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Examples of what you can do with miniwindows #2

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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Thu 09 Jul 2009 03:02 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message

Below is a screenshot showing how miniwindows can be used to make your mudding experience more interesting ...

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #1 on Thu 09 Jul 2009 03:04 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]

Amended on Thu 09 Jul 2009 03:23 AM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message
Shown in the screenshot are:




Also installed is:




Overall the look is a much more graphical one than you normally associate with text-based MUD games.

The sound effects also add a considerable amount of impact to battles. Somehow it doesn't seem right to be in a big fight, but have the PC be completely silent.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #2 on Thu 09 Jul 2009 03:20 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]

Amended on Thu 09 Jul 2009 03:42 AM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message

This is what I see when I type "consider all" (except the red box) ...

Based on the consider text, it works out the relative mob level to me, and colours the line accordingly.

In case anyone is wondering, the cup mentioned in the quest further up got away with murdering 17 civilians - I was too busy doing this forum post to go and get revenge. ;)

And when fighting, the status window shows who I am fighting and how well it is all going ...

If I mouse-over the minimap it shows a legend to explain what all those funny symbols mean ...

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #3 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 04:18 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]

Amended on Sun 26 Jul 2009 09:53 PM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message

You can see all this stuff in action on a YouTube video I made showing the various windows (and a few more) which can be viewed at Playing a MUD game with MUSHclient

The video has closed-captioning.

See below in this thread for a .zip file which contains most of the plugins used in this demo.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Twisol   USA  (2,230 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Reply #4 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 04:34 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
Very cool video! Do they all (or most) use the mw.lua script?
'Soludra' on Achaea

Blog: http://jonathan.com/
GitHub: http://github.com/Twisol
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #5 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 04:44 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
The inventory and small map do - for the popup window.

Most or all use the movewindow module - that is how they implement being dragged around.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by WillFa   USA  (517 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Reply #6 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 06:29 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
Very cool Nick. :)
Between the Easter Egg and now the videos it's cool to have a face and a voice to go with our favorite mudder (that I personally don't kill critters with).

The only small criticism I have of that video is that it's titled "playing a mud" while all the plugins and features are very much specific to Aardwolf, and not generic to all muds.

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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #7 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 07:17 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
Easter egg? How did you find that? (Someone's been looking at the source, methinks).

As for "playing a MUD", well Aardwolf *is* a MUD. It would be different if I had said "playing *the* MUD".

By saying MUD rather than Aardwolf, I am trying to encourage *all* MUDs (or all MUD players) to try to ramp up their interfaces. Whilst the plugins shown on that video are, indeed, Aardwolf-specific, it wouldn't take much work to adapt them to lots of other MUDs.

The plugins are publicly available, and if any other MUD admins, or players, want to adapt them to their use, they are very welcome to do so.

Meanwhile the video is intended to try to bring more players into the genre, players who may be used to the MMO-style of graphical interfaces which show, at a glance, your health, inventory, and so on.

I was going to start a thread about this - I think that MUDs have to move on a bit from the interfaces that worked OK in the 1990s. I'm not suggesting going into 3D graphics, but maybe a bit of support for windows like the map window. I found Lasher from Aardwolf very receptive to these ideas - he added tags that would be optionally output to the client which helped it distinguish map data from other data (and room exits, and so on).

After all, the players aren't the enemy - they are your lifeblood. Helping them do things like display a map isn't cheating - it's helping them.

Thanks for the compliments BTW. :-)
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #8 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 07:40 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message

I have somewhat less hair than in the Easter Egg picture. :(

This is probably my favourite photo of myself, for various reasons:

Photo of Nick Gammon.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by WillFa   USA  (517 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Reply #9 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 09:26 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
I indeed have been looking at the source. It's the easiest way to suggest buggy code for 4.42's trigger matching. <blush>

The mud I typically play is 3Kingdoms. Unfortunately, I don't like a lot of the client extensions they've chosen to do. Instead of doing MXP, they've done their own proprietary thing called MIP (message interface protocol). They also wrote their own client called Portal and until recently MIP was licensed to be implemented by other muds, but not clients. This restrictions been lifted though, so I've written a MIP plugin. I don't know of other muds that have incorporated MIP, and generally 3K'ers usually end up knowing who I am for questions about MC.

Anyway, if there are other muds that use MIP, you can find a core set of plugins here: http://cid-73890baf188d56e7.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/MushClient%20plugins%20for%20Portal%20MIP

If you're a 3Ker, and looking for the Crafting UI plugin, you can find a write-up blog about it here: http://willfa1974.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!73890BAF188D56E7!178.entry Nick might find it interesting to take a peek at that...


Especially with the updated PlaySound stuff, I should continue on with the MIP plugins. MIP can send out a url or filename for sound and image packs, which I haven't done miniwindows for... Speaking of the URL stuff, there was another thread about LuaSocket being available in future versions of MC... any more thoughts on that? My biggest drawback on writing plugins is that I don't really want to support them, and the whole trusting/dll loading issue makes it a pain to do that currently. If installation is more complicated than "CTRL+SHIFT+P, ALT+A, dbl-click the file", I get whined at... I don't like getting whined at. (yaa, someone else that doesn't like the sandbox)



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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #10 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 09:48 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]

Amended on Mon 27 Jul 2009 03:19 AM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message
If you want to reproduce the setup I had for the demo video, I have packaged everything up (except the sound-playing stuff), so you can install it fairly simply.


