MiniWindow Channel Capture

I'm attempting to capture text from one or two channels into a miniwindow and I'm not entirely sure how. I'm used to a different client and scripting in MUSHClient so far has really just confused me so I was hoping to get some help in how to create the window properly and how to capture the text to it. Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

Do you mean scrolling text, like chat, or fixed stuff, like the current room or map or something?

Scrolling text. I want to capture a chat channel to the miniwindow so that I can read it easier rather than trying to see through the long battle scroll I sometimes have when fighting.

This post describes something similar, the only problem being you can't scroll back:

Is there a way to make it so you can scroll it back? Also, I don't really understand this plugin. I've tried to edit it to suit my needs but I don't think I'm doing it right. Sorry about this, I've only ever done basic things with triggers and this client is confusing me a bit.

Nevermind, I found another page on here and that script seems to work perfectly. Sorry to have bothered you with this.

I am still quite interested in that idea of having backscrolling in a text-only miniwindow.

I think someone had a library that implemented those, but am not quite sure.

Yeah, I just found it. Thanks.

Fiendish, you mind telling me how you managed to make it scroll then? I haven't figured it out as of yet.

Sure, but it's easier to start with a demonstration.

Take a look at ...
http://code.google.com/p/aardwolfclientpackage/source/browse/trunk/Aardwolf_Chat_Capture_mw.xml

Keep in mind that it's customized for Aardwolf, relies on the latest movewindow.lua file that isn't yet in the installer (I think it will be in 4.52) but can be gotten from the git repository, and is very much a work in progress.
I still have to fill in the ScrollerMoveCallback function, which deals with actually grabbing the scrollbar shuttle, and am going to work on cleaning it up a bit. The original implementation that I took ideas from is pretty sloppy now that I've spent some time looking at it. But I've got ideas in mind already. Just haven't gotten to writing them down and uploading them. (The shuttle is what I'm calling that block that goes up and down along the scrollbar when you scroll. Does it have a proper name?)
Also, I'd eventually like to be able to grab mousewheel events and use them for scrolling too, but MUSHclient doesn't yet support that.

Features included in this channel capture are as follows:
miniwindow-based
10,000 line backscroll history
message timestamps
optional echo in main window
scroll bar with up/down scroll buttons that indicates amount of scrollback relative to the current amount visible via the shuttle size.
drag bar across the top for re-positioning
mouse-driven resizing tab so you can resize the window during use.
Text dynamically re-flows and the scrollbar shuttle resizes itself as you resize the window. (The text-reflow is currently quite inefficient, but the performance is only really an issue with a lot of scroll history)

If you have specific questions about what's going on, I'm happy to answer. Though if you wait until I'm finished, or if someone else wants to solve the above issues before I get to it, I'm sure I or someone else could help you repurpose the result for your MUD.

Edit: I finished the ScrollerMoveCallback stuff.
So now the feature list includes scrolling up and down by grabbing the shuttle.

Scrollbar "thumb".

Looks great! Couple of suggestions:

• Click on a line to select or copy it (copying messages is something you do quite often)
• RH click or something to select or copy all (or maybe RH click for a menu, including configure, select all, omit timestamps etc.)

And maybe make the timestamp grayer (like in the older chat window). It sort of hits you in the eye.

And have an option to omit the original from the main window (oh I see that is in the plugin as an alias). But hey, if we are doing GUI, may as well have a menu. :-)

All very cool suggestions. I'll add them in the next few updates.

If you resize, and push the mouse too far to the left (ie. past the top left corner, in a NW direction) then it loses the correct synchronization with the resize corner.

I'm attempting to adapt your chat script to fit my mudding needs and am having trouble understanding your triggers. It is quite different from your mud. The main channel is OOC and looks like this:

Gheshin OOCs: 'Hm'
You OOC: 'Hm'
[OOC]: You sigh.

If you could just tell me how to get at least one of them working properly with your script I'm sure I could figure the rest out myself, but I've tried what seems to be 50 different variations on triggers in the file and can't manage to make it work.

Doh! You know I had that on my list of things to deal with and then I forgot. Thanks for catching it.

Edit: fixed now.

I think the problem you're having is that the very first part of the chat() function in my script is specific for Aardwolf, because we have special tags on all channel output to make scripting easier.
You need to remove the block that says

That block strips everything out up to the first instance of "}", which is the last character of our channel tags. Since you don't have the tag, it strips everything. Which means you get left with nothing.

Then the following trigger, as an example, will capture "You OOC: blah blah blah"

I didn't figure that plain dim white would hit anyone in the eye, but I'm down with making it customizable. :)

Perfect, that is actually what the problem was. Thanks for helping me sort this out.

