4.14 – a statue of a giraffe in front of a waterfall

AI is all the hype these days, so we asked what AI thought of Mudlet’s logo… apparently it is a statue of a giraffe in front of a waterfall. That’s not relevant to today’s release, but we thought you’d be interested in knowing this! Features in this update include a dark theme toggle, addition of MUME, Discord button to open the game’s server, and additional text wait time is now adjustable!

Dark theme toggle

edru2 added a dark theme to Mudlet! You can how select it in settings:

vadi2 followed the option up with a feature to follow your system setting and to also update your editor theme.

MUME

Middle Earth makes its way into Mudlet, welcome!

Multi-Users in Middle-earth (MUME) is a highly competitive world PvP DikuMUD, set in J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional world of Middle-earth, as described in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, where players may choose to join the epic war between the forces of Sauron and the armies of the Free peoples. In MUME players can explore, role-play, acquire achievements, and complete quests across many challenging locations across Middle-earth such as Lothlórien, the Shire, Bree, Rivendell, Goblin-town, Mirkwood, Dol Guldur, and the Mines of Moria. The game is completely at no cost to play and has been continually enhanced since its inception in the fall of 1991.

Discord button customisation

atari2006tim worked on the Discord button! Games can now tell Mudlet what their Discord invite is, and once they do so – Mudlet will show a button that’ll take the player to straight to the game’s Discord server 😃

Adjustable text wait timer

SlySven has done work on the text wait timer for games that lack Telnet GA or EOR signalling and made it configurable in settings. By default this timer was 0.3s, which you can now lower or increase as needed.

Why do we even need to have it? Well because not all games are telling Mudlet when they are done sending all text. That’s exactly the meaning of GA. Games that do implement GA have no timer at all. Thus the better solution is, of course, to encourage games to implement GA!

Lowering the timer runs the risk that not all text will be received from the game before showing it on screen, which could ‘break’ your triggers for that particular line. Increasing the delay reduces that risk, but then of course the experience is compromised.

Lua, Rainforest tests

Quality is an important area of Mudlet, and alongside the newly created QA team, vadi2 has worked on automating Mudlet to run our Lua tests! Now whenever an improvement is done to our Lua functions, a copy of Mudlet is launched automatically in the cloud and all existing Lua tests are run to ensure nothing breaks. This also gives a safety net to anyone working on Mudlet that should they break something on accident, it’ll get caught. That said, the safety net needs to be expanded to cover all tests – so we’d love for volunteers to help strengthen it.

That’s not all on the quality story, either! vadi2 also worked on setting up visual tests that ensure the Mudlet interface itself – one you see and play with – is tested. Similar to Lua tests, automation launches Mudlet in the cloud and follows a script to click around on buttons and observe that they do what they ought to do. It is relatively intuitive to setup these tests, and we’d also love it if we had more volunteers to help flesh them out:

📢 Vote on best improvement

We announced earlier a trial to pay a bit of money for the top 3 most popular PRs – well it’s kicking in with this release! Head over to the form to vote on your favourite improvement in this update.

Anyone who submits an improvement to Mudlet is eligible for a spot on the poll. That said, this is still an experiment we’re trying out so we might change or scrap it in the future if it doesn’t work out.

Credits

Thanks to all coders who made this release happen! atari2600tim, Damian Monogue, Kebap, Manuel Wegmann, Mike Conley, mudlet-machine-account, Nils Schimmelmann, Piotr, Slobodan Terzić, Stephen Lyons, Tim Johnson, Vadim Peretokin, and 噢哎哟喂.

Thanks to all translators dutifully carrying the flags: Alan Sneath (alsneath), ifelse, Kamil Tunkiewicz (zeddicus), Leris, Marco “M0lid3us” Tironi (wiploo), vadi2, and vingi.

Changelog

There’s a lot of improvements in this Mudlet update besides the top 5 listed above, so dig into the changelog below to find goodies:

🆕 added

--mirror option for logging output to console
option to show errors view from the toolbar
customization of Discord button using invite URL from GMCP or Lua
dark theme toggle to preferences
events when a speedwalk() is stopped, paused, or finishes (reaches the end)
IDManager and named tempTimers/event handlers from script
option for secure IRC connections
resetDiscordData() function
what color formats are acceptable in places it is missing in Geyser ldoc comments
clear error console functionality
Custom right click menu items for command lines
Gmod busted tests
Save/Load map as .json from preferences dialog

✨ improved

map context item names
[CodeFactor] eliminate (some of) our C style casts
allow wait for more network packets to be adjusted
cleanup room_exits.ui file
Clear edit forms for deleted items
Create map / Load map dialog will be again present for empty map
Create room at right-click position
Do not trim whitespaces in tab completion
icons not coloured status text for normal exits in exits dialog
icons not coloured status text for special exits in exits dialog
only enable IRE driver GA bugfix for IRE games (unnnecessary newlines with GA)
Properly announce Discord failing on length 1 texts
shorten welcome message for new aliases & triggers
simplify dlgRoomExits() invocation
sync mpackage modules
Unregister fonts upon package/module uninstall
update bundled NotoColorEmoji font
use constants to index into special exit columns in dlgRoomExits

🔨 fixed

CodeQL warnings
copy2decho() on empty lines
copy2decho, copy2html to work for all international text
Discord logo dimensions on profiles screen
Export Triggers title bar to be more generic
Adjust height of command box when cycle through history
cleanup: remove some warnings in uses of QKeySequence
correct a missing override that showed up during CI
disable more controls in preferences when there is no host
don’t show jibberish when Adjustable Container title bar is too short + add position as option for setTitle
eliminate a load of warnings about missing-field-initializers
Lua functions for tempKey and tempAlias work again
modules no longer get emptied if reloaded during saveProfile()
only provide NAWS information from main console
remove spaces in initializer brackets
remove stray debug messages
repair prevent all controls from being hidden feature
settings button will be available again before you connect to a profile
try and make connectExitStub(…) work as per the API
update default Zombiemud port
update PCRE download source to one that still exists

Infrastructure

add ‘Chancel’ as an allowed codespell – it’s an area in Lusternia
Add ‘nd’ as an allowed word
add knowledge for debug symbols in builds
added label for port in Github Codespaces
close out p tag in text label
danger checks in JS
disable Windows builds in GHA
fix Windows changelog generation now that we have quotes
fixed autoupdate workflows to trigger checks
git ignore 3rdparty boost and cocoapods
give a danger-friendly PR title to Crowdin updates
Improve ptb changelog generation
make sure to fail Windows builds in case the packaging step failed
More adjustments to the changelog styling
read error log correctly from Windows installer tool
remove unrendered emoji characters from changelog script
remove unused mUserDefinedName in code
update appveyor signing password
updated Lua tests documentation
Lua tests to run in CI automatically

4.14.1 fixes tab characters showing up in the code editor.

4.14 – a statue of a giraffe in front of a waterfall — IT