Note: the release linked is for Windows, but the Mapper works fine on all platforms as Mudlet does.

Note2: the mapper utilizes ATCP and MMP technologies to provide a seamless experience – no mapping is necessary, and the mapper doesn’t get lost. As IRE games are the only ones to use them at the moment, the preview works only for them – but of course in the future, we’ll work on mapping and non-ATCP room detection capabilities. Remember this is an early preview!

Changelog:

Bugfixes

Quality comes first, so here is a list of all issues that were fixed in this release. If you know about a problem and it’s not listed as fixed here, let us know about it. Things fixed:

• A crash when searching in the script editor with queries that used regex metacharacters
• Lua errors inside event handler functions not reported to debug
• tempRegexTrigger() works properly again
• Scripts are deactivatable now, ie a deactivated script won’t be compiled
• Keys not staying in their groups
• Timer groups fire on 0ms interval and slowed down the system
• Custom command separator doesnt save
• Setup namespaces for mini console + lables that are restricted to the respective profile -> you can have multiple connections using a mini console called “map”.
• crash on setBgColor() on an undefined text selection
• newline characters are stripped from trigger patterns (copying a pattern that was wrapped to two or more lines is into a trigger pattern is fine now)
• crash on deleting scripts with event handlers
• crash on reconnect button if reconnect process was still under way

New Feature: ATCP

Mudlet now fully support ATCP, a data transmission protocol that is mainly used with IRE games. Working with it is quite easy – all data is stored for you in the atcp table that is updated as new data comes. The table is a key-value type, so for example atcp.RoomNum will get you the latest room id received (most likely, that of the room you’re currently in) and atcp.CharVitals will get you the character vital stats string. You can do display(atcp) to see all the information the table contains.

Triggering on new ATCP events is easy as well; whenever a new one received Mudlet raises an event with the same name that of the ATCP message (sans the connecting dot in the middle) which you can hook an event handler to call a function for you. All of this is throughly explained in the manual, and a complete set of demonstration script is provided as well to get you started right off the bat.

You can also send ATCP messages to the server with sendATCP.

Do keep in mind though that the MudBot proxy or the Vadi Multi (mb-core.exe) strip all ATCP information. So if you or your script users make use of it, contact the person who you got the proxy from for help (an update to the Vadi Multi is available that will pass through all ATCP information).

New Feature: client-side MXP

And by client-side, we mean that MXP from the server isn’t currently accepted, so don’t expect to do config mxp on or something similar and have it work ;)

At this stage, setLink, insertLink and echoLink functions were added that allow you to create clickable words. Upon clicked, the words would run the supplied code – so you can, for example, enable any item you see in a shop to be clicked on that will send a command to buy that item. Links can also have custom tooltips to show when mouse is hovering over the linkified text. One useful script that’s been possible with this is one to allow URLs in text to be clicked and opened in a browser.

In addition to links, popups are also available – setPopup, echoPopup, and insertPopup. These are similar to links in the fact that left-clicking on linkified text will do one action, but right-clicking will show a pop-up menu that allows you to choose from a selection of choices.

This is just the start of MXP and there’s more to come, but these tools already allow some very powerful utility scripts to be created – so go crazy with linkfication!

New Feature: easy database operations

Mudlet came with a sqlite library since 1.0.5, which works great but requires knowledge of database theory and SQL syntax. Stephen Hansen aka ixokai has written a whole set of db: functions that make it real easy to use a database from Mudlet.

See the tutorial section of the Mudlet manual to get started.

New Feature: Mudlet-generated events

Mudlets event system allows you to build very modular scripts (and helps interoperability with other scripts, as well). In this release, Mudlet generates some events for you – namely, ATCP message ones and a few others:

• sysWindowResizeEvent is called when the main window is resized. Use this event to re-position your labels and miniConsoles according to the new dimensions. This is also the now preferred method to use instead of the handleWindowResize function – because the function can only be overwritten once, meaning that other scripts won’t get access to it. Hooking to an event, however, can be done multiple times and so multiple scripts can be notified of dimension changes easily.
• sysWindowMousePressEvent is called when a mouse button is pressed down anywhere on the screen. Some nefarious uses with labels running about can now be accomplished.
• sysWindowMouseReleaseEvent is similar to mouse press, but called when the mouse button is released.

New Feature: errors view

Mudlet now has a dedicated errors display – which shows only errors, so it is way less spammier than the debug view. Additionally, it logs all Lua errors to the log/errors.txt file inside your profile folder.

New functions

As if three large feature-sets weren’t enough, there’s still more for you with 1.1.0.

