Aardwolf custom Mushclient Development

Many of our players have come up with some great ideas to get new users to Aardwolf. However, there is no point going all out on getting completely new users to the website when they don’t know how to play when they get there. We have always struggled with being a large and complex game that can be difficult to learn, particularly for people who haven’t played a MUD before.

The Aylorian Academy was a first step towards making it easier to learn how to play Aardwolf, and the addition of the Flash Mud Client to the site is an improvement over the Java Client for folks who want to quickly try out the game.

The problem still remains of what they do afterwards? Installing a MUD client with no aliases, triggers, etc is only marginally better than no client at all. Configuring a client for the first time can be complex. A person that has never played a MUD before is not going to invest the time and energy when they’re so used to other games that just do it all for them.

After discussing some ideas with Nick Gammon, the author of Mushclient, we have created a custom version of Mushclient that, when installed, will:

1. Install a number of Aardwolf specific plug-ins with it.
2. Run a script that will determine the user’s desktop size then open various extra windows based on their screen real-estate. The font style and size are also set automatically.

The script has been tested on every resolution my laptop supports (12 different settings between 800*600 to 1920*1200) and works fine. The main point of this was originally to auto-configure and install some plugins for Aardwolf, but I made some code changes to improve the plugins while I was in there. The stats andmap windows are shown below and you can check out the example screenshot for the full layout.

For users of other clients, these are all tag driven and can be developed using basic triggers, depending on what your client supports. For existing Mushclient users the plugins will be made available individually.

Other than the auto-install, the cool part about the stats window is that it automatically updates everytime you see a prompt or battleprompt. No prompt configuration is needed for this, just an additional config toggle. Notice also that the map window includes the room name and exits.

For packaging up Mushclient itself, Nick kindly provided the NSI script he uses to package up Mushclient for release. A weekago I’d never so much as written a line of code in Mush or used NSI, so working on this has been fun.

It is not quite ready for release yet, it still needs some tidying up. There is also a lot of registry hacking in the NSI script, some of which can come out based on some recent changes Nick made to Mushclient itself.

Having a single download / install that gives new players what they need to get started with Aardwolf is a good step forward, particularly as the development of a custom client it as the end of a very long “todo” list.

I was going to include a section on “Why Mushclient?” here but the post is long enough already, so that can wait for a follow up post.

As you can see, the fact that there hasn’t been a reboot / announcement note of changes on the main MUD for a few days rarely means “nothing is happening”.

The base download will include map capture, stat capture and a spellup plugin. A channel capture plugin will be included but off by default. Speedwalking will be built into the MUD itself with a ‘runto’ command. Appreciate your comments on this. What else do you find essential to play Aardwolf?