Mudlet 2.0 Overview

Mudlet 2.0 is now available for download for Windows, OSX and Linux platforms! Mudlet is a Free and Open Source game client for playing online text-based MUDs.

What is Mudlet?

It is a game client for on-line text games, MUDs. There are hundreds of these games out there, some existing for several decades! Pick up Mudlet and jump into playing any of these games – all of which have involved storylines, unique PvP and PvE systems, crafting, sailing, travelling in space and many other things you wouldn’t think of!

New Addition: Mudlet Mapper

The highlight of this release is the addition of a mapper – an extension of Mudlet that allows you to create, view, and speedwalk on a map of the game you’re playing.

Feature rich

Mudlets mapper sports both 2D and 3D views, extremely efficient pathfinding, ability to plot text and images onto the map, map image backgrounds and on-map notes, custom exit lines to explain the most difficult of geography, room highlights, per-room data storage and more. The mapper covers your basic g geography needs of mapping and speedwalking, and allows you to go way further by turning the map into a tool you can build on.

It supports everything from mapping wilderness areas in their original ASCII, to 3D room format or 2D room format. Complicated geography can be explained away with custom exit lines, and you can choose to map entire MUDs to be on display at once – performance is not an issue. Relevant rooms can be marked with a character, entire areas can be labelled or given a background to set the feel.

Speedwalking can be accomplished both via cardinal and special exits; special exits are completely scriptable and support complex sequences of events to make them happen. Preferred rooms for speedwalking can be singled out with room weights, or and rooms you’d like to avoid can be locked out of speedwalking altogether – or you can also just lock an exit from being used, keeping the room available.

Performance

Like Mudlet, the mapper is designed for speed. It easily scales to thousands of rooms in the map and single area – here’s 31k rooms in one area, shown at once. Not bad, huh? The image itself takes up 9.6k x 6.3k pixels.

Pathfinding (working out a way to get from A to B) is extremely quick – on absolutely giant worlds, it doesn’t give any noticeable freezes. You won’t feel lagged down having giant maps and needing to walk around in them, at all.

Highly scriptable

The mapper is highly customizable and scriptable – there are over 60 functions to completely manipulate the mapper and map data. This allows you to build amazing scripts with this map interaction – scripts that track people visually on the map, scripts that plot your demesne of power, and many more things you can imagine.

This makes a lot of tools possible as well – for example, a complete Cmud → Mudlet map importer was scripted within Mudlet.

Map auto-download

If your MUD provides public maps, Mudlet makes it very easy for your players to obtain the map and keep it up to date. This makes for a much more welcoming experience to new players, who don’t feel as lost once they press a map button get a layout of the world – just by pressing the Map button, Mudlet will automatically download the games map for them.

At the moment, all IronRealms games – Achaea, Aetolia, Imperian, Lusternia and Midkemia Online support this feature! If you would like to see your MUD added, get in touch.

MXP

Mudlet 2.0 introduces support for MXP! This makes clickable links and menus within games work, so give it a go – you might find it personally way easier to deal with clicking on text than typing out long commands. This can give a more welcoming experience to new players as well when they’re exploring the world of MUDs.

Modules & Packages

Mudlet 2.0 introduces a new feature of Mudlet package. Mudlet packages can contain multiple aliases, triggers, scripts, keys and so on – bundled together with any other resources that your script might require (such as artwork for a GUI, or sounds). All this is easily installable as a whole within Mudlet.

This not only allows users to create and share fully fledged UIs without fuss with others, but also allows your MUD to have a distinct look & feel as soon as a Mudlet user connects to it – Mudlet supports automatic UI download and updating from your MUD server.

Getting rid of a package is easy as well – removing the package will uninstall all triggers, aliases, scripts and other resources that it brought in.

Package exporter

To create the said packages, a new tool is available in Mudlet that makes the task much easier now. It allows you to select multiple triggers, aliases, timers, scripts, keys or buttons and export them altogether as one.

Modules

The new Module manager, alongside the Package manager, can install Mudlet packages as well for you – in a way that’ll make managing multiple profiles or developing a script easy.

Modules allow a single script to be synchronized across the profiles you’ve installed it at – so if you edit or update the script on one profile, saving it will instantly synchronize it with all profiles that make use of it.

As well as that, modules can synchronize directly to disk on save, which makes the life of a script author much easier – there’s no need to re-export every time you’re done working with a script.

GMCP

Full GMCP support is now available within Mudlet with 2.0 – so for MUDs that support it, you can enjoy hassle-free data use in your scripts. GMCP is the successor of ATCP – it allows the MUD and the client to communicate out of band, send complex messages while being easy to deal with client-side and not requiring any special parsing.

Colour logging

Full color logging is now available in Mudlet – you can either select to log specific parts, or have it permalog, or even go scroll back and save a part that you haven’t logged – in color, as you saw it.

Mudlet also allows you to log, or permalog, in plain text as well.

Notable improvements

A variety of things of things were improved in this latest update:

you can now use the ‘cancel’ button to stop Mudlet from closing if you closed it accidentally

Mudlet will now open maximized if you’ve closed it maximized

Mapper will now remember it’s checkboxes and panel status

For scripters:

new on connect and disconnect events

event handlers can now be inside tables, and it’s possible to register new events via API

print() is now available, works the same way as in Lua’s interpreter

searching in Mudlet is case-insensitive now

installPackage() and uninstallPackage(), along with downloadFile(), help you do automatic updates

… and more. For a complete list of changes, see the changelog available here.

We would like to thank everybody who made our 2.0 release happen – both in detailed feedback and problem reports, code contributions, wiki help, forums moderation and everything else. This is a client made by MUD players for MUD players – and for you, the community. Thank you!