1. Easy, colored echos: there are now cecho, decho and hecho functions to output echos with color tags in them.
2. getOS lets you know if Mudlet is running on Windows, Linux or a Mac.
3. openURL opens the given url in the default OS browser.
4. showColors shows you a neat table of all of the named colors available.
5. createConsole will create and size a miniConsole for the proper amount of lines and characters per line
6. string:title to capitalize the string
7. table.union and table.n_union to join two tables together
8. table.intersection and table.n_intersection to get only the values common to all given tables
9. table.complement and table.n_complement to get a relative complement of one set to another
10. speedwalk to undertake long journeys
11. getTimestamp to retrieve the timestamp for a given line
12. invokeFileDialog to have the user graphically locate a folder or a file
13. isPrompt returns true if the current line processed is a prompt one (works only on GA servers). This makes closing gates on a prompt real easy, because prompts can often change.
14. feedTriggers re-processes the given text as triggers for you. Great for testing your triggers in arbitrary lines.
15. deselect to clear the selection on the main window or a miniConsole
16. tempTimer now allows Lua closures instead of Lua code in a string
17. setLabelStylesheet to give a label a stylesheet, allowing some very nice customization of health bars and so on
18. sendAll now allows a true/false argument at the end in same fashion as send

Enjoy!

Thank you all to everyone who contributed to the Mudlet 1.1.0 release – we couldnt’ve produced a great, free, multi-platform and user friendly client without you. Help spread the word about Mudlet and keep on rocking.

Just because there are so many new things, the this announcement will cover the general things that you as a user will notice, and the follow-up one will cover things that scripters would be happy about.

Display improvements

Mudlets custom-made, and already the fastest text display among MUD clients received many improvements in 1.1.0. Still keeping the speed advantage, it received a lot of work to make it better – gone are the black rectangles, selection blowing up, and tough times scrolling. Additionally, the blank space that sometimes appeared between the input line and the MUD text is gone, and commands are now shown are now on the last line, not a line of their own. Commands can have their color customized as well. The default setting for text is now with anti-aliasing enabled, making first look experience more pleasurable.

A menu bar

Should you not like the big buttons in the main window or want to reclaim some screen real estate, you can now use a menu bar to access the common things instead of a toolbar. To enable it, see Settings → General.

Auto-resizable and multiline input line

When you’re typing up a long sentence, you’ll notice that the input line will now smartly resize to accommodate it. This makes roleplay much easier since long emotes will be clearly visible at once now. As a bonus, you can also insert new lines without sending a command first.

Here’s an overview of the keybindings you can use with the input line now:

Composer

Mudlet now supports ATCP and the Composer feature – which means that in IRE-based and other MUDs that support it, when you’ll start editing text a popup window will show up and you’ll be able to easily edit the text. This is the same as the Composer feature of the Nexus client.

Just a small note though – if you’re using a proxy to connect to a game, like MudBot or Vadi Multiclient, you’d need to get in touch with the person you got it from. By default, those proxys strip ATCP information and thus the Composer won’t work.

Notable misc fixes

Rejoice! The command separator option now gets remembered, so you can change it and have Mudlet remember it after a restart. Additionally, keybindings will no longer jump out of their groups but stay in them as expected. A lot of other things were fixed as well – and as always, if you find a problem do let us know.

Screencast

Mudlet 1.1.0 casual overview

Enjoy!

Much thanks to shenlon for doing an excellent job on the previous packages, and to ixokai for creating the new installer.

We’ve added Lua functions to create permanent aliases/triggers/timers that show up in the script editor. This means that the #alias way of creating stuff from the input line is now feasible!

Another scripting addition was that now you can check if an alias/trigger/timer exits or is enabled. You can also enable, disable, and delete them via scripting.

The trigger editor pattern list was also partially redesigned, along with the trigger editor itself – making it perform much faster.

Blaine von Roeder has also created a Variable Persistence System – which means you can now easily save your variables across sessions! The manual will be updated shortly on how to make use of this.

Additinally, Babelfish created a checho function – it allows you to easily make an echo that has colors in between, using the hex color values. Next Mudlet version will have a cecho function which will allow you to do things like cecho(“this is red green blue”)!

Bug Fixes

• Updated to QT-4.6, removing many rendering and display issues(doubling line inputs, etc)
• Fixed resetFormat( windowName ) to work on main console. Syntax is resetFormat().
• Defaulted LF-after-newline to ON for GA-enabled MUDs. Fixes reported problems with IRE prompts.
• Returning focus to Mudlet no longer causes incorrect characters to be hilighted in the command line.
• Pressing up when the command line is empty now selects the last sent command.
• Timer Folders no longer spam the Debug Console with execute announcements
• Debug console now shows correct capture groups for Aliases and Triggers (Bug 493400)
• LuaGlobal and Mudlet Documentation now properly updated on Mudlet start
• Colorizer triggers renamed to “Highlight Triggers” (Cosmetic)

• Fix: timer couldnt disable itself
• sqlite database support
• Added createGauge, setGauge, getRGB, deselect functions
• Fixed preferences dialog resetting the font

The Mudlet team is currently working on the 1.1.0 release, which will feature MXP! Here’s a preview of it on Imperian:

• “don’t print commands” option fixed
• command history: if you have the clear command line option turned on, cursor up should get the last command and not the one
• windows crash fixed: drag and drop: trigger drop trigger folder onto heading(triggers)->folder disappears-> crash if you click on 1st trigger
• fixed crash on drag and drop: if your drop into an open trigger folder
• drag & drop: fixed crash if you drop above or below the trigger headline parent -> forbid such drops

Lua functions:

• Added calcFontSize( fontSize ) to determine how wide and high a mini console needs to be to display a certain amount
• Added startLogging(true/false) turn logging on and off.

