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Newbie Joined: 15 Nov 2004 Posts: 8

One thing I cannot find is the settings for assigning or disabling special characters. A MUD I play uses the ; for special emotes, but I cant find how to make Cmud not use it as a command separator like I could in zMUD.

ANy help?

Enchanter Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 511 Location: USA

Go to Options>General. When the option screen opens up look on the left for Scripting and click on it. Then, on the right you will see a tab for Special Characters. That is what you want.

Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 4:27 am

Also, you should be aware that changing special characters currently doesn't work very well in CMUD.

Newbie Joined: 15 Nov 2004 Posts: 8

Thanks for the help! Not too worried about changing it, just wanted it turned off. I don't really use any of the special functions of zMUD.. was too lazy to work with it, lol.. and thusly don't expect to really put all the capabilities of cMUD to use.

Apprentice Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 152

Beginner Joined: 14 Jan 2004 Posts: 18

Apprentice Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 152

But learning a totaly new "coding" language was not? You have to have started making those patterns in some point, in either perl or in z/cmuds patterns. Anyway you had to learn a new thing to do.

Yes, making those patters perl exclusive would force current non-perl users to push that convert button, but new users would then again use such language that would work with everyone regaldes what specail charactes they want to use.

Enchanter Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 511 Location: USA

I think what it was is that some of us felt the niceties of the original pattern recognition and its documentation within zMUD, and when regex support was added, even though it is better learning it was a little more complicated.

But Special Characters don't just have to do with pattern recognition (though you would probably still need the quote character even with regex). The characters are ones that are built in to do specific things (; for separation, > for direction, etc), and so there is obviously a need to have them and to make available a way to change or disable them. I know that I've written some text in a mud where I put a semi-colon in it. Really screwed up my writing too.

Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 5:38 pm

Most "normal" people find true regular expressions *very* hard to read and understand. The original zMUD trigger language came from the old TINTIN unix clients. And actually, zMUD triggers existed before Perl was widely used (although I was also playing with early versions of Perl when zMUD was written and that's where some ideas also came from). The normal zMUD trigger syntax is more like what people using wildcards in filenames are used to. Most people expect * to just match anything, whereas in a regular expression you have to use .*

Remember that many people use zMUD because the scripting is *easier* than normal programming languages. There will *always* be something new to learn no matter what I do. But I have ten years of experience with this listening to *all* users and I know that if I made RegEx the default, I would get a *lot* more support emails.

And as Dumas said, the Special Characters really don't have anything to do with the trigger matching. Special Characters were put into zMUD early on because of issues with the command line. When zMUD started using ; for command separation (like tintin) and . for speedwalking paths, there were certain MUDs that already used these characters, so there needed to be some way to turn them off.

Because the zMUD parser for scripts is the exact same parser used in the command line, zMUD needed a way to let the user change these characters.

In CMUD, the script parser/compiler is separate from the command line, and special characters can be different in different packages. So you can use $ for your variable character instead of @ and your package will still work in CMUD no matter what the user has changed their own characters to. This solves the problem that zMUD had with exchanging scripts with different special characters.

OK, that's the background. But CMUD added a new feature called the "smart command line" which performs more syntax checking of your command line entry to determine if it's a valid command or if it should be sent to the MUD.

So, back to Kerrida's original post: If your MUD uses the ; character to start a command, then you should be able to use that within CMUD already without needing to change the special characters. Give it a try...it should already work the way you expect.

What I'm trying to do in CMUD with the new command line is to phase out the need for Special Characters.

Newbie Joined: 15 Nov 2004 Posts: 8

Newbie Joined: 15 Nov 2004 Posts: 8

Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 6:44 pm

Ahh, I see, that's a pretty wierd syntax. Never seen that before. It's a pretty poor choice for the MUD to make since ; has been used for multiple commands in MUD clients since the old TinTin days.

You can always put a ~ character before the ; to prevent CMUD from parsing it, or you can put " quotes around the entire command to force CMUD to send it to the MUD without parsing. Or you can press Ctrl-R or turn off parsing in the menu or click on the parse icon to the right of the command line to toggle parsing on and off.

Or, you can wait until one of the next versions of CMUD to fix the special character saving bugs.