Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2002 12:01 am

The topic says it all :) I've looked over the net for zmud plugins and havent found any. Is it because plugins are designed to be mudcentric? Or are they just too cool to share around? Are there any 'generic' plugin depositories with configurable settings?

Hopefull I'm not the only one who's looking :P

Why oh WHY did I have pass door on...

GURU Joined: 15 Jun 2001 Posts: 654 Location: USA

Well, I know for my part at least that most of my zMUD plugins are WoTMUD specific. I think this is because I play there and tend to cater to the needs there... The most notable exception to this would be my HTML Logger plugin which is entirely MUD-independent.

I'm quite open to ideas for more general purpose plugins...

The factors that most influence whether I start some project are my interest in it, the utility of the end-product and the ease of making it. Two out of three here usually gets me coding.

I've been working off and on making CommsParser more generic so it'll work for any MUD.

Aennor and I used to have a shared repository for our plugins... however, he's no longer hosting it so I need to get one set up again soon.

Hope that helps.

- Charbal

Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2002 4:27 pm

The depository is here on the Zuggsoft site.. But if no-one sends any...

*doesnt have any plugins*

Lady C.

GURU Joined: 15 Jun 2001 Posts: 654 Location: USA

I offered to send some of mine to Zugg but he's going to be redesigning it shortly to link to plugin author's pages directly.

- Charbal

Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2002 10:08 pm

I've tried the plugins from here, not really useful for me :) the plugin for the stats is just a different version of the #stw i'm using, the text reader is useless cos i mud without sound, and the tray window isnt really needed (by me) :P

Wondered if theres more floating around somewhere, and what they're capable of doing. A guy I mud with has been debating on writing a plugin that shows what you're wearing all the time. Normally I'd say "use #stw like me!" but i think he already is, and our window is too small now to add new junk like eq :P

Why oh WHY did I have pass door on...

Newbie Joined: 20 Dec 2002 Posts: 3

The HTML Logger program works great for me, except for one thing. I can't get the command line commands #HTMLLOG, #HTMLSETUP, or #HTMLCONVERT to work. When I try to use them, nothing happens. Could this be because I'm running an older version of zMud (6.16) and need to upgrade, or is there some other problem? If it's because of the older version, guess this is the excuse I've been looking for to download the new version.

Posted: Fri Dec 20, 2002 5:36 am

quote:

The HTML Logger program works great for me, except for one thing. I can't get the command line commands #HTMLLOG, #HTMLSETUP, or #HTMLCONVERT to work. When I try to use them, nothing happens. Could this be because I'm running an older version of zMud (6.16) and need to upgrade, or is there some other problem? If it's because of the older version, guess this is the excuse I've been looking for to download the new version.

All reports from the beta forum say that the new version absolutely rocks over 6.16 for speed, stability and integration with the zmapper program (map creator/editor). Go for it :P Remember to read the sticky threads tho

Why oh WHY did I have pass door on...

GURU Joined: 15 Jun 2001 Posts: 654 Location: USA

quote:

I can't get the command line commands #HTMLLOG, #HTMLSETUP, or #HTMLCONVERT to work. When I try to use them, nothing happens.

HTML Logger is 100% compatible with 6.16. What you are experiencing was an issue that occurred with the initial release of 1.0. It can be fixed by going into the plugins menu, to Install Plugins, then removing and then installing HTML Logger from the list (find and select the HTMLLog.dll file).

The plugin itself wasn't at fault but the installer I was using (Visual Basic's Packaging and Deployment wizard). I've since started using Inno Setup which allows me more flexibility in creating installation-dependent registry entries so I don't have this issue.

However, if you are using HTML Logger 1.0, I'd recommend upgrading to 1.1. It has a few bug fixes and extra features.

- Charbal

Newbie Joined: 20 Dec 2002 Posts: 3

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it as you directed, but this didn't help any. Also I'm fairly certain I am using the latest version of the HTML Logger program because I downloaded it from your link that you posted in this thread.

Ben

GURU Joined: 15 Jun 2001 Posts: 654 Location: USA

Just tested this specific issue against an installation of 6.16 and I was able to reproduce the problem described. The problem is that zMUD is looking for the HTMLLog.dat command file in its own directory instead of the plugin's. Later versions of zMUD are not affected by this.

The reason I never caught this was because during the course of development I had multiple copies of this file and didn't think to remove the one from my zMUD directory when testing out the final version.

Several solutions are available: copy the HTMLLog.dat file to the zMUD directory, install the plugin into the zMUD directory or upgrade to 6.40.

So, closer to the original topic... does anyone have any suggestions for generic plugins?

- Charbal

Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2002 1:31 am

a launched window (like #stw) that collects and displays the eq you're wearing (based on configurable triggers along the lines of "you wear an oil stained cap on your head", "you wield a derenger/in your left hand")?
i have a heap of dead black space on the right side of my window, something like this should fill it nicely :P

i stil really dont know how far plugins can go...an interface between zmud and a mysql server?

Why oh WHY did I have pass door on...

GURU Joined: 15 Jun 2001 Posts: 654 Location: USA

A plugin really isn't necessary for this. Since you have extra space in your window, you just need a way to specify that you want to put text there. More generically, it would be useful to be able to specify the exact starting row and column of any text to be added to the status window. It just so happens that there are ways to change the cursor position using VT100 codes and these codes work in the status window. So I made a script that allows you to define elements you want in your status window and exactly where they should go and I posted it in the Finished Scripts forum.

