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 Entire forum ➜ MUSHclient ➜ Suggestions ➜ Happy New Year, and a new wishlist
Happy New Year, and a new wishlist

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Posted by Hapax   (6 posts)  Bio
Date Mon 20 Jan 2003 10:25 PM (UTC)
Message

There are two things that SimpleMU can do that I really wish MUSHClient could do. If I'm mistaken, and MC can do them after all, please tell me how.

The first has been mentioned already -- spawning windows for tabletalk, channel-talk, etc., during spammy scenes. I would be thrilled if MC did this.

The second, which I haven't seen mentioned so far, is putting blank lines between entries in a log. I spend literally hours editing logs, and if I didn't have to do the line-breaks myself, it would save me a lot of headaches.

Some more wishes:

- Would it be possible to set up a trigger option that says, in essence, "Do not consider this to be world activity"? In other words, the text will still appear on the screen, but my taskbar button won't flash and the world number-button won't turn red. This would be useful if, for instance, I want to set a world to alert me only if something "important" happens (not channel-chatter or whatever), though later when I'm bored I can go back and read the channel-chatter too.

- Say that I am waiting for a slow poser to say something, so I pass the time by scrolling up to re-read some stuff that happened earlier in our scene. So far as I can gather, one of two things will happen: either I get shunted back down to the bottom of the screen when she poses, interrupting my reading; or, I turn on the pause option, which means that I don't actually *know* when she's posed. Is there a way to alert me when she has posed, so that I can go back down to the bottom of the screen at my leisure? Maybe lighting up the world-number button to signal activity in the world, even though I happen to still be in it (just paused and scrolled up)?

- Related to this, I'd really like it if there were an easy way to go back to WHERE I HIT PAUSE rather than the bottom of the output screen, so I don't have to scroll back looking for where the old stuff ends and the new stuff begins.

- Let's say I'm wasting time on a MUSH waiting for some friends to turn up for a scene. The screen fills up with a thousand WHOs and paged conversations and so on. OK, now it's time for my scene. Is there a way to just "clear the screen", like starting over? I realize I could set a bookmark so that I could hit ^B to go back to the "real" beginning... but sometimes I just want to throw out the trash entirely. That way, when I hit the Home key I turn up at the first *important* part of the game rather than the point where I logged in.

- OK, a really dumb question now. When reading @mail or bulletin board posts, is there a way to pause output screen-by-screen?

Thanks once again for all the hard work you've done. And happy new year!

hapax
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Posted by Shadowfyr   USA  (1,791 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #1 on Mon 20 Jan 2003 11:31 PM (UTC)
Message
> The first has been mentioned already -- spawning windows for
> tabletalk, channel-talk, etc., during spammy scenes. I
> would be thrilled if MC did this.

Not at the moment. I am slowly working on an ActiveX control or possibly a program that will let you generate such a window and configure it with any combination of textboxes, richtextboxs, pictureboxes, labels, buttons, etc. that you like based on a text file containing a form definition. You would do something like:

Form {
  Height    200
  Left      1000
  Top       0
  Width     640
  RichTextBox {
    Name      "ChatWindow"
    Height    170
    Left      0
    Top       0
    Width     638
    BackColor   Black
    MaxLength   0 <!-- No limit -->
    ScrollBars  3 <!-- Both -->
    TabIndex    0
    TabStop     True
  }
  OneLineInput {
    Name      "ChatInput"
    Height    23
    Left      0
    Top       175
    Width     590
  }
  Button {
    Name      "SendChat"
    Caption   "Chat"
    Height    23
    Left      595
    Top       175
    Width     43
    Return    "ChatInput"
    Send      "gossip %ChatInput%"
    Plugin    "fba8f08ebbdd03bcae94ab05","DoChat", "%ChatInput%"
  }
}


The result would be a window containing a rich text control that can diplay colored lines, an input line and a button to let you send stuff from there. In this case it would set the world variable "ChatInput", send the stuff you typed to the world preceeded by 'gossip' and also call a plugin's sub with the contents of what was sent. You probably wouldn't need or want to do all three. In fact just using the Send field and requiring that the user type the channel name before would be enough in most cases.

I have no idea when or if I will have a working version of this out though, but as a side note, it will probably be skinnable, since I am allowing for the use of pictures on the main window and buttons. This assume I can get any of it to work. ;)
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,158 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #2 on Tue 21 Jan 2003 03:55 AM (UTC)
Message
Quote:

The first has been mentioned already -- spawning windows for tabletalk, channel-talk, etc., during spammy scenes. I would be thrilled if MC did this.

