Shattered Kingdoms

Jada and I finally broke down and actually made our first monitary commitment to MUDing with the purchase of zMUD, which I know a good numbe of you use. The problem is, we have no idea how to use it.

She's doing a little better than I, but I'll get to the point.

How do I change what is sent to the MUD when I push the numbers on the number pad? With MUSHclient I could customize the pad really easily and I have a particular way I have it set up and it has been that way for my more than two years of playing. Honestly, if I can't change that then I probably won't even use the program.

We bought zMUD for the spell checking and the automatic logging. I have a lot of flags now and I think it is important that I keep logs of just about everything I do.. not to mention it is fun to read over old ones. So.. how do I set that all up? To be honest I don't understand the stuff in the leagal scripts thing so hopefully we can make it slightly more clear that all that.

Thanks in advance.

I can show you how to set up your number pad direction thing. I have it set up on mine.

But besides that any more advice from you zMudders is welcome.

There's a lot of flotsam in the legal scripts thread. Much of it I can't make work, other things I'm not certain what they're supposed to do. A few things are awesome, if you're willing to pick through it.

First off - the keypad:

I try to keep mine in classes so if I break it I can easily turn it off. You'll want to replace the command with the actual command - the brackets must be there - and then copy and paste the lot of it in the prompt - be sure that the little computer icon in the buttom right corner does NOT have a red X over it. If it does, click it to make it go away.


etc. It's also possible to have the command changed with the addition of CTRL or ALT if you wish.

Autolog -

C/P this in prompt and it will log on whenever you connect with the date as the file name; it should by default append if you re-log on.



If I'm not coherent, throw something at me, and I'll try again.

the fastest (and newb friendly way that I use) is to find the menu "buttons" it will open a new window, from there, press new button; it will be easy from there on, you press the button you want assigned then enter the command you want.

You also need to watch out for the parsing Zmud does - certain characters are "interpretted" by the client as instructions to it rather than the Mud so do things to Zmud instead of SK.

For example, if you were to set up an alias within SK to "get food, eat food" you'd type something like the following:

alias grub take food backpack;eat food

However the Zmud parser interprets the semi-colon as an instruction to it to split the command, so you end up with the alias of "grub" getting set to just "take food backpack" and then directly executing "eat food". SK will probably tell you you don't have the food in your inventory, which isn't a huge disaster, but if you were instead setting up the getting and quaffing of a potion, the zapping of a wand or the brandishing of a staff the result could be somewhat more inconvenient.

The solution is to use the tilde character to instruct Zmud to not parse the semi-colon in this instance. So what you'd actually type is:

alias grub get food backpack~;eat food

The other special Zmud character you're likely to run into is "." when giving the description editor instructions. Again, prefix the fullstop with the tilde character, so rather than typing .c to clear an existing description, for example, you'd type ~.c

Zmud is a great Mud client once you get used to its little quirks. I'm particularly fond of the automapper. Incidently, if you get as far as using it and get frustrated that it doesn't automatically map when you pass through a portal (the crack in the wall in Morea, for example) the trick is to prefix the portal command with a chevron, so you'd type >crack to both pass through the crack in the wall and have the automapper map it for you.

The other thing you'll want to do if you get to playing with the automapper is to trigger the Zmud "NODIR" command on the Mud reporting doors being closed or your not being able to go in a certain direction.

The other handy utility is the text editor, which you bring up by hitting Ctrl, Shift and Enter together. You then type in your character description or sequence of commands, and hit Ctrl, Shift and Enter to send them directly into the Mud. I used to find it invaluable for building, especially once I'd configured it with the Ansi colour codes, but it's also really handy for writing character descriptions or notes on the mud.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. Enjoy. And don't be afraid of Zmud's helpfile, it's fairly comprehensive and generally pretty clear. That said, if you get stuck on anything specific, ask. Somebody else has probably already been there

I always check my preferences in the Zmud Editor window. For notes and longer descriptions I set the sendline delay up to about 350 milliseconds.

If you would rather not have to use a tilde prior to sending the dot, you can always go into Zmud preferences, under special characters and enable or disable any of the special characters. There is a lot of documentaion on Zmud in their help files and even more on the website.

I have made extensive macros, alia, buttons, and several triggers that capture information and route it to a gauge in my client. I also have toyed with the menu that comes up on right click in the Zmud window. As you get more familiar with its various options, these many powerful tools can help you do things like:

a set of buttons that function to build and customize your prompt
gauges for HP, PE, ME
reminders to vote for SK on TMS
group info display/control
gagging of spam

I've got a whole package of settings written by several old players. The bulk of the work was done by boo.

E

Or double-click on the little VDU icon in the bottom right, which switches parsing off completely. Incidently, doing the ssame on the pistol icon next to is disables all your triggers as well.

Double-clicking on the icon again switches parsing back on.

I think it's just single-clicking the little computer in the bottom right corner to turn off parsing, so that you can add semicolons into in-game aliases.

I prefer Zyshain's old look/open/close script, like so:



That way, you press 5, then 3, and you get "look se" in the prompt.

The other really nice feature is to set triggers to capture conversation into other windows. For example, I have a trigger defined like so:



This puts most of the conversational elements I might miss in battle spam into a separate window called conversation (which is created the first time the trigger fires)... it also provides me an easy way to look back during a session and see what exactly was said without having to filter through room descriptions and people's stupid emotes.


Back in Luce's day, I had an resurrection script which gave a few randomized emotes and says (with appropriate wait timers) before turning on a special self-disabling post-resurrection trigger which captured the name/adjective of the person to direct followup conversation. The engine is very robust, and I was hardly scratching the surface of its capabilities, although the more you depend on external elements like this, the less you actually play.