Zugg Software :: View topic - YAWL

Apprentice Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 195

heres my wishlist of little oddities and amusements that I would like to see changed. if anyone even cares. hehe

1. Ive noticed a lot of people complain that zmud is ugly (i say hooey to you).. pritty things take up space. every pixil of my screen is used for SOMETHING. Its important that i dont have pritty scrolls, if i wanted pritty pictures i wouldnt be a proud mudder!

- i'd like to be able to lose the tick timer, connection timer and right left scroll bars off the status bar. i know some will use them, well i dont. who wants to be reminded you wasted 9 hours in your chosen mud? not me

- on this note, more status bars! lots of em! fill my screen with them please.

- also it would be nice to also use the zmud top bar like a status bar (you know, where the max/min/close buttons are etc)

2. better spam/trigger loop protection

- im a dumbass, i loop triggers/alias all the time so fast that my computer wont let me click the trigger off icon (plus i never remember the keyboard shortcut for this)

3. easier to color buttons please more then the standard 5 shades

- i like bein able to right click a button then bring up the palette. but that only gives me like 10 shades. so PLEASE link it to the color picker

4. sticky prompts is a biggie. but i wont go into this cos everyones read plenty about em

5. in the settings window.. the filter button is kinda...well slow

6. better status windows, i hope the new docking system will solve that.
and also the zapp implimentation.

7. coffee maker facilities very much apprecited, altho not neccessary.

oh and daily tips on how to deal with mud addiction may help

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 12:18 am

Number 7 is a must have!

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

1) I would also like the option to lose the tick timer, connection timer, and right/left scroll bar - my window wraps at the correct width anyway so I never have to scroll. Having said this, maybe having the option to put the tick timer on the right hand side of the input bar might be appropriate (ie next to the buttons which toggle triggers and parsing). Additionally, you could put the connection timer in the window caption next to the MUD name for those who want it gone from that bar but still display it somewhere.

2) Maybe there needs to be a 'Application.ProcessMessages( )' when an alias fires a trigger and vice versa? Though this may cause other instabilities?

3) I'm pretty sure you'll be able to skin your buttons now - though some way to 'tint' the might be nice eg if you provide a greyscale gradient background, blend that with a colour mask? I guess that might be up to the skinning engine though?

Wizard Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 1113 Location: USA

You already can lose the left-right scroll bar. Just drag the separator bar (left side of the bottom scroll bar) all the way to the right.

I'm waiting for the first beta to see what I can do with ZML visually before I make requests for the UI components. It sounds like a lot of what I've wanted to do for the last few years will be doable in CMUD.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

It's not so much losing the scroll bar, it's losing the entire line, scroll bar, status bar, timers, everything :)

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

I lost all that for ages on zmud, but wanted it back, and the only way I figured out how to get it back was to import my settings (using a zsc file) into a blank settings file.

Wizard Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 1113 Location: USA

You can toggle the status bar off in your preferences, too. I personally only get rid of the scroll bar to give me more room for all my status line items.

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 4:45 pm

I would LOVE to be able to move the triggers off gun caption elsewhere. I cant tell you how many times a recusive loops has popped out on my, yet i couldnt click for the lil pop up window from one of the icons by my system clock covering it. On a real bad loop, getting rid of the pop up wont work, as the loop is so memory intensive that the icon wont come back fromt he system being to busy looping.

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 5:23 pm

You'll be happy to know that there are already some changes like this in CMUD:

1) The tick timer box is only displayed when the tick timer is actually running.
2) The MUD Connection time box is only displayed when the connection timer is enabled in the preferences.
3) The horizontal scroll bar can be toggled in the preferences.

In general, I agree that I'd like to make some changes to the icons to the right of the command line. Currently, some stuff is in the status bar and some stuff is in the command line (like the clock) and it seems a bit disjointed. With the possibility of multiple status bars in CMUD, I want to get rid of the tick and connection time stuff in the status bar, so maybe that should all be moved down to the command line. I'm guessing that few people need a command line that is the full width of the window.

So, other suggestions on how you'd like to see some of this stuff arranged would be useful.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

If these things (icons, clock, etc.) were like Toolbars, then they could be dragged and dropped wherever you wanted them... Maybe not feasible, but just an idea.

Apprentice Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 195

I agree, i dont like certain layout aspects.

- I think the clock can be totally togged off.. i have a clock on my windows start bar, and my wall, and my phone. Lose the clock

- Now i feel the trigger icon is still needed.... i use it a lot, im sure a lot of people do.. but where do we put it.