  • If you are not yet using MUSHclient version 4.42 or higher, go to this page to download version 4.42:

    http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=9593


  • Then, download this file: http://mushclient.com/plugins/Aardwolf/Aardwolf_plugins_v1.zip

  • Unzip that, it should give you a "plugins" folder.

  • Copy the contents of that entire plugins folder to the plugins folder of your MUSHclient installation (under Vista you may need to give it permission to do that).

    This folder would normally be:


    \Program Files\MUSHclient\worlds\plugins



  • This should add four new files to your plugins folder, namely:


    • Plugin_Installer.xml
    • Send_Input_To_Main_World.xml
    • Helplist.mcl
    • Restore_On_Activate.xml


    You will also get a sub-folder called Aardwolf, with a whole lot of plugins in it. This Aardwolf sub-folder will have in it:


    • Aardwolf Help_v2.xml
    • Aardwolf_bigmap_miniwindow.xml
    • Aardwolf_Campaign_Noter_v2.xml
    • Aardwolf_Consider_info.xml
    • Aardwolf_Experience_Bar_v3.xml
    • Aardwolf_Health_Bar_Miniwindow.xml
    • Aardwolf_Helplist.xml
    • Aardwolf_Inventory_Window_2.xml
    • Aardwolf_map_v2.xml
    • Aardwolf_Quest_Noter_v2.xml
    • Aardwolf_Stats_Detector.xml
    • Auto_Say_Visualizer.xml
    • Omit_Blank_Lines.xml
    • telnet_options.lua


  • Start up MUSHclient, if you haven't already.

  • You can install the plugins in the plugins\Aardwolf folder individually if you like (eg. Aardwolf_Health_Bar_Miniwindow.xml for the health bar).

    Important: If you manually load the plugins one by one, you should first load Aardwolf_Stats_Detector.xml - this is a "helper" plugin that detects your current stats. Other plugins expect that to be there (like the health bar, and the experience bar).

  • More simply, just install the plugin Plugin_Installer.xml in the main plugins folder. This will look in the Aardwolf sub-folder and install every plugin it finds there.

  • Most plugins use miniwindows, however the Helplist plugin still uses a "dummy world window" which is a second MUSHclient world window which doesn't actually connect. You may need to move this around to be visible.

  • Depending on your screen size you may have to drag the miniwindows around to make them all visible.


Whilst these plugins are for Aardwolf, players on other MUDs could adapt them to their use - in many cases, like the health or experience bar plugins, you would need to change them from using the "stats detector" plugin, to making a trigger that pulls the information from your prompt.

I did not demonstrate the Auto_Say_Visualizer in the video. Basically, if you turn auto-say on (like, for a lengthy chat with someone) it colours the command window green, so you have a visual warning that you are chatting, and need to turn auto-say off before doing commands like "score" and so on.

The video showed, but I didn't specifically mention, the experience bar plugin. You can see that at the bottom of the screen (above the command window), with the experience bar getting longer as I kill things.



- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #11 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 09:53 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
Quote:

Speaking of the URL stuff, there was another thread about LuaSocket being available in future versions of MC... any more thoughts on that?


It's on my list of things to do. Getting it to work properly under Vista is probably a slightly higher priority.

I must admit, as my earlier post (above) shows, it is fiddly to get a whole suite of plugins installed. My method of packaging them up in a .zip file is OK, but I must admit something smoother could be nice.

Some kind of "plugin manager" could be a nice project for someone - especially for plugins that have dependencies on other plugins, or other supporting files.

At present my Plugin_Installer plugin is about as close to that, that I have.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Twisol   USA  (2,230 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Reply #12 on Sun 26 Jul 2009 10:44 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
Quote:
Some kind of "plugin manager" could be a nice project for someone - especially for plugins that have dependencies on other plugins, or other supporting files.


That is, in fact, on my to-do list. I want to utilize LuaSocket to create a plugin manager that will allow you to ask for a list of plugins, perhaps get plugins under a certain category or MUD, and install them. It would also handle dependencies, and the whole thing would rely on text files containing information on (a) other lists and/or (b) locations of "plugin data" files which contain URLs to its associated plugin, version information, minimum version, et cetera.

I could work on this now, but I'm (a) waiting for LuaSocket to be supported natively, and (b) working on an IRC plugin I've already begun.
'Soludra' on Achaea

Blog: http://jonathan.com/
GitHub: http://github.com/Twisol
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Posted by Blainer   (191 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Reply #13 on Wed 29 Jul 2009 06:19 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
Noticed the the zip file has an empty directory under "Documents and Settings".

Love the video too btw.
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,797 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #14 on Wed 29 Jul 2009 09:18 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message

My copy doesn't have, see screen shot:

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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