I gather using a trigger to "append to notepad" won't be sufficient? If not, in what way is that not enough?

Quote:

The second, which I haven't seen mentioned so far, is putting blank lines between entries in a log. I spend literally hours editing logs, and if I didn't have to do the line-breaks myself, it would save me a lot of headaches.


Use logging configuration to set the line preamble or postamble (which ever seems better) to include a "%n" sequence. That will add an extra newline.

Quote:

- Would it be possible to set up a trigger option that says, in essence, "Do not consider this to be world activity"? In other words, the text will still appear on the screen, but my taskbar button won't flash and the world number-button won't turn red. This would be useful if, for instance, I want to set a world to alert me only if something "important" happens (not channel-chatter or whatever), though later when I'm bored I can go back and read the channel-chatter too.


You can probably do that with a trigger that matches what you *do* want to be alerted to - play a sound, and check the box "only if inactive".

Quote:

- Say that I am waiting for a slow poser to say something, so I pass the time by scrolling up to re-read some stuff that happened earlier in our scene. So far as I can gather, one of two things will happen: either I get shunted back down to the bottom of the screen when she poses, interrupting my reading; or, I turn on the pause option, which means that I don't actually *know* when she's posed. Is there a way to alert me when she has posed, so that I can go back down to the bottom of the screen at my leisure? Maybe lighting up the world-number button to signal activity in the world, even though I happen to still be in it (just paused and scrolled up)?


Turn on auto-pause. Then you won't be sent back to the bottom. Set up a trigger on the poser which plays a sound when they reply.

Quote:

- Related to this, I'd really like it if there were an easy way to go back to WHERE I HIT PAUSE rather than the bottom of the output screen, so I don't have to scroll back looking for where the old stuff ends and the new stuff begins.


Just before scrolling back hit Shift+Ctrl+B to bookmark where you are now. Then hit Ctrl+B to go back there.

Quote:

- Let's say I'm wasting time on a MUSH waiting for some friends to turn up for a scene. The screen fills up with a thousand WHOs and paged conversations and so on. OK, now it's time for my scene. Is there a way to just "clear the screen", like starting over? I realize I could set a bookmark so that I could hit ^B to go back to the "real" beginning... but sometimes I just want to throw out the trash entirely. That way, when I hit the Home key I turn up at the first *important* part of the game rather than the point where I logged in.


Display menu -> Clear output buffer.

Quote:

- OK, a really dumb question now. When reading @mail or bulletin board posts, is there a way to pause output screen-by-screen?


I tried some sort of pause a while back - it wasn't a success because it was hard to define what you had read. A better method is just to go to the start of the post (eg. using a bookmark) and then just hit PageDown to gradually read it.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Shadowfyr   USA  (1,791 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #3 on Tue 21 Jan 2003 07:59 AM (UTC)
Message
Actually Nick, to answer your question as to why a notepad window is bad, here are the flaws I would say it has:

1. No color support, so you can't seperate out types of lines or traffic channels in it.
2. You can't position it outside the mushclient window. There
are times this is if not a necessity, then at least more convenient.
3. You literally can't do anything else with it, especially adding control buttons or the like.

I do think that as nice as it would be, building in a true chat window is pointless, since a more customizable window type that allowed user placed controls would be much more useful. Such a window could be made to do literally anything and most controls only need to allow setting/retrieving values and the click event for buttons. Even the example of my idea is not 100% needed since clicking the button could call a plugin sub and that sub could request the values from the controls in the window. 90% of the code is handled by scripts and only the absolute most basic interface needs to be in the window itself if done correctly. That and something to load the layout and position the controls.

However, I am sort of split on whether I would rather have such a thing built in or to make my external version and later put out a non-free one with major enhancements. ;) lol Though a built in one could be later ported to another OS, where mine...
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Posted by Linda   Sweden  (164 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #4 on Tue 21 Jan 2003 12:45 PM (UTC)
Message
As I also mentioned in the discussion a while back, I agree that a window for separating out chat or page conversations needs to be more than just a notepad window to really do the job. Ideally, it should have its own separate input window, for example.

