Help Popup Module for Mudlet

TetchtaTetchta The Innocent
edited February 2022 in Tech Talk
Hey guys,

One of my favorite, and I mean favorite features of Nexus is that, if you look up a help file, it pops up in its own separate window. this makes reading files a snap. Instead of painfully scrolling up while bashing to try and read, you can literally just have a liddle window that overlays over everything and can be moved around at your convenience.

When I first started getting into coding, I really wanted to emulate this feature, but it turns out it's surprisingly tricky to make work. Instead of piping help text into the GMCP table, Nexus instead uses a proprietary GMCP flag to remove the page length limits on generic help files, and then individually copy-pastes each line in the help file into the window and then deletes it from your screen. It's a pain, and a bit goofy, but it works. I gave up on that project then, but came back to it now that I'm better at coding. A year later, I'm like, "Hey, I'm just dangerous enough to copy multiple lines and delete them." And mostly that's because I already had the code in my system to do that, because I shamelessly stole it verbatim from @Lin.

Anyway, if you want it, here it is, a help popup window that's very similar to Nexus. It's actually better in some ways--mainly in that, since it's a UserWindow in Mudlet, you can actually move it all the way off your mudlet main window and completely out of the way. It works with MXP clickables, and I think I got all of the bugs out:


There are a few settings you might want to tweak in the help_grabber script, mainly setBackgroundColor() setting if you have a color other than black as your background (it uses RGBA format), and setWindowWrap() if you find you want it to be narrower or wider to your tastes.


Other than that, I think this should be plug-and-play with any system out there, providing the system in question isn't already scraping command strings for help messages.

ArchelausLinMazzionZeheiaValorieGavramelShaianNipsy

Comments

  • TiurTiur Producer
    This is pretty cool, thank you for making it and sharing.
    Tetchta
  • Only problem I'm finding is once I help something, even after closing the window, all commands get sent to that new popup window. That's probably on me though. Looking into it.
  • TetchtaTetchta The Innocent
    yeah don't install this version on your system. You can fix it by finding the Help Footer trigger and then adding a "prompt" trigger/pattern to it, which is what I shoulda done the first time. I haven't had the time to upload a properly fixed version.




    Ayastia
  • NipsyNipsy Setting fire to Aeryx's mine
    This is awesome Tet. Thanks for sharing!
  • TetchtaTetchta The Innocent
    Uploaded a new version, it should work with all prompts now.

    Ayastia
  • Is this still available? The link above downloads an invalid folder.
  • I whined at TPB Ealric until he made me a replacement for this with help from Lisa on the Mudlet Discord. Attached! Works for help, chelp, ghelp.

    Note: You need a prompt, doesn't matter what's in it.
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