Zugg Software :: View Entry

Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 12:16 am

Today I did something really unusual! I actually played some MUDs!

I'm really going to need to try and take more time to do this more often. Just in two hours of creating level 2 characters that I could save on 2 different MUDs, I made a list of all sorts of stuff that needs to be improved in the future.

The good news is that CMUD worked really well (at least for me). I didn't get any crashes at all during my playing. True, I wasn't doing any heavy scripting. But it was still a nice surprise.

I was mainly playing on some real MUDs to try and mess around with the mapper. But I just couldn't get the mapper to fail. Yes, I *did* have the standard problems with the mapper on various MUDs. I'm really going to try and improve this thing in the future. I was happy to see that it worked with the onscreen compass/map on Realms of Despair, although it put the extra space and / characters into the room name. But on Materia Magica, the onscreen compass/map really messes up the mapper. Someday I want to fix that...it's on my future to-do list.

I was on Imperian for a while, but got really frustrated with the changing weather that causes the first line of the room description to change. And since this is merged with the text from the room and not on it's own separate line, there is no easy way to set up a #NOMAP trigger. Obviously I need to think of a way to make this work better on MUDs with weather like this.

I had my mapper docked to the right side of the screen, and it worked well there. But all of the extra vertical space was crying out for a room name/description panel at the bottom that would show the full description of the current room. Something else added to my future to-do list.

As I was typing on the MUDs, I reminded myself that I really want to integrate the Shift-Tab completion (where it grabs a word from the screen) with the normal Tab completion. I really got tired of typing some of the long names and commands that some MUDs have.

While I was on Materia Magica, I also experienced the frustration with the spam from some of the chat channels. The [CLAN] channel really should be disabled for newbies until they learn how to turn it on. It really got annoying. Of course, when I set up the standard #CAPTURE;#GAG trigger, I still got the extra prompts and blank lines that many people complain about. So yes, I really need to make this work better.

All in all it was a good experience to remind me how much basic stuff there is to do to make normal MUD playing for newbies easier. It was fun, but it was still klunkier than it could be.

Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 12:22 am

There's a command in Imperian to stop the weather showing up in room descriptions, that's the workaround I used. The people and things in the room are also part of the same paragraph as the description, which causes further problems though. If you have it on brief mode (which is much less spammy) the room description doesn't appear at all, just the things in it, which obviously change. Support for both brief and verbose modes would be excellent.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

First rule of mapping with IRE muds, ANSI colors are your friends. Just adding color based detection option to the automapper configuration will be a huge help for many muds.

I could imagine using a vertical splitter during the configuration with the captured text to indicate an ignored portion like that compass. A setting of remove first sentence of description takes care of that stormy weather.

Also some sort of flag within the configuration that creates #NOMAP triggers. Maybe click something off to the left in the display and it puts a little red X, then when the configuration is confirmed it makes the #NOMAP.

On a few muds I have played there is a message that consistently directly precedes the room information that is easily triggerable (ie You {walk|run|swim|crawl} %t). Such a line is a great indicator that the next line is the room name, but usually throws off the configuration with out proper triggers. Maybe a room name precursor setting would be good. That provides something on each end of the room information making parsing into name, description and exits easier.

In all cases, that confirmation window for what was detected needs to be interactive.

Apprentice Joined: 03 Feb 2007 Posts: 170

Hmm, 2 hours of gameplay without a crash? Was that with the current version? (Meaning the unreleased as of yet version that you've been working on) or was that the 1.24 that can be downloaded. If it was 1.24 I'm semi shocked, if on the other hand it was closer to what will be 1.25 that sounds like I should be able to give my copy of CMUD a real test drive without worrying about crashing. Also did you have any issues with the command line in your 2 hour venture?

Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:57 am

1.24 is quite usable. I use it as my primary client and I play for several hours at a time, including using the mapper. The only thing I don't do is multiplay.

Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2007 1:19 am

i find that multiplay works alot better if you open a seperate instance of cmud than opening another session... but not both on the same mud though

Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2007 1:54 am

Fizban, this was with the soon-to-be 1.25 version. So yes, it works a lot better. And I haven't had any command line issues in several days, even with some pretty tough multi-session and multi-window setups.

Shalimar: I think you will find multiplaying in 1.25 to be a *lot* better. Separate instances is fine if you want each session to be *completely* independent (and that should still work fine). But it's not an option for people who want to interact between their characters. I think people who multiplay will be much happier with v1.25, especially once I have a chance to rewrite the Intro to Multiplaying help file (which is still horribly out of date).

I doubt I'll have time to update the Multiplaying help topic before the release, but it's something that will be easy to do when I'm taking care of Chiara and not doing serious programming over the next few weeks.

Apprentice Joined: 03 Feb 2007 Posts: 170

Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2007 6:10 pm

As mentioned in the other blog entry about bug fixes, the bugs regarding multiple windows should be fixed in v1.25.

Apprentice Joined: 03 Feb 2007 Posts: 170

Also just a thought that popped in my head, not asking you to add it sooner than planned, just wondering approximately when SSH support can be expected. When it is added it is definitely an add on I will purchase as CMUD is a much friendlier (and shouldn't be buggy by then) interface than that of PuTTy that I use now for accessing shell.

Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 12:04 am

As mentioned in one of the other blogs, Chiara (my wife) is going into the hospital for surgery on Monday. So I probably won't be working on CMUD for several weeks while she is recovering. I decided to focus the 1.25 version on bug fixes and stability based upon the results of the CMUD Feature Survey. You can see from that survey that SSH was pretty low on the list. Feel free to vote for SSH in that survey to give it a boost.

SSH is still a high personal priority for me, so I'm hoping to get it added within the next few months. But until the surgery is done, I don't want to commit to anything.

Apprentice Joined: 03 Feb 2007 Posts: 170

1.25 will be set up to download within the next few hour? I had seen you mention it being added Friday (I'm assuming you meant today, but wasn't sure).

Apprentice Joined: 03 Feb 2007 Posts: 170

Ignore the above post...just found it.

Beginner Joined: 16 Aug 2007 Posts: 28

Zugg, I know this post is old but if you ever decide to mud again and test that mapper please test on EVERDARK! I can never get the mapper to work for me. Oh and if you could be a fighter, get to level 25 and create an awesome file for me. *laugh* Oh and *bats eyelashes*

Apprentice Joined: 14 Apr 2008 Posts: 105