Posts made by skew

I came to MSB today and found that I had this greeny wordy thingy next to my name, and now find myself with the overwhelming desire to learn you people how to do things.

So, today, I will present THE EASY WAY TO BUILD A GRID!

This revolves around a tool (a spreadsheet) created by Mike Wiley. Mike is awesome. He's The Mike. He wanted me to put his e-mail address here, in case anyone wanted to reach out to him, so... willeym@comcast.net.

This tool creates a fast, easy way for you to input information and get the MU code to actually do stuff. This was built for TinyMUX (I think) and so might not work on other MU servers, but I think it should.

Without further adieu, here it is: @Diggy Diggy Hole

Note: It's Google Docs. If you don't have a google account, I strongly suggest stepping forward to year 2009 and getting one. This Google Doc is also set to read-only, so y'all can't use it. You have to copy it to your own personal google drive (via File -> Make a Copy...).

Overview

Diggy Diggy Hole contains 3 tabs. The first (Template) is the template, into which you will input information. The second (Preview) shows a preview of what you will see in the MU itself. The last tab (Commands) will give you the actual output. You will copy and paste this into your MU and it will make things do.

Instructions

Move to your starting point. This could be your build nexus, or in another room that you want to add an additional room to. This tool will create the new room, apply descriptions and drops and etc to the entrance/exit, then move you into the room, and apply the room desc. Finally, the tool will add desc/drop to the exit (which I guess links to your starting location).

Example:

From within the room "The Loop", I am going to create a room for "Wicker Park". I start in The Loop, then copy and paste all the commands into the MU. It creates Wicker Park, puts me into Wicker Park, then descs that room, and then descs the exit to get me back to The Loop.

Considerations

This creates one room, and one entrance/exit. If you need multiple entrances/exits (like, you can get into this building from the sewer, or the street), you will need to do that all on your own.

This tool assumes you will type "out" to get out of the new room and back to the starting location. In the case that the room has multiple exists, you'll want to edit the command and remove "out" and "o" before you run it.

Google Sheets doesn't seem to always spell check. So make sure to actually tell it to spell check.

And that's all I got for now. As people look this over, I'm sure they'll find something I said/did wrong, and I'll add them to this post.

@juke I can't tell from the screenshots on the page... Does BeipMU have two text input windows? (Picture of it in potato is the first screen shot in the first post I made.) I see two windows, but one appears to hold connection information, and isn't used for input?

@Alzie I just tested, it does no such thing on Windows. Sorry Linux.

Development on BITN is chugging right along, but my fingers are tired from typing descs. Is there anyone out there that might want to desc a room for me? We're using mostly existing, real-world locations, and simply writing up descriptions for them. It's not hard work, but it's boring, and gets tedious. But if each and every one of you donates just one desc a day, we can truly make change in our world... er... the world of BITN!

Interested? Shoot me a message here.

@Alzie Does it? I don't seem to recall that ever happening. I know I've watched it flashed while I was in the middle of typing into Skype or whatever else, and there's been no loss of my cursor or whatever. I could just be misunderstanding what you mean back takes focus.

@Sanguine Never heard of anything like that. Has anyone else complained about it? The +ooc is a command is something MU-side, not client-side, so I can't imagine it matters to Potato Client, not unless what data is sent to the client by the MU causes it to freeze. Is there something strange about the OOC room? Some weird stuff running inside of it? I am assuming, of course, typing +ooc takes you to the OOC room.

How to create events in Potato

So, you want Potato to do something to the stuff that appears on screen? Things such as highlighting, color changing, spawn windows... You do that here.

Go to "Options" -> "Global Events"

This is the global events window. There's a whole lot of crap you'll see here, and I am not sure how to use all of it, but here's a few things...

The List

The left hand side of this window is a list. It executes in order as the items appear here. If a pattern is met, it will run the event. If not, it will skip. You have the option to check "Continue?" to mark if you want the program to continue down the list. Pay attention to this, because if you want two things to happen to a single line of text (say, highlight your name and send it to a spawn window) you will need to have the "Continue?" option checked. The arrows at the bottom allow you to move items up and down the list.

Exclude from Activity Alert

While multi-tasking, or multi-windowing, I would often wait for my client to flash and let me know my RP partner had responded. Then I noticed that various auto-commands, channels, etc, would set my window flashing. I did not want to ignore these things, but I definitely did NOT want them flashing at me.

As you can see here, this will watch for incoming text that looks like "<Watch> *" where the * represents anything at all. I have "Activity?" checked, which means it will omit from the activity monitor. This means that whenever my watch command goes off ("<Watch> Ganymede has connected.") it will still show on my screen as text, but it won't flash the task bar/window/whatever.

Highlight Names

Note the type. Contains instead of wildcard. Idk why, but this is how it works. This will make the given word (Betsy) show bright white. Note also that I do NOT have "Continue?" checked. This means that once this event runs, it won't continue down the list. That also means that if I have the activity alert on channels suppressed, if this event comes first, it will process this event first, then never reach the second event. Meaning, if someone says "Betsy" on channel, it will flash.