Edit: I don't know if this is for everyone as I run MUSHClient inside an emulator on Linux, but when I try to click the up/down of the scrollbar it gives me script errors. And when I try to click the shuttle, it closes the program altogether. Also, after resizing the window once, it refuses to let me do it again. Still a better plugin than what I was using before even with all that.

I'm using it in WINE right now in Ubuntu 9.10, and everything works fine for me. What errors are you seeing? One thing you probably need to do is get the newest copy of wait.lua from the repository and put it in your lua folder. That will prevent assertion errors when you click on the arrows without being connected to the MUD. Also make sure you have the latest copy of movewindow.lua from the repository. And when downloading files from the repository, make sure you get the RAW text files and not something filled with web markup.

The "requirement" of 4.40 should probably actually be 4.52 :D

- Fiendish

Oh, I forgot. Also, all the TelnetOption stuff is specific to Aardwolf. You should remove all those lines too and remove the following...

I updated wait.lua and movewindow.lua, and that fixed my problem with the shuttle causing a crash. The shuttle works perfectly now, I can resize whenever I like, but I still get assertion errors after clicking the up/down arrows. Are there other files I should update?

You need to tell me what error you're getting.

Down arrow:

Run-time error
Plugin: Chat_Capture_Miniwindow (called from world: WoN Imm)
Function/Sub: MouseDown called by Plugin Chat_Capture_Miniwindow
Reason: Executing plugin Chat_Capture_Miniwindow sub MouseDown
C:\Program Files\MUSHclient\lua\wait.lua:159: Timers not enabled
stack traceback:
[C]: in function 'assert'
C:\Program Files\MUSHclient\lua\wait.lua:159: in function 'make'
[string "Plugin"]:362: in function 'scrollbar'
[string "Plugin"]:403: in function <[string "Plugin"]:395>

Up arrow:

Run-time error
Plugin: Chat_Capture_Miniwindow (called from world: WoN Imm)
Function/Sub: MouseDown called by Plugin Chat_Capture_Miniwindow
Reason: Executing plugin Chat_Capture_Miniwindow sub MouseDown
C:\Program Files\MUSHclient\lua\wait.lua:159: Timers not enabled
stack traceback:
[C]: in function 'assert'
C:\Program Files\MUSHclient\lua\wait.lua:159: in function 'make'
[string "Plugin"]:362: in function 'scrollbar'
[string "Plugin"]:403: in function <[string "Plugin"]:395>

Make sure you have timers enabled. There's a checkbox in the window that pops up if you do Shift-Control-0.

Yes that works now. I should've tried that. Thanks.

By the way, there's a new version of my script available at:
http://code.google.com/p/aardwolfclientpackage/source/browse/trunk/Aardwolf_Chat_Capture_mw.xml
Don't forget to customize it for your MUD.

It now also requires this file to be put into your plugins folder. It deals with converting style runs to plain text with injected color codes. The contents of this file are customized for Aardwolf. In order to get color-code copying to work for your MUD you may have to change it.
http://aardwolfclientpackage.googlecode.com/files/aardwolf_colors.lua

Share and enjoy.

Totally new to this stuff, so I don't know how to fix this. I just downloaded and tried to run your plugin, but I get this error:


Error number: 0
Event: Run-time error
Description: cannot open D:\MUSHclient\worlds\plugins\telnet_options.lua: No such file or directory

stack traceback:

[C]: in function 'dofile'

[string "Plugin"]:44: in main chunk
Called by: Immediate execution


Any pros able to tell me what's wrong?

Nevermind I found the file. I blame it on lack of sleep!

Fiendish,

I just wanted to compliment you on your window design. It's really very nice indeed!

I play Achaea and I was able to get it up and capturing channels fairly easily. After working with it for a short time, I've already started thinking about other potential uses for such a scrollable window. That brings me to my question:

I'd like to have just the window functionality for general purpose use with other plugins (e.g. make it a library). I'd also like to contribute this back to the forum for others to use. How would you feel about this (of course giving you full credit for the window itself)?

Please let me know your thoughts.

-C

Sounds awesome. Do it. I wouldn't feel good about getting sole credit for something like this that has evolved from the work of others, though. Perhaps you'd could just give credit to the forums. :)

Tbh, I'd really like to see this stuff eventually make its way into the MUSHclient C++ code instead of being interpreted by Lua. Live text reflowing gets wicked slow if there is lots of text in the scrollback buffer. :( And srsly, we need the simplicity of spawning efficient resizable scrolling (real) windows that aren't hacks on top of a very base layer to get serious about development. The whole time I spent on the capture window my girlfriend was bugging me "Don't operating systems usually give that stuff (window dressing) to you already?" I was like, "Yeah, but here I only get pixels and text and mouse events!"