Several other misc. changes are included in the downloads section.

Enjoy!

It fixes a crash that would happen with drag and drop, allows send() to just send stuff to the MUD without echos, and has a display performance fix for Windows. Enjoy!

Watch the introductory Mudlet 1.0 screencast

What is Mudlet? It’s a free, open-source and cross-platform MUD client that works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS! Designed to be fast, efficient, and user-friendly, you can get your own copy for free right here: http://www.mudlet.org/download/

Mudlet features Lua as it’s scripting base and a rich client API to support it. Split screen, auto-completion from output and input, multi-session gaming, HTML and text logging, replay recording and playback are all part of the package.

Mudlet also features a rich UI api for creating your own labels and buttons anywhere on the screen and changing their looks:

Special focus has also been placed on the speed of the client (watch).

Now go out and enjoy Mudlet! We’d love to hear your feedback on our forums.

The new clone url is git://mudlet.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/mudlet/mudlet, and the download as archive is available here.

Additionally, Mudlet beta 15 is now available!

Download (Note: It requires an Intel OS X 10.5+.)

There are installers for Windows and Ubuntu, with a Mac in plans. Mudlet at this point is a quite usable client for everyday gaming – we’d like you to stress it as much as you can, make it crash, find flaws or find new features that you’d like! Let us know, because we’re listening.

Changes since the pre-alpha version:

• Switched to the PCRE 7.6 regex engine which is much more powerful
• Enabled the new speed display by default
• Improved scripting support with more functions (see help manual)
• Improved trigger engine with trigger chains and multicondition triggers – many bugfixes and improvements
• Added support for XML packages, including import/export!
• Added customizable button bars
• Switched from qmake to cmake for building (qmake is still left as backup though)
• Improved command line autocompletion
• Added buffer limiting to Mudlet (right now it’s hardcoded at 100k lines with 10k batch deletion; this will be customizable later)
• Added small screen netbook support
• … and a more detailed changelog is available on our git page.

Caveats in the beta version:

• Settings from the pre-alpha won’t be transferred – but if you’ve made lot of them and wouldn’t like to lose them, let us know and we’ll add a converter
• The interface polishing is not done – does look ugly / unusable in some places, but the functionality should be there

Secure Profiles

One of the chronic problems in MUD clients is profile corruption – when all your work just goes *poof*. We’ve took that issue very seriously, so Mudlet now has a Secure Profiles feature.

The way this works is that Mudlet makes snapshots of your profile in different time periods – and when saving, it doesn’t delete the old snapshots until they’re obsolete. This way, even if you get a power loss, your old profiles will be safe and not everything will be lost.

Improved Connection Dialog

We’ve been hard at work to polish the Connection dialog. Here are rather recent screenshots (a bit of polishing is needed, as you might notice:

.

We’ll be looking at improving all of Mudlet’s windows in terms of usability and aesthetics in the upcoming releases. Speaking of which – if you’re familiar with html & css, we need you! Mudlet could use a nice start page instead of the grey box that we have right now.

Import / export

Mudlet has also received import/export functionality – you can now import/export your whole profile, or selected items (for sharing). It’s rather basic for now, but does the job way better than copy/pasting. A more featureful addons system is being planned.

Improved developer process

We’re experimenting with using git, hosted on github.com sourceforget.net for the git code hosting. The master branch is available here – so if you’d like to make a patch, the preferred way is to setup a github account, make a branch there – and when your patch is ready, Heiko will merge your changes into the master branch.

Upcoming beta

As already mentioned, we’re working hard on making a beta-release soon (hoping to have it within a week, even). We’ve compiled a list of things we’d like to address before the beta – if you have anything to add to that, your input is welcome.

We’re still looking for more ways to make Mudlet easier to install/upgrade for you – so if you’re familiar with Mac, OpenSUSE, Fedora, *BSD packaging or anything else – let us know.

At the moment, it has scrolling, selection, copying, and split screen capabilities – with screenwidth 0 support coming next.

Preliminary tests results show that it is very fast – as intended! Given 14,258 various lines with color, the new display displayed them all in only 0.6 of a second. To compare, zMud took 2 minutes to display the same text (with cMud scrolling through at 20 seconds).

So stay tuned for when the display is finished and in use :)

Additionally, if you have any input on what capabilities Mudlet’s text display should support – let us know. We’re making a custom one just for Mudlet – so that it is extremely fast, and is able to cope with the large amount of text and formatting extremely quickly.

Update: The installer was updated, fixing a bug where scripts weren’t auto-compiled at start.