- the show command history arrow is usefull. but i would like the shortcut to be modifyable.. up/down controlls that and which commands to go back to. what about a cusomisable shortcut so ya can do.. alt+up for example. some already use the arrow keys for alias/macros.

- maybe this stuff can be put on the file/edit/view bar at the top. it only ever takes up half the screen width... so why not use it for these kinda things.

- just thinkin tho about the full width command line... im kinda used to it (anyone else got opinions on this?) im not sure if i would feel disoriented if the command line changed from the full width. i wouldnt really know untill i see it.

overall tho the interface is so simple its hard to actually improve on it, my comments are just niggly little ideas.

im very glad to hear about the connection/tick timer changes zugg. keep up the good work.

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 10:06 pm

I'm in favor of a full-width command line. I'm a relative novice at zMud, and I'm not a power gamer or points grubber, but the full-width command line comes in handy if I'm saying more than a sentence or two at a time.

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 10:42 pm

Seb has a good idea...what if all of these things were just "widgets" that you could put into your toolbar.

In CMUD, the main menu at the top is a toolbar (of menu items) and it doesn't take the full width. Thus, you can place other toolbar icons next to it without needing a completely new toolbar row. Using the DevExpress menu customization stuff, you will be able to easily customize your menu and toolbar. So if these other items like the clock and connection time were just additional items that you can select and drag to the menu or toolbar then maybe that would be good enough. Then I could really clean up the status bar and command line.

Perhaps what I'll also investigate is the ability to dock toolbar items to the right of the command line. I'd just create a normally empty toolbar to the right of the command line, which would then make it available for you to drag stuff into.

This way, people who don't want a full-width command line can add toolbar icons to the right, and people who want the full width can keep it empty and just use the menu and toolbar at the top.

I also think the DevExpress stuff allows you to create your own toolbars and add them to the 4 sides of the application window, so you aren't limited to just the toolbar at the top, but I'll need to test and confirm that.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

Yes, that's what I was thinking: a la MS Office - toolbars you can enable and disable, undock, float, dock somewhere else, e.g. to the right of the command line, customise, or even make your own toolbars, etc. But obviously that's probably a lot of work for you.

Posted: Tue Apr 25, 2006 12:51 am

Actually, the Developer Express toolbar system handles most of the end-user customization stuff already, so it might not be nearly as much work as you'd think Wink

The tricky part is figuring out how to store your preference and then restore it later. DevExpress supports saving the toolbar/menu settings to the INI file, but I'd have to modify that if each MUD window has it's own toolbar.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Yeah I was going to say use widgets so we can dock them wherever we want. I would like some way to 'lock layout' so once I've set up the layout I like I can't accidentally drag it later.

Saving the toolboar/etc layouts within a package would be -really- good, so you can share them with friends or so mud admins can create a 'standard' for their mud.

Magician Joined: 17 Apr 2005 Posts: 496

"Borrowing" this thread since it covers a lot of what I want...

Better ways to arange buttons, notably the "flexible space" from Firefox.

Better find (ctrl+f, not the #find command)-- instead of just up and down, which become worthless because they either reset when I don't want them to or can't be reset when I want them to be... Two sets of radio buttons, one which is up(default)/down and the other is from bottom(default)/from scroll buffer (grayed if the scroll buffer isn't in use)/from last find (grayed if no previous find)... and also an option to wrap (Text not found, continue searching from top?), so you could have it search down from the top by selecting down and from bottom.

A way to have "regex" be selected by default when you make a new trigger in the settings window! Even better, a way to always use regex and get rid of the checkbox all together. (No offense but I can think in regex and I can't think in ZMud patterns.)

A way to capture text to a variable like using #c+ does for a window... basically make it as simple as
#trigger {some trigger} {#c+ @somevar}
#cond {some trigger} {#c- @somevar}
without having to worry about setting up some trigger in the middle which matches every line and concats it to a var.

Also, you get the problem that you end up with multiple triggers matching off of the same thing... either because you've got ones that match every line for capture purposes or because you something where you want to do one thing on a pattern only if you've got some class enabled and you want to do some other thing every time, regardless of weather said class is enabled or not. Make it so this doesn't happen, and destroy the "duplicate trigger" box which seems to have NO non-destructive options.

Posted: Mon May 01, 2006 5:14 pm

The "flexible space" is an interesting idea that I'll look into with the new toolbar system.

