Release notes for MUSHclient version 2.00

Version 2.00

Released on 01 May 1997

World management 

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1. Connections are now "asynchronous". This means that MUSHclient no longer "hangs" while awaiting connection to a world. 



2. You can connect to multiple worlds, and then wait for each connection to complete, or time-out, as the case may be. 



3. You can specify one or more worlds to be automatically connected to as MUSHclient starts executing. 



4. You can disconnect a session without closing the world. 



5. You can abort an attempt to connect to a world, without waiting for it to time-out. 



6. You can reconnect a session without having to close and re-open the world. 



7. You can open a world without necessarily connecting. 



8. When creating a new world, you can use an existing world's settings as defaults (colours, triggers, aliases and so on). 



9. The position on the screen of each world window is remembered and restored next time you use the program (including the size of the command area). 



10. The status line shows the duration that you have been connected to the current world. 



11. You can optionally close a world without being asked to confirm the close. 



12. The program now correctly handles Telnet negotiation sequences, thus allowing you to connect to a host that requires the Telnet protocol. 



13. More buttons are on the "toolbar" at the top of the screen. Toolbars are now resizable. The "game" buttons are on a separate toolbar. The program remembers the toolbar positions and restores them next time. 



14. When saving a newly-created world, MUSHclient no longer truncates the suggested file name at the first space in the world name. 



Output window

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1. The number of lines in the output window (the one which shows responses from your MU*) is now user-customisable, from 200 lines to 100,000 lines. 



2. The width of each line in the output window is now user-customisable from 20 to 500 characters. 



3. You can right-mouse click to bring up a context menu of useful commands. 



4. The buffer-handling of the saved lines in the output window has been re-written for high speed, even with thousands of lines of data. 



5. You can "paste to the world". This allows you to send text from the clipboard to the world directly (including a user-specified line preamble and postamble). For example, you could paste in an interesting quote, with "say " in front of each line. 



6. You can use a "find" command to search the output window for text you specify. 



7. You can save the "selection" to disk as a text file. 



8. Each line is time-stamped as it arrives, thus you can find when it arrived by just moving the mouse over it 





Command window 

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1. The number of lines of commands retained is now user-customisable from 20 to 5,000. 



2. You can specify a font, font colour and background colour for the command window independently of the output window. 



3. If you are about to accidently wipe out your typing (by using a function key) the program prompts you, so as to avoid losing your input. 



4. Function keys (and numeric keypad actions) which act immediately (eg. North) now save and restore whatever you were typing in the command area, so that they do not wipe out your typing. 



5. Auto Say - This option allows you to automatically "say" everything you type, without having to prefix each line with "say". The auto-say prefix is customisable, so you could use it to "auto-page" for example. There are various ways of excluding lines from being auto-said, if desired. Auto-say can be turned on or off from the button bar. 



6. You can use the "find" command to find a particular line in the command history window. 





Activity window 

---------------



1. The activity window has been completely re-written to make it much more friendly and useable. 



2. It can be resized and repositioned. The program remembers the position of the activity window and restores it to that position next time. 



3. It can be opened automatically at program startup. 



4. It shows: World name, count of recently received lines, total lines received, world status (open, closed, connecting), time world connected, and duration world open. 



5. Worlds always appear on the activity window list, so that the same world is always the same number (and thus you can always use Ctrl+1 to switch to world 1, Ctrl+2 to switch to world 2, and so on). 





Configuration 

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1. There are now 21 separate configuration pages for configuring each world. 



2. Colour configuration has been greatly enhanced by the use of "colour swatches" which show at a glance your entire colour scheme, thus allowing choosing of appropriate colour combinations. 



3. There is an option to use the default ANSI colours. 



4. All of the pages with lists on them (eg. triggers list) have a "find" option, to aid finding a particular trigger, alias (and so on). This is particularly useful for users who have extensive trigger or alias lists. 



5. An "info" page shows details about this world, including the amount of memory used by your output buffer. 





Printing 

--------



1. You can now print all or part of the output window. You can also print the "selection" (ie. to print a particular paragraph, select it with the mouse and then print the selection). 



2. You can apply printing styles to different colours, so that (for example) "bold red" will print in bold on the printer, but "normal yellow" will print in italic. 





Log files 

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1. You can specify a "log files directory". This allows you to log all game sessions to a different directory than the default directory, without having to navigate your way through lots of folders each time. 



2. You can optionally append to an existing log file. 



3. You can optionally write a "log file preamble" which consists of the world name, date and time, to the start of each log session. 





Searching 

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1. A "find" capability has been added to many aspects of the program, to simplify managing lengthy game sessions. 



2. You can find lines in the output window 



3. You can find input in the command history window 



4. You can find aliases, triggers, timers, and more. 





Timers 

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1. Timers provide periodic events to MUSHclient. 



2. You can specify any number of timers, per world. 



3. Timers can fire at either: a specified time (eg. 9:30 pm) or an interval (eg. every 10 minutes) 



4. Timers can send text to the world (eg. "Conan the warrior looks around vaguely") or invoke a script subroutine (or both) 





Triggers 

--------



1. Omit from output (to cause a trigger to discard annoying game input) 



2. Keep evaluating (so a trigger match doesn't stop evaluation of other triggers). eg. "* pages you", "Tom pages you" could be 2 separate triggers which both have an effect (one might cause a different colour, the other might trigger a response) 



3. Copy wildcard to clipboard. eg. "* pages you" could copy whatever "*" matches onto the clipboard 



4. Labels (so triggers have names) 



5. Script event (so triggers cause a script subroutine to fire) 





Aliases 

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1. You can now have an "argument" to an alias. For example: You type: "attack dragon", and the alias substitution text reads: "stab & with sword; kick & with left foot; cast fire spell on &". In this case the "&" in the substitution text is replaced by the word "dragon", in each case. 



2. You can use the clipboard contents as the alias argument. This is useful in conjunction with matching on a wildcard with a trigger and copying the resulting wildcard text to the clipboard. 



3. Labels (so aliases have names) 



4. Script event (so aliases cause a script subroutine to fire) 





Scripting 

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1. Scripting capability has been added by using the VBscript or JavaScript languages supplied by Microsoft. You can optionally use either language as the script language, per world. 



2. Scripts can do more complex things than are normally possible, such as reacting in an intelligent way to events. 



3. To support scripts which remember things from one session to another, MUSHclient now has program "variables" which are stored in the game configuration file. The scripting language can set or retrieve these variables, so that you could (for example) build up a database of the types of monsters you encounter. 



4. Script subroutines can be invoked from: world open, world close, world connection, world disconnection, trigger match, timer event, and alias match. 



5. Script commands can also be typed from the command window, if prefixed by a user-specified character. eg. /world.close 



6. The script language has access to world details, so that from within a script you can: send to the world, find world status (open or closed), find the world name, set and retrieve variable contents, add triggers, timers and so on.
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