Mudlet 3.2

Finally welcoming summer in the northern hemisphere, Mudlet 3.2.0 is here. Mudlet can display text in many other languages now, coroutines are available, and userwindows (stand-alone miniconsoles) have been massively improved!

Encoding in Mudlet

Veteran Mudlet developer SlySven worked to teach Mudlet to display text in Spanish, Russian, and many other Western languages!

Go to Preferences > Encoding to select the encoding you’d like to use.

This is the first baby step in enabling Mudlet to support internalisation. Choosing the encoding will help Mudlet display the letters right, but triggers will not work with non-English text and nor will some Lua string.* functions like string.len(). We’ll be adding these features incrementally and it will all be ready in Mudlet 4.0.

Coroutines

Lua coroutines are now available in Mudlet, opening up a lot of possibilities for writing your scripts better – check out the demo in the manual. Big thanks to the core Mudlet developer ahmedcharles for enabling this!

Script loss fixed

If you happened to insert an XML-invalid character such as 0x0 in your script, Mudlet wouldn’t be able to load it back in and lose everything that followed it. This has been fixed – credits go to to Buck in Discord for identifying the problem and SlySven for fixing the problem! 0x0 and it’s friends will now get saved and loaded just fine.

First time user experience

First impressions matter – whenever you’re getting your friend on Mudlet or someone is thinking of checking out this underrated thing called MUDs. Mudlets is now much better – on first launch, a welcome screen is now automatically shown:

We’ve also made it so the Connections window automatically opens up if you don’t have any profiles on autoload, and the last used profile is automatically selected.

There’s too much blank space in though, isn’t there? MUDs that get onto Mudlet’s default profiles list are ones that make a significant contribution to the open-source Mudlet project, or those that go the extra mile to add a great gaming experience for their players on Mudlet: mapper support and a UI package.

Userwindow improvements

Would you like to make your miniconsoles separate from the Mudlet window? Move them over to another monitor perhaps? Or make dock them inside Mudlet? You can with openUserWindow(), check it out. This release has improved a lot of things for userwindows – they’ll now remember their position when you open Mudlet, won’t inherit borders from the main window, and will close with the profile. Once you open a userwindow, you can use all the same cecho(), copy(), paste() on it just as with a miniconsole.

Thanks to the modest itsTheFae for his work in making this happen.

Floating toolbars improved

Floating toolbars – those that you can make in the Buttons view and stick buttons in – no longer spazz out when you click on the script editor.

Changelog

added alert() function in case you need to alert the user for something

added getServerEncodingsList(), setServerEncoding(), and getServerEncoding() to choose encodings from script

added tempKey(), permKey(), and killKey() functions

added ability to choose encodings (UTF-8, ISO*, and many others) in preferences

added support for coroutines!

added support for the telnet BELL code to have Mudlet icon flash/blink for 3s

added loadWindowLayout(), saveWindowLayout(), and a boolean argument to openUserWindow() for controlling the layout of userwindows

added mudletOlderThan()

fixed a possible crash if you closed Mudlet profile while it was still playing a sound

fixed being able to open multiple ‘About’, ‘Module Manager’, ‘Package Manager’ windows

fixed clicking on floating toolbars interrupting the editor when clicked on

fixed floating toolbars to close when the profile is closed

fixed floating/dockable mapper window to close when you close with its profile

fixed map auditing always complaining about a default area missing

fixed save profile dialog to ask a proper question

fixed userwindows inheriting borders from the main display

fixed white-on-yellow search highlighting to be the normal black-on-yellow again

fixed a crash if scripts used sysDisconnectionEvent

fixed script loss when special characters (like U+000B) were used in scripts

fixed lua-zip error when opening Linux AppImage

fixed labels placed under the mapper window preventing clicking on the mapper

improved AND/OR trigger tooltip to mention that matches go into multimatches[][] instead of matches[]

improved borders settings Preferences – you can now set them to negatives

improved first-time experience: connection dialog opens automatically and a welcome message is shown

improved last-used profile to be autoselected when you open the connection dialog

improved moved map format selection to be in map options

improved Mudlet to autoload profiles much quicker

improved performance inside code Mudlet by using multi-arg .arg() instead of chained .arg() calls

improved userwindows to open in their last position on the screen by default

improved connectToServer() to also save the parameters for the next time

improved a bit of MCCP-related code with a cleanup

Credits

This release was brought to you by Ahmed Charles, Florian Scheel, itsTheFae, kbasten, Mike H, Stephen Lyons, and Vadim Peretokin. Depressed by cancelled projects at work? Interesting in contributing to a project and actually seeing your work get used by people? Hop on board!

Random tip: you can use Unicode art in Mudlet! Try doing cecho(“°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸”) or cecho(“<green>(╯°□°）<dark_green>╯︵ ┻━┻”). You can find more examples over here.