In CMUD there are two types of buttons "toolbars". There are the zMUD compatible toolbars with buttons that work exactly like zMUD. No improvements are planned for this. Then there is the new toolbar system which works more like standard toolbars in other applications. You can drag your buttons (and other things) to this toolbar, and rearrange it however you want. You can create as many of these new toolbars as you want and dock them to any edge of your MUD window.

The downside of the new toolbar system is that it's harder to control exactly where an item is placed. As with normal toolbars, you can decide if the "button" has an image, caption, or both and can position the image on the left, top, right, or bottom of the caption. You can fix the width of the button, but you have less control over the height. The height is determined by the overall toolbar that contains the button. You can have a multi-line toolbar, or you can create two toolbars and place them below each other, just like in other applications. But you can't have one button with a different height from another in the same toolbar.

So, the "flexible space" might work for a horizontal spacer, but not for vertical spacing.

I think the flexibility of the new toolbar system and the ability to save toolbar layouts will make it better than the old system, even with this vertical spacing restriction. But we'll see how it works during beta.

I'll take note of your "find" suggestions, but I probably won't get to that until later during the beta period. You should probably make a separate post on this so it doesn't get lost and forgotten.

RegEx will never be the default. Anyone who can "think in RegEx" can remember the checkbox. A large majority of zMUD and CMUD users do not think in RegEx and prefer the normal zMUD syntax. Also, in CMUD when using a normal pattern, the compiler can optimize any variable lookups for you. So a normal trigger can actually be faster than regex in CMUD if you use variables in your trigger pattern.

Finally, the multiple trigger issue is already fixed in CMUD. CMUD doesn't care about "duplicate" settings like zMUD did. The only time a duplicate trigger can cause a problem is if you dont assign a unique ID to it and then try to reference it by the pattern in the command line. For example, if you did "#UNTRIG {^$}" and you have multiple triggers with this pattern, CMUD won't know which one to delete and will delete the first that it finds.

Magician Joined: 17 Apr 2005 Posts: 496

Sorry, bad wording on my part--I'd just like a user-selectable option to set regex as the default, not make it the default for everyone. The main problem is using the states tab to create long triggers. If I have a trigger where I want to match a bunch of different lines in a specific order I often use the states tab to create most of it because you can adjust almost everything on one page there... but then I have to go back to the pattern tab, select each state which has any regex from the state drop down and tick the regex box.

And another option for those who chose to only use one or the other to remove the checkbox, so that you can tab through stuff easier--right now you click on the Pattern box, type in your pattern, have to hit tab twice to get to the value box, and on one of those tabs your selection "disappears", when it's selecting the regex checkbox... this could also be fixed by re-aranging the focus-on-tab, but I'm not sure if that's even possible.

Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 5:21 am

Well, you'll need to give feedback on CMUD once it's out...the State Tab in the trigger editor is completely gone. In CMUD, trigger "states" are treated as "sub triggers" within the tree-hierarchy. In other words, to make a trigger into a state of another trigger, you just drag the sub-trigger and drop it over it's parent. To add a new "child" sub-trigger to an existing trigger, you click a button in the editor panel and it creates a new trigger state that is a child of the current trigger.

So there is no special tab or list of states. They are just displayed like normal triggers with an extra level of hierarchy. To re-order trigger states you just drag the trigger to it's new position in the tree.

Button states and menus are handled the same way. I tried to be consistent with the tree hierarchy for dealing with controls that have "sub states" rather than making all of those special tab grids. I think this is better than how zMUD handled it, but I'll probably have to tweak the interface based upon feedback.

Also, in the new editor, the RegEx option comes after the Value, so you don't have to tab twice.

Remember that the settings editor is one of the parts of CMUD that was completely written from scratch. Other parts of CMUD re-use some zMUD code, but not the Settings editor. It's completely different. So it probably doesn't make much sense to comment until you have had a chance to play with it.

Novice Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 32

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 9:56 pm

I would like a wod boundry option for use when triggering off a variable array so that highlights dont get a partial word.

array="this|that|red|other"
#TR {{@array}} {#CW red}

This is how it currently would show:

Fred was a bother to that thistle.

And I want:

Fred was a bother to that thistle.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

I believe that would be %q. #TR {%q{@array}%q} {#CW red}

Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 2:25 pm

No comments on that one?

Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 4:39 pm

Maybe the CMUD could detect if a line didnt end in proper punctuation {.|!|?} and automatically append them together as its sent to the client?