Regarding the way to put newlines into the log, is there any way of doing it so that when someone poses something that already includes a newline (that is, they've broken their pose up into two or more pragraphs) it doesn't add more newlines on each side of that newline since that results in extra big gap between paragraphs in a pose and smaller gaps between each pose.
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,158 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #5 on Wed 22 Jan 2003 02:15 AM (UTC)
Message
Not sure how you would detect that, but assuming you could you could call a script on a trigger and have it decide whether to add a newline when doing a world.WriteLog.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Poromenos   Greece  (1,037 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #6 on Wed 22 Jan 2003 10:37 AM (UTC)
Message
As for the alert on pause thing, you can't really set triggers on everything and have them beep, nick... I would suggest that the "MORE..." text on the status bar does not appear, unless there is world activity... so, you scroll up, no MORE... sign (since you probably know you scrolled up), but when there is activity from the mud, you get it... That is also good for the way that it worked before, because there's no actual meaning of scrolling back down unless there is more MUD input... So even if it's blank when the user scrolls up, there's no need for him to scroll down.
Vidi, Vici, Veni.
http://porocrom.poromenos.org/ Read it!
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Posted by Hapax   (6 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #7 on Sat 25 Jan 2003 01:30 AM (UTC)
Message

Thanks to all of you for all your help with my questions.

On spawn windows, Nick writes:

> I gather using a trigger to "append to notepad" won't be
> sufficient? If not, in what way is that not enough?

On the World of Darkness MUSHes where I play, you can have characters with supernatural senses who can overhear other people's "private" (i.e., tabletalked) conversations. It would be good to send each of those overheard conversations into a separate window with its own colours and triggers. It'd be particularly nice if, as Linda suggested, each window also had its own input area, as if it were its own open world. Therefore if I manage to catch player X letting out a juicy piece of gossip, I don't have to return to the main world to pose glancing in that direction and raising an eyebrow (or whatever).

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

>> Would it be possible to set up a trigger option that
>> says, in essence, "Do not consider this to be world
>> activity"?

> You can probably do that with a trigger that matches what
> you *do* want to be alerted to - play a sound, and check
> the box "only if inactive".

Personally I prefer my games to be silent, and therefore I have no sound triggers at all. I still think I like the idea of a passive trigger which quietly ignores the stuff that I *know* to be spam, so that I don't have to make a list of the things that are not spam (and hope that I didn't miss anything!).

My aversion to noisy MUSHing is relevant for the next point too:

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

>> Say that I am waiting for a slow poser to say something,
>> so I pass the time by scrolling up to re-read some stuff
>> that happened earlier in our scene. So far as I can
>> gather, one of two things will happen: either I get
>> shunted back down to the bottom of the screen when she
>> poses, interrupting my reading; or, I turn on the pause
>> option, which means that I don't actually *know* when
>> she's posed.

> Turn on auto-pause. Then you won't be sent back to the
> bottom. Set up a trigger on the poser which plays a sound
> when they reply.

I'd have to make a separate trigger for each scene, since this applies to a number of different characters that I play with regularly. Then I'd have to turn that trigger on when the scene is going slowly, and off again when it's going not so slowly. Seems like more trouble than it's worth.

I like Poromenos' idea of having the MORE... at the bottom of the screen *only* display when there is new world activity, rather than simply telling you that there is text beneath the cursor. As he said, if you're scrolling around with PgUp and PgDn, you probably know when there is and is not text beneath the cursor :)

Thanks for the heads-up on how to put blank lines in logs and how to clear the output buffer. Life is good.

'pax
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Posted by Magnum   Canada  (580 posts)  Bio
Date Reply #8 on Sat 25 Jan 2003 04:13 PM (UTC)
Message
I think there should always be an indication that you are in scroll-back mode, but perhaps the "MORE" text could be altered if there is new activity. Perhaps something as subtle as "MORE !"
Get my plugins here: http://www.magnumsworld.com/muds/

Constantly proving I don't know what I am doing...
Magnum.
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,158 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #9 on Sat 25 Jan 2003 10:41 PM (UTC)
Message
The activity list window, if you open it and put it to one side somewhere, will show a non-zero entry in the "New" column if there is genuinely new activity in the world, even if scrolled back.

Another approach is to use the Window menu -> New window, to open a second window. Leave the second one scrolled to the bottom and peeking through so you can see if new activity appears at the bottom of it, while you are scrolling back reviewing things. You can also use the command area in the second window to make quick replies whilst using the main command area for game play.
- Nick Gammon

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