Communication log

Every channel, in its own window, so a tell does not scroll away underneath a fight. The feed for this is one Mudlet's own supports list leaves out — the script asks for it explicitly, which is why the log fills where a stock profile's would stay dark.

Affects

The same rows the affects command prints, kept live: a duration under three turns red, and a permanent affect reads perm. Death link, singing and hiding are not affects and carry no duration, so they sit in a footer under the table rather than pretending to be rows in it.

The map

The pane knows where you are and changes with it. Indoors and in ordinary rooms it is Mudlet's own mapper, given a quadrant rather than a window you have to go looking for — and it fills in as you walk, a room at a time, working out which way you went from the exits the last room listed rather than from what you typed. Recall, a portal, a follow or a command that failed cannot send it the wrong way. Step onto the overworld and it becomes a painted map of Thera — the continent as a picture rather than a grid of letters, with your sprite standing on it and a cross on every way into an area. The info box names the country and the square you are on, Eastern Roads  14,10, rather than a room number nobody types; indoors it names the room and the area it is in. It stays one line, and it answers for whichever room the mouse is over, so you can read the name of a room you are not standing in.

The tile view is still there and lua solarPaintedMap() swaps between the two. It draws the same 25×15 grid of country the game draws, centred on you and running into the regions around you, in a tile font of the game's own: conifers for forest, waves for water, peaks for mountains, rounded swells for hills, courses of brick for a wall so you can see which way it runs, worn paving for the roads and laid planking for a pier or a boardwalk, its boards running across the way you walk — the roads turn corners and meet at junctions rather than breaking into a jagged run of bars and slashes. The sea comes ashore on a curve instead of down a staircase, because a square on the coast is drawn part water and part land rather than one or the other. You are a sprite standing on top of it all, filling exactly one square, and he turns to face the way you are walking — standing still keeps the way you last went rather than snapping back.

Take a ship out and the map goes with her. At the helm or on deck it draws from where the vessel is rather than where you are standing, and she takes your place on it — ship, submarine or airship, each with her own four facings, and each pointing the way she was last steered rather than the way she has drifted.

Your own hulls are drawn where you left them, on the square they are anchored on, so a ship you can step onto looks like one. Only yours — the map is not a fleet tracker and will not tell you where anybody else's is — and the one you are aboard is left off, because she is already the marker you are standing on.

Take a coach, a ferry or a turtle and the map does the travelling. It works its route a square at a time while you sit on it, so the country goes past under you rather than arriving as a wall of text, and the sprite on the map is the coach, the boat or the turtle you are on, pointed the way it is going.

Go underground and the picture goes with you. The caves are painted the way the continent is: ledges shaded so a shelf reads apart from the floor below it, falling water drawn in waves across the drop, bridges over the water, and a mouth where one chamber opens into the next. In a tunnel you are a silhouette rather than the figure you are out in the light, and where something crosses above you it is drawn over your marker — which is what tells you that you are under the span rather than on it. It is drawn as whatever is actually up there, so planking covers you over the water and stone covers you inside a castle.

Some things lying on the floor draw themselves on it. An item left where it lies shows on its own square, over the ground and under you, and it goes from the map the moment somebody picks it up — so a room can be read for what is still in it rather than looked at twice.

Where the ceiling comes down, you duck. Your sprite crouches for as long as the roof above your square is low, and stands again the moment it lifts — so you can see from the map alone whether it is safe to be where you are standing. Press a button and the map shows what it did: a bridge thrown across a gap is drawn where it now lies, and taken away again when it runs out.

Statistics and gauges

Your stats above four gauges: health, mana, movement and the enemy. Health changes colour as it falls — green from 67%, yellow from 34%, red below — and in a fight the enemy gauge shows the percentage as its label with your opponent's name inside the bar.

The game window has disappeared

Click the profile tab first — it should come back on its own. Since 1.7 the repair is registered against Mudlet's profile-focus event, so switching to a profile whose output has been squeezed shut is enough to give it back.

If it has not, type this in the input line:

lua solarHeal()

Mudlet writes the border into the profile config, so it survives a restart and outlives the script that set it. Disabling the script does not bring the window back and neither does reopening the profile.

lua setBorderRight(0) is the older advice and still works — it is the first thing solarHeal does. What it does not do is remove the cause, which is why the border kept coming back.

A panel has gone missing

lua solarReset() puts every panel back where it started. Worth knowing that the saved geometry is keyed on each panel's name, so the reset is also what you want after upgrading if a panel comes back in a strange place.

The panels are there and empty

That is GMCP being off. See before you install — Settings → General → Protocols.

The map is spades and shading, not tiles

The tile font registers when the package installs, and a font does not reach a profile that is already running. Restart the profile and it will be there.

To ask what it settled on:

lua solarMapCheck()

It reports whether the font is registered, and what size a square came out at. Until the restart it says not registered — and the map drawn without it is still a map, the same shades and spades the game draws over telnet.

The map pane looks empty

lua solarMapCheck() says why. It reports how many rooms your map holds, how many of them are hidden, and for the room you are standing in: its area and coordinates, how many rooms share that area, and how many of those are drawn. It then prints five of the rooms by number, broken out into where each one came from — worth pasting if you are reporting a map that looks wrong.

Mudlet's mapper shows one area at a time, which is the answer people miss — a map with hundreds of rooms in it still draws almost nothing if the room you are in is the only one in its own area, and the pane can be centred on an area you are not in, in which case every count reads correctly and the screen is still blank. The check names the area the pane is actually showing, on the Mudlet versions that can be asked.

If it reports a lot of hidden rooms, they are old overworld squares. Up to version 1.40 the painted map left one behind for every square walked, out of sight, and enough of them would stop the Academy map loading. Nothing collects them any more, and lua solarForgetOverworld() clears out a profile that already has them. It touches only hidden rooms that are overworld squares, so anything you hid yourself is left alone.

If the map is drawn on the wrong squares — rooms piled on top of one another, or a picture stacked on a picture — lua solarForgetOverworld(true) takes the squares you can see as well as the hidden ones, and the overworld redraws itself as you walk. Installing 1.67 does it for you; the command is there for putting a profile right without waiting for an update. Rooms you walked indoors are left alone either way.

The panels are the wrong size after resizing Mudlet

The reserved strip is measured once rather than recomputed on every resize, on purpose. Re-measure it by hand:

lua solarRefit()

Every event reports a nil value

Only possible on a hand install: the script's name has to match the function it contains, capital letter included. Mudlet fires a registered event by looking up a global function named after the script, so solarUI the script calls solarUI the function, and a mismatch reports attempt to call a nil value on every event and nothing else. The package cannot get this wrong; a hand install can.