And, to answer your question, a plugin can do nearly anything. While I suspect some sort of interface between zMUD and a mySQL server would be possible, I'd have to learn how to do it myself in order to program it. In a related vein, I've been toying with the idea of making some sort of way for multiple users to sync their local mapper databases with a remote one so any changes would be propogated throughout. It'd be a large project so no promises.

- Charbal

Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2002 10:01 am

You can get a plugin from mysql that acts as a layer between access and mysql, allowing you to manipulate mysql from access...installs as an OBDC..OCDB...one of those makes sense to someone :P
I've been using it to work on my eq lists, called myodbc-<latest file revision>, is a cinch to setup and install. maybe you can make some kind of use from it too?

Why oh WHY did I have pass door on...

Apprentice Joined: 25 Jun 2002 Posts: 109 Location: USA

I downloaded the HTML Logger from the link at the other forum you posted.
It installed and does everything correctly and nice, but I also cannot
get the #HTMLLOG, #HTMLSETUP, and #HTMLCONVERTLOG to work from the command
line. I'm running zMud 6.40 and copied all the files into my zMud directory
as well, just to test...anything I'm missing?

-Death

Magician Joined: 24 Feb 2001 Posts: 342 Location: USA

This is great! i've had more fun playing with this plugin today than just about anything else, even though, i'm having same problems with the command line, um, commands. also i can't seem to get it to save the settings for color or the .col file i load. any advice Charbal?

Newbie Joined: 20 Dec 2002 Posts: 3

After downloading and installing Zmud 6.40, the command line commands work fine for me. However, one thing I'd like to suggest in a future version is if when you load a .col file, the settings could be saved from session to session. This way I can setup an atconnect variable to start HTML logging everytime I connect to the mud

GURU Joined: 15 Jun 2001 Posts: 654 Location: USA

Good to hear that the commands work for someone else besides me :P

I've been investigating this as much as I can, even seeing which files zMUD tries to open with Filemon and haven't turned up much. I've made my plugin try to give the absolute path to the HTMLLog.dat file if it exists, however. Giving zMUD explicit instructions on where to find the file instead of letting it look for itself may do the trick. I'm counting on those of you with the problem to test it for me, though. So I'm releasing version 1.2.

I've also fixed a bug with strikeout that could cause the output to be mangled after that particular code and one where text coming from the MUD could be put in the title of an HTML log if you created it from the menu and waited at the title prompt.

But the main thing I've done is optimization. I dedicated 2 whole days to this, essentially. At one point, I created a C DLL to get at a function in the CRT that isn't available in the Windows API (memcmp, and RtlCompareMemory doesn't count since that's only in 2000 and XP even though I used that in my testing too). Unfortunately, that didn't provide a measurable increase in speed so I stayed with my Visual Basic way of testing if two UDTs were equal by testing each of their members in turn. If none of the preceding made any sense, this should: in my testing, I was able to increase performance by up to 40% on very color change dense logs such as those from my HTML Logger test MUD, the insanely colorful Drasan). About 15% of the 40% increase is due to the fact that I no longer substitute > for > in the output since it doesn't seem necessary per my reading of the HTML 4.01 specification since they aren't ever being put in quoted attribute values.

The core engine logic was not changed at all (it's the same as it was in 1.0)... a few slower statements were merely replaced with faster equivalent statements.

Settings should already be saved from session to session. Right now, whenever zMUD wants to save a .MUD settings file, it calls the SaveSettings method in the plugin to see if it has any information it wants to save. Unfortunately, zMUD does this without telling the plugin which .MUD file it is saving to or even which window that .MUD file is storing settings for.

So the plugin just returns its current settings and zMUD saves them to the .MUD file. So to force this saving, all you have to do is save your settings file.

Because zMUD tries to reload the plugin settings from each settings file loaded (again without telling the plugin which is which), the last settings loaded will be the ones that take effect since they overwrite the rest. So I'd strongly recommend saving your settings in all of your open windows after making changes to the HTML Logger settings. While I've made the plugin so it will only overwrite its setup when a valid settings string is given to it (thus keeping you safe from overwriting by a settings file that doesn't have any information stored for HTML Logger), it's still possible that an older version of your setup could overwrite a newer version.

To demonstrate this, you could save the older version of the setup in two windows, restart zMUD, open up only one of those windows and save a newer version, then open the other window and it will overwrite your settings; when these window is saved, it will save the settings in memory to them, in this case the older version. As I said, the best way to avoid this for now is just to save all windows when you make a change to the HTML Logger setup.

I'm trying to convince Zugg to either change this confusing per-session saving and loading to global saving/loading or associate the settings with windows since the fact that the plugin isn't given enough information to associate loaded settings with any particular window causes all these problems.

Failing that, I may end up saving it directly to the registry (like the standalone HTML Logger application and my CommsParser plugin both do already). My CommsParser plugin takes things a step further and looks for a variable named Profile in each zMUD window to see which registry profile it should load which allows for two or more open windows to have disparate configurations while preserving each. I thought I'd try to use the native settings loading and saving again since I abandoned it last time but I'm not sure that it's working out too well so far.

Well, now that you've learned more than you ever wanted to know about the way zMUD loads and saves plugin settings, I'll tell you that the download link for HTML Logger 1.2 is the same as it was for 1.1.

- Charbal

Magician Joined: 24 Feb 2001 Posts: 342 Location: USA

Charbal, you're a prince