Advanced Tutorial

Actions, Dialog, Colors

Interacting with others within the MUSH is similar to F-List in some ways, different in others. The two most basic interactions, chatting and emoting, are easy enough: the say command (alias ", ') lets you speak as your character, and the emote command (alias /me, :) lets you perform an action.

Typing:

say hello
'hello
"hello

Will result in:

Emille says, "hello"

Typing:

emote stands up
/me stands up
:stands up

Will result in:

Emille stands up

Notice that the MUD will add some punctuation and formatting, but you’ll most likely want to include your own.

If you want to include dialog within an action, it will be easier to read if you change its color to the one used for dialog. You can do this manually with a pipe tag. |b will change text after it to blue, |m will do the same in magenta.

So a line within an action might look like,

:stands up, waving. "Hello!", she beckons you over.

Or, even better:

:stands up, waving.|b "Hello!"|m, she beckons you over.

MUSHclient: Triggers

MUSHclient’s triggers will alert you whenever text you’ve defined is detected, much like F-Chat’s ping system, but much more customizable.
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The trigger editor can be accessed from the larger configuration menu (alt+enter), under ‘Triggers’. To edit a new one, click 'Add…"

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These are the relevant areas for our use-case.

  • Trigger: the field where you’ll input your trigger phrase, as a regex expression.
  • Match: specifies which colors to restrict the matching to, if any. For FurhausMUSH, magenta is for actions, blue is for dialog, and cyan is for public-channel messages.
  • Enable: Make sure this is on!
  • Regular Expression: Tick this to use a regular expression rather than a simple string.
  • Sound: Browse for a sound to use when the ping is triggered. MUSHclient doesn’t include any, but any short .wav file will do. A good example is Steam’s old message sound, which you can download here.
  • Label: A label to group triggers with. Any triggers with the same label will automatically become a group in the main configuration window’s trigger view.

To build your own custom trigger, simply mix a regex expression and a color.

^.+\bNAME\b.*$

Will ping on actions or dialog that mentions your name, depending on whether you specify Blue or Magenta.

^(?!NAME ).*$

Color Magenta = Will ping on all actions that you didn't send.

^(?!You ).*$

Color Blue = Will ping on all dialog that you didn't send.

^.+\b(?<!\[Public\] )NAME\b.*$

Color Cyan = Will ping on all public channel messages that include your name.

Of course, triggers are more flexible than simply alerting you to when people mention your name. You could use it to be notified when shifts are open, vending machines update, and much more. Experiment!