,__ __ ___ /| | | | / (_) | | | __ __ __| \__ | | | / \_/ \_/ | / | | |_/\__/ \__/ \_/|_/\___/ Installation, instructions and general waffle ******************************************************* MoodE stands for 'MUSHcode object orientated development Environment', which is a fairly long winded way of saying that it is a utility to help you write MUSHcode. This file contains information on installing MoodE. The real 'user instructions' are held within MoodE's built in help system. INDEX 1. About MoodE, and the author 2. Installing MoodE, and system requirements 3. Known bugs, Todo list, Plans 4. Getting in touch 5. Merci! 6. Boring license stuff 1. About MoodE, and the author ------------------------------ I'll start with myself. I began mudding some time in 1994, and bounced around an assortment of games, eventually settling on Ragnarok, Battlestar Galactic and Dune II, amongst other places. After a year and a half or so, I left most of the games I was on to run my own - Babylon 5. After about a year, I left this project too, and entered a 'retirement' phase, hanging out socially on one or two games, while heading the development team of my latest online project, Caffeine. I came 'out of retirement' in 1997 when Javelin, maintainer of PennMUSH invited me to join his staff on Riverworld (a great game which sadly folded, due to lack of interest), and now I hang out on M*U*S*H (pennmush.org 4201), under my real name. Why did I write MoodE? Good question, especially if you consider that I haven't seriously MUSHcoded in over a year. I always found it hard going on the eyes, and stressful writing MUSHcode with only TinyFugue and my trusty FugueEdit. A couple of utilities did (and still do) exist to make life a little easier by formatting and compacting code to let you work on it offline in a sane fashion, but for GUI orientated folks (and even non-GUI orientated folks), these utilities can be a little annoying to use. MoodE is designed to build a series of MUSHcoding tools into a compact, extensible and above all easy to use GUI. MoodE stands for MUSHcode object orientate development Environment, and eventually I hope that it will contain mechanisms to edit code from several attributes and objects in tandem, using notation which is also identical to one of a number of modern programming languages. I also intend for it to contain optimization tools, and utilities to convert code between various kinds of game - PennMUSH, TinyMUSH, TinyMUX, and so forth, by correcting minor incompatibilities between them. 2. Installing MoodE, and system requirements -------------------------------------------- You've already unpacked MoodE if you're reading this, I suppose, but I'll mention how to do so anyway, since you may be reading this on the WWW. MoodE is supplied in only one format, tarred and gzipped. Why? Because I run in a Linux environment, and this is the easiest option available to me. To my knowledge, it should be possible to unpack this kind of file on any platform. In UNIX, 'tar zxf moode.tar.gz' will work if you have GNU tar, otherwise you may need to do 'gunzip moode.tar.gz ; cat moode.tar | tar xf', or something similar. Under Windows (various flavours), 'WinZip' from http://www.winzip.com should be able to cope with the task of unpackaging tar/gzipped files. Okay, so you've unpacked MoodE, and have a nice directory containing this file, ChangeLog.txt, MoodE.class and StringUtils.class. The ChangeLog file is provided for entertainment value, and so that once you make a suggestion to me, you can watch and see what I really do about it, this file has an obvious informative value, and the other two are Java class files. StringUtils is a set of string manipulation routines that MoodE uses (and which are easier to maintain in their own file), while the other .class is MoodE itself. Although MoodE is written in Java, you cannot run it in a web-browser; it is a Java application, rather than a Java applet. This means that you will require *either* the Java Development Kit, or the Java Runtime Environment (JDK and JRE respectively). If you don't have either, and are not interested in Java programming, you should find, download and install a relevant version of the JRE for your system, it is smaller, and has everything you need to run Java. Would-be developers should install the larger JDK, which also contains things such as the Java compiler, 'javac'. Windows users should be able to find the JRE through http://www.download.com, or another suitable search site. Users of Linux can find the latest at ftp://lagrange.la.asu.edu/pub/Linux_jdk (I am not sure about the availability of JRE for Linux). If you use a different system, hop over to http://java.sun.com, and try to hunt down the JRE which you require. ** MoodE was written using JDK 1.1.5, and may not function properly with a lower version. It almost certainly WILL NOT work with JDK 1.0.X ** Other than that, MoodE uses very little diskspace, and should run on almost any system. Java applications do tend to be quite memory hungry, and can use a fair bit of CPU - this is something I can't really help. Bat and Pif files for Windows 95 are supplied in the MoodE distribution to make life a little easier for Win32 users, thanks to Halatir@M*U*S*H who created these. As of version 1.1.0, MoodE also offers an auto-update facility. This will pop up whenever MoodE is booted and an active internet link is present, and check for a new version. If none exists, MoodE will run normally, otherwise you will be asked to Cancel, View the ChangeLog or Update. The first two are self explanatory, but if you choose to Update, MoodE will move itself to ./backup/ and then copy down the new files. After this, it will attempt to restart itself, but, if this malfunctions, you will have to restart the application manually. For what it's worth, the more or less platform independant command to run MoodE appears to be 'jre -cp . MoodE' (without the quotes, and from the directory you unpacked MoodE in). 3. Known bugs, Todo list, Plans ------------------------------- Bugs will be listed here when reported, and when unfixed by a new release. Currently the only known bugs (not fixed in this release) are: None at this point in time * Some information boxes have flashing cursors. * Buttons on information boxes do not 'grab' you. Todo list.. well, this fits with plans. Plans are always grand, but more immediately (in no particular order): * Syntax highlighting. * Some object orientated stuff (for ufun() etc). * A utility to grep actual MUSH helpfiles. 4. Getting in touch ------------------- You can reach the author at: neddy@itl.net If you wish to report a bug, please include full details of what happened, what you think should have happened, the dump output (if any appears), and the MUSHcode which you were working on (and what were you doing to it?). Feel free to drop me a line to say hi, too! If there is enough demand, a MoodE mailing list may appear in the future. 5. Merci! --------- Many thanks to: Halatir@M*U*S*H for the '95 bat/pif files, and a huge amount of help debugging the dashed thing. Trispis@M*U*S*H for an equally huge amount of help, and personal suffering at the hands of Windows 95 (and Internet Exploder), doing the same. Javelin@M*U*S*H for the handy idea of making it fully MPP compliant in some way, which in turn spawned the 'mode' and ultimately 'configurable notation' concepts. 6. Boring license stuff ----------------------- MoodE is not freeware, nor is it shareware. I retain full copyright over my work, and do not yet wish to release the sourcecode. MoodE may go in a number of directions in the near future, and it will most likely appear under the GPL once a few more features have been added. Until then, it is 'Niceware'. If you use MoodE, you must make an attempt to be nice to a newbie whenever the opportunity presents itself! Happy MUSHing, -Matt Chatterley http://user.itl.net/~neddy/ "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.." -John Lennon (Imagine)