Speaking of such things...
Someone should request as a feature the ability to get the colors of captured text in a more efficient manner. Looping through loops of loops just because we don't have access to the color code for each character kinda sucks.

Even in the core MUSHclient code (the C++ stuff) I don't attempt to rewrap if you resize the output window. Recalculating wrap boundaries for potentially hundreds of thousands of lines is going to be slow, in any language.



Actually, storing style runs is more efficient than storing a "color code for each character". For one thing, each character has a foreground colour (R/G/B which is 3 bytes) plus a background colour (another 3 bytes) plus bold/underline etc. So if you stored it "per character" you would be using something like 8 bytes per character (the character itself, + 3 foreground, +3 background, +1 style).

Then even if I gave you that information, per character, you would then have to replace calling WindowText once (for a whole lot of consecutive bytes, all the same colour) with lots of calls, which itself is slower. Imagine, instead of a single call to display 80 bytes, all white on black, you had to do 80 calls! And then that defeats text kerning, where the text output routines might kern and anti-alias based on adjacent letters.

So you may end up with a slower result, and one in which the text looked worse.

Remember, the miniwindows were initially designed to give scripters what they didn't have in the text client, namely:

• Status bars
• Action buttons
• Pop-up windows (eg. inventory items)
• Images (eg. maps)
• Some text capability (eg. for labels)

Providing scrolling text, with text wrapping like a word processor, was not high on the design agenda.

And indeed Fiendish, you have demonstrated it can be done, and done very well. You don't have to wrap everything after all, just the visible parts. And the player probably won't resize every couple of seconds, so they may tolerate a brief delay if they do.

You don't get "only pixels" - you can draw whole lines of text, you can draw filled or outlined shapes, including Bezier curves, rectangles, ellipses etc.

You can draw images from .PNG files. You can flood-fill areas.

So it is under-stating the library a bit to say you only get pixels to work with.

I'm back to updating this script again.
There's a new version available that gets rid of the second window hack for resizing, now that we can nondestructively resize miniwindows. It also now relies on yet another file (feature creep!) available at
http://aardwolfclientpackage.googlecode.com/files/mw_theme_base.lua
This enables cross-plugin color theme unification as long as everyone plays nice. See the comment at the top of mw_theme_base.lua for details.

is anyone still on the forum that could help me edit this to my mud?

Sorry, those links are no longer valid. As I developed the Aardwolf MUSHclient package more, I (unfortunately for you) made it rather more difficult for someone else to move over to another MUD.

For the latest versions you'll want to see
http://code.google.com/p/aardwolfclientpackage/source/browse/trunk/MUSHclient/worlds/plugins/aard_channels_fiendish.xml
and
http://code.google.com/p/aardwolfclientpackage/source/browse/trunk/MUSHclient/worlds/plugins/aard_chat_echo.xml

For the version around at the time of that thread post, you'll want to look back into the repository history from before I changed the whole file structure...
http://code.google.com/p/aardwolfclientpackage/source/browse/trunk/Aardwolf_Chat_Capture_mw.xml?spec=svn65&r=41

I'm interested in this. Is it possible to upload a screenshot or something similar to get an impression how this window with some chats looks for you?

My mud provides all chat channels over ATCP. So i dont need extra triggers to catch them and now i think about getting a miniwindow with all chats. But i'm not much of a coder and i'll need a template to start with.

http://code.google.com/p/aardwolfclientpackage/wiki/ChannelCapture

This concept is really similar to what I want to try and come up with.

Instead of redirecting channel lines, I'm trying to allow the creation of many miniwindows for players you page.

But the most important part would be that each window needs to have a local var that remembers the name of the user I'm paging
For instance if I type "Pager Jonah" it would create a miniwindow for Jonah. I was hoping to make it so that each pager window would have its own input block, and when send pages through them it would send it with "page *" where * is the name of the person being paged.

Of course lines that pertain to the pager would need to be directed to it.

for instance,


And hopefully I can add the scroll up/down a page buttons too since page data is kind of important at times.

Is this doable? What do you think?

You can save details like the player name easily enough (eg. a table keyed by miniwindow ID).

But miniwindows don't support individual input areas. You could have a "reply" button (eg. square box) which pops up a text-edit dialog box, which you have to type into and dismiss.

Oh no! Without the use of a readily available input box it makes the use of a pager worthless, at least for what I wanted to use it for. I’ll try to research the Text edit dialog box thing to see if maybe I can manipulate it in some way to make it still do what I need it to do.
What I really need to do is find some time to just sit down with the help file and really dig into how things work. That’s how I taught myself how to use many other IS programs, like Excel, Monarch, InfoPath, etc.
While at work I have the next best thing – the forum FAQ and I believe I saw a glossary somewhere once or something like it.

I think it should be possible to build one from scratch. But it may not be easy.