Spawn windows

If I were to input a different name in "To:" it would output to a different window. I can have many channels, for OOC, pages, only certain channels, all channels, whatever I want. This game uses brackets around their channels, and also around their OOC talk. That means I'll need a separate event for [OOC], wherein I do absolutely nothing, save have it existing. It will hit the [OOC] first, then stop, and not move OOC talk to the spawn window. For all text that does not start with "[OOC]", it will continue.

The spawn windows will appear below the list of worlds, and activity will show in the spawn window with an orange circle:

How to Log in Potato

The simplest way to log is to use the built in logging feature.

Logging -> Show Log Window

• Include Buffer From: - This will capture everything that's currently in the buffer. If you were not already logging, it will capture everything that's in your back scroll. So, basically, it's just like "Save as..." and saves everything.
• You will input where you what the file saved and waht to name it.

There is another option, of course, and this is what I use. Potato can be set up to automatically start logging. It starts when you connect and stops when you disconnect (or choose to end the log) and captures everything that comes through. Each world will have it's own file. I've been logging for years and I have about 150mb of text file saved, so don't worry about space.

Auto Logging

1. Go to "Options" -> "Configure World"
2. Choose "Auto-Sends" on the left.
3. Under "Send upon first connect, before Login info:" input something like the following...

/log -append 1 -leave 1 -- [/get _name]-[/get _char]-[/time %Y-%m-%d].txt

Now to break that down... /log enables logging. Append means it will append an existing file if it finds one (such as if you close out and come back in on the same day). Get name will get the name of the world, get char will get the character you are logged in as, and the time command will add in the year, month, and date.

This command will create a new .txt file in the same location that Potato.exe is, and that file will be named world-char_name-yy/mm/dd.txt.

When you connect, you should see something like...

Now logging to "C:\Location_Of_Potato\Eldritch-Joey-2016-02-09.txt".

Now remember if you are creating multiple worlds, you will need to copy your world and edit, or input the above command into each world's Auto-Sends. Easy, yeah?

Potato is the best MU client, but some people struggle to use it. The documentation on the site is a little difficult to follow, and some of the features are not very intuitive. As such, I'm putting together a little How To so we can all use the best MU client.

Why's it the best? Easy. It has two input windows. That means when you're in the middle of Hot TS and get paged a dank meme, you don't have to ctrl+a ctrl+x to save your half-written pose while you respond to @tragedyjones about how dank his memes are.

Example:

Sweet right? Okay, so, set up isn't very hard. Input a name, address, port for your MU. It'll then open the world configuration menu.

"Worlds" are self contained configuration thingies within Potato. You can configure the default world ("Options" -> "Configure Program Settings") as well as Program Settings, and all the future Worlds you create will pull from the default. Me? I just copy my existing world and modify it.

Within Program Settings, here's some things that are useful:

Under Program Settings -> Misc Settings
Start Maximized? (probably uncheck that)

Within World settings ("Options" -> "Configure Worlds"), here's some things that are useful:

Basics:

• Select Default Char (only after you have added a char)

Characters:

• Add your character. Add multiple. The world can be set to auto-connect to the default character. If you want multiple auto connects to multiple characters, you create multiple worlds.

Display/Ansi, Colors and Fonts:

• Configure your font. Pretty simple.

Display/Miscellaneous:

• This is where you save the Wrap Text size! Go in here, choose "Current Window Size"
• Echo Sent Commands? will make sure your text doesn't echo. Unless you want it to... weirdo.
• Two Input Windows? Uncheck if you hate the best things in life.

Activity Settings:

• Flash Taskbar? This will make if flash when there's activity.
• Show activity, clear activity. This will add a yellow "New Activity" marker on the screen that's held until there's a new, New Activity marker (if you have it clear).

So, that should get you in! Now, some things that might be useful to you...

Edit/Convert...

• Convert Returns to %r - If you copy and paste text into the input box, you can run this command to remove the lines.
• Escape Special Chars - this applies the \ in front of all special characters so they don't get read by the MU code.

Logging

• You can turn this on to easily log a current scene. You can even have it grab everything in the cache. I don't use it, though, because I auto-log! I'll show you how to do that later.

Tools

• Text Editor - Opens a separate window for you to input text. This is useful to have a big writing area. You can then choose to send this text into the window. Just make sure you send it to THE CORRECT WORLD. It's active for the world that was open when you clicked it, not the world that's currently selected.

So, that's it for now... next post will be logging, then next will be events and spawn windows.

EDIT:

I did a write up on how to use spellchecking within Potato on a separate thread. Just for organizational sake, it's here: http://musoapbox.net/topic/840/how-to-use-spellcheck-on-potato-mu-client

Google is awarding people who do account checkups with an extra 2GB of storage. It takes like a minute to do, and the upgrade seems to be permanent.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/9/10940046/google-drive-free-2gb-space-security-checkup

(Note: It doesn't seem to show immediately on your google drive, but then I went to "Upgrade Storage" and it showed me at 17g, instead of 15g.)

Oh! I forgot to add...

