client

Revenant Client

A rough-draft Python client and engine for playing DragonRealms. The goal is something lich-shaped — a middleman between the game server and whatever front end you want to attach — but written in Python, with Python scripting, and more modularity where that's easy to get.

This is a hobby project. It is not a drop-in lich replacement and it is not trying to be. If you want a polished TUI today, go use Profanity. If you want a polished modern front end, go use Frostbite. If you want to tinker with Python wrapping a MUD connection, stay.

Related reading: Pylanthia.

Components

• core — the engine / middleman. Handles the telnet connection to Simutronics, feeds incoming bytes through an XML parser, strips game XML out of the text stream, and dispatches input/output. See client/core.py and client/xml_data.py.
• login — handles the SAL-style login handshake to get a game connection. See client/login.py. Drop a secrets.py next to client/secrets-example.py to supply credentials.
• gui — a PyQt6 front end. A main text output, a docked input line, a file/view menu. Reminiscent of the pre-Wizard/Stormfront AOL Gemstone clients. Currently the primary test bench for core. See client/gui/client_gui.py.
• tui — a non-working draft of a terminal front end. Framework choice is still up in the air. See client/tui/.

Install

Requires Python 3.10–3.12. Python 3.13+ will not work because client/login.py imports telnetlib, which was removed from the stdlib in 3.13.

This project is a member of the root uv workspace. From the repo root:

uv sync                      # installs revenant-client + dev tools into .venv

Dependencies are declared in pyproject.toml — currently just pyqt6 and pyyaml, with black, flake8, pre-commit, and pytest in the dev dependency group.

Running

There is no CLI entry point yet — the GUI is started via if __name__ == "__main__" at the bottom of client/gui/client_gui.py:

uv run python -m client.gui.client_gui

You will need a working secrets.py (copy from client/secrets-example.py) for login to succeed. A CLI wrapper is on the TODO list.

Tests

From this directory:

uv run pytest

There is a small XML parser test suite in tests/test_xml_parser.py backed by a captured login session in tests/login-sample.log.

Layout

client/
├── client/
│   ├── core.py            # Engine: connection, reactor loop, XML parsing
│   ├── login.py           # SAL login handshake
│   ├── xml_data.py        # Game XML parser / text stripper
│   ├── client_logger.py   # Logging mixin
│   ├── logging_config.yaml
│   ├── gui/               # PyQt6 front end
│   └── tui/               # (draft) terminal front end
├── notebooks/             # Scratch notebooks
├── tests/
└── pyproject.toml