap, but it gets the job done. There's going to be 2 more land masses added, and atleast 1 other planet at some point in the future. So yeah, it's big.
A lot of MUDs these days use ANSI maps. Even my MUD does, even though it isn't really that important, it is an option. This may be a good idea, I have seen MUDs where the map will not fit on the screen.
Personally, for the maps that my mud was using in the past, I set up a really simple funtion that converted the map to HTML so it could be viewed that way instead of in the mud, as this was frequently a problem.
Nick's custom output system probably won't be too happy with horizontal scrollbars. I imagine that perhaps the notepad window could be changed, or optionally it could become RTF instead of plain windows edit - but that would incur a speed hit.
As usual with Windows, using it is a tradeoff between flexibility and ease of use.
I initially had horizontal scrollbars, but for technical reasons (namely that Windows 95 is a 16-bit operating system as far as window co-ordinates are concerned), my use of the nice and simple CScrollbar class stopped working at exactly 32767 pixels of window size, and the window started "scrolling backwards" as users reported.
I then rewrote it to have a custom drawing system, with custom scrolling. However to avoid the 12 or so pixels taken up by a horizontal scrollbar I decided to not use one. Why? Because of the nature of MUDs, with text scrolling by quickly, I couldn't see a great use for horizontal scrolling.
I still haven't got an answer to my question. Who is the target audience? Two clients I mentioned don't have horizontal scrollbars anyway, and the third doesn't seem to handle the map properly anyway.
Personally, I don't need horizontal scrollbars (re: target audience). If a whole MUD has a need for them though, maybe it's not too far-fetched a possible feature. :-)