Advanced Features

Moving Stuff

The MUD also contains many objects that you can pick up, drop, or give to other people. To pick up an object that is sitting in a room or location, use take. For example, to pick up an apple, do:

take apple

To give an object you are holding to somone else (you can see what you are holding with look me), use the give command. For example, to give the apple to Ted, do:

give apple to ted

You can drop or get rid of objects with the drop command. For example, to drop a banana:

drop banana

This becomes more interesting if you become a programmer and can create objects to give to other people.

Pasting Large Amounts of Text

If you have a large amount of text that you want to share with everyone, for example, your latest poetry, you can do that with the @paste command. Just run the @paste command by itself, and you will get prompted to enter the text. Then, you can copy and paste the text however you normally write on the mud. You don't need to use " or : here. Lastly, you need to enter a period (.) all alone on one line. This tells the MUD that you are done entering this huge amount of text.

So, to paste our favorite poem, do the following:

@paste

The following will appear:

[Type lines of input; use `.' to end or `@abort' to abort the command.]

Paste your text in, press enter to send it, and then finish by typing a single period and pressing enter. It will appear like this on everyone's screen:

--------------------------------- Q*Bert ----------------------------------
My Favorite Poem, by Alan

Roses are red
Violets are blue
I luv muds
and so do you
-------------------------- Q*Bert stops pasting ---------------------------

In addition, you can also paste privately to a single person. It is very similar, except the command is @pasteto. To paste something to DesertDave, do: @pasteto desertdave. The method used to paste text in is the same as for the normal @paste statement.

Timestamps

If you want to know when things happened on the MUD, there is a method to get the current time stamped onto your MUD screen. This isn't really useful when you're sitting at the MUD, but if you idle for a long time, and come back, it might help. Also, for the people that stay connected all the time and have many days (or weeks) of scrollback, this is good for historical purposes. :) To set a timestamp for N minutes, do the following:

@misc-options tstamp N

This will display the time every N minutes if something is going on. It is smart and will not timestamp when nothing is going on, which would be pointless. You can change what the time looks like, for example, if you prefer it to say "Minute 15 after the hour 2" instead of 2:15, you can do that. Refer to help tstamp for information on that. For reference, here are the shortcuts you can use in your timestamp format:


$H -> hour #. $M -> min #. $S -> second #. 24-hour format, fixed width.
$h, $m, $s same x/c have not-fixed format. 00:03:24 vs. 0:3:24
$O/$o -> numeric hour in 12-hour format.
$D -> long day name. $d -> short day name.
$N -> long month name. $n -> short month name.
$Y -> long year # (e.g. '1991'). $y -> short year # (e.g. '91')
$Z -> the time zone
$P/$p -> AM/PM, or am/pm.
$T -> date number. $t -> date number with no extra whitespace etc.
$1 -> Month in fixed-width numeric format (01-12)
$2 -> Month in nonfixed numeric format (1-12)
$3 -> Date in fixed-width format, 0-fill
$$ -> $.

MOO Mail

Believe it or not, the MUD has its own simple email system. This is mostly good for a few mailing lists that are on the MUD. To check your moo-mail, do: @nn. The following mailing lists exist:

Neil - This is a place to send any humorous things that Neil says. And he says a lot.
qooc - This stands for "Quote Out of Context", and is the place to send any quotes that, taken out of context, are humorous. Read a few of the existing ones, and you'll get the idea.

To subscribe to a list, use the @subscribe command. For example, to subscribe to the Neil list, do:

@subscribe neil with notification

The with notification suffix indicates that you want to know immediately when something has been sent to the list. You can then use @nn to read the new mail.

Sending mail is a little harder. There are two ways, @send and @qsend.

Type @send *neil to send to the neil list, for example. It will prompt for a subject and then let you type in the message. This will initially let you type in the message with the in-MOO editor, which isn't too easy to use. You have to prefix all lines with double quotes (") and then type send at the end to finish it.

If you use emacs, then you probably want to do: @edit-options +local. This will let you do the editing in an emacs buffer before sending. Then, as it says itself when letting you edit a message:

Use ^C^S to send, ^C^C to send and destroy, ^C^] to abort...

Using @qsend is a little easier, as it is all contained on one line. The format is:

@qsend *neil subj="<subject>" messagemessagemessage...

Setting Up to do Programming

Unfortunately, one of the best ways to do programming is by connecting with emacs and using emacs to program. But, there are probably many MOO/MUD clients that have some sort of way to make programming easier. The first thing to do is:

@edit-options +local

to tell the MUD that you want all editing to be done locally (in emacs). Besides that, it's probably best to refer to the MOO programming references listed on the first page.

Adding Features

@features @addfeature Coming soon...