If your OOC chat comes through as <OOC>, it will be flagged as a channel (since <OOC> is a lot like <Vampire>). You have a few options... First, if you channels are set up with brackets ( [Public] ) instead of right and left arrows, you'll be fine. Likewise, if your channels are set up with TWO arrows, you can set your event to read as <<*>> *. Second, if the above is not the case, you need to create a separate event for OOC! Create a new event, put in [OOC] * or <OOC> * as your pattern, and then do nothing else. If Enabled? is checked, and Continue? is not checked, the code will find the match and simply stop running.

The last step is to make sure the OOC channel event is ABOVE the channel spawn event. If you put it BELOW, it will hit the channel spawn event before it hits the OOC event and thusly not work.

Alternately, you can let your OOC feed into it's own channel, or whatever. I should probably compile this crap into a how to... Sounds like work, I'll do it later.

This will walk you through enable spellcheck on the Potato MU client. This was originally posted on Fallcoast (don't recall the author) and I forgot to save it somewhere, then got a new computer, and had to figure it out again. So I'm putting it here!

Install Instructions

Potato uses the aspell spellchecker for accomplish this feature, so first install aspell. The windows version can be found here: http://aspell.net/win32/

Look for "Full Installer". It should download a .exe file that you can run. You can leave all the settings as-is. Once this is complete, go back to the aspell.net page and snag the appropriate language file. That's likely English. This should download another .exe file, and if you used the default settings for the first install, you can use the default settings for this install. Just make sure it ends up in the same spot.

Once that is installed, open up Potato. From within Potato, go to Options - > Configure program settings. In the Program Configuration window, go to Program Settings, then Misc Settings. You should see a field for "ASpell Executable". Input the location that you installed the ASpell executable. If you stuck with the defaults, it should be: C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspell\bin\aspell.exe (assuming you have a 64 bit machine, which most people do these days.)

Once that is in, you should be done. I believe the default is command to activate spellcheck is Ctrl+S -- if it's not, you can go to Options -> Customize Keyboard Shortcuts. You can also click Edit -> Check Spelling.

Please note that there is no "on line" spell check. It doesn't underline words you spelled wrong, but instead opens a window to check.

Troubleshooting

If you hit Ctrl+S and nothing happens, check to make sure you have the keyboard shortcut.

If you definitely have the keyboard shortcut and nothing happens, it means it's not finding aspell.exe, so make sure the path you specified in the Program Configuration window is correct.

If the window opens and you receive an error saying something like "No words found" or "no language found" or something, it means you did not install the language file. Go back to that step, download the language file, install the language file.

Just a quick explanation... Potato reads each incoming block of text. If you have "contains" selected, it will reach the incoming block and search for a given pattern/word/whatever. It processes everything the exact same - poses, channel, pages, etc - so you need you need to set up a new event for each type of thing.

Change that up just a little to make it " pages: " with the space on the end, and make sure the Case? flag is checked. There's still a chance that stuff will be pushed into the spawn window incorrectly, but it's a smaller chance.

You'll also want to create a second, similar event, that's set to "From afar," so that it will capture the paged emotes.

For channels, you can do <*> * and it will capture all channels that have < > or << >>. If you need, you can do [*] * as well.

I had set all my stuff to spawn, but frankly I did not like it, so I removed it. Nothing wrong with Potato, just wasn't what I was looking for.

@Miss-Demeanor There will be no Changelings in BITN. >:|

@Warma-Sheen I'm saying the "could happen" stuff is scarier, but in a way that doesn't appeal to me at all. Like, the world is scary enough, I don't need to relive the worst bits of it on screen.

I am, in general, not a fan of most horror. What I enjoy is the sort of "what if" situations that really make your skin crawl. Things that are bizarre enough that they don't affect my day to day life... Our world is simply too boring for that. But... What if it wasn't?

I don't like The Hills Have Eyes because it could happen. I've been out west and getting stranded is too real a possibility. Not to mention that I get frustrated with the silly choices the characters make. The feeling of hopelessness plus frustration... No thanks.

When individuals are forced to encounter the impossible, however, that's fun for me. Fun and scary. The Haunting comes to mind.

@Ganymede I remember this post! Though, sadly, most of the real shiver-causing ones are about kids. As a rule, I try not to murder people's children.

Good stuff, though, thank you!

@Arkandel said:

@tragedyjones said:

Just an update I don't think we will have a special Storyteller slot anymore, at least not initially.

What's a Storyteller slot?

He's referring to what I mentioned above, in response to Pyrephox. It's an idea we'd kicked around, but we're not going to be using (at least, not initially).

@Ghost Yeah someone else can run that one. I have my limits. >.<

@Ghost Or... "C.H.U.D. is an acronym for "Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller"."

@Pyrephox said:

(I actually have a whole plot worked up for this one that I've never gotten to run.)

We are going to make a big effort to enable non-staff story tellers. That's one of the reasons why we're gathering this list, so we have ideas we can have people pull from and run. I've found there's a fair number of people willing to run things, just not having an idea ready when they're inspired.

@tragedyjones is also working on a storyteller role, which will give some of the meager "tools" we have available to those that are interested in storytelling regularly (but are not staffers). I won't say more on it, cause I don't know any more!

And for everyone else, thank you! This is great stuff, keep it coming.