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Novice Joined: 03 Sep 2004 Posts: 34

I have done basic programming many many years ago, on turbo pastel. Which as far as i know i obselete. For me to learn how to program using cmud what would be a good language to learn.

For a person that does not understand most of the terms what language is most compatable to Cmud?

thanks

Magician Joined: 29 Nov 2005 Posts: 482

read the cmud manual.. its not exactly a definitative programming syntax i suppose.

Isn't It Turbo Pascal?

In any case. Look through many of the examples we have posted around the forums and review the cmud manual and i think you will be fine. Just take it step by step. I think you will be fine.

Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 3:10 pm

Personally, I learnt CMUD by learning CMUD, and that'd be my suggestion. zMUD had a lot more weird syntax options than CMUD does, and that's where I learnt originally, but I still think that the way CMUD and mud clients in general implement things is easiest to learn by learning it, rather than something similar. To put it another way, it's like saying "I want to learn to program in Delphi. What should I learn?" - the answer's obviously going to be Delphi :P

The help files are a good place to start for the basics, and the references are obviously a source of plenty of info (though bear in mind that much of the CMUD help is out of date. Zugg's choosing to focus on bug squashing before documentation I think :) and just ask on the forums if you need any specific tips or problems solved. You could also try begging some scripts off someone, especially if you know someone who plays your MUD and uses zMUD or CMUD, and then see how they've put their stuff together.

EDIT: Simultaneous postin', baby. You and me. </Issac Hayes>

Novice Joined: 03 Sep 2004 Posts: 34

so cmud is a language on its own?

oh it was turbo pascel

Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 7:07 pm

And actually, CMUD and zMUD are written using Delphi, which is the fancy name for "Turbo Pascal for Windows". In other words, what started as Turbo Pascal is not Delphi (and the new version is actually called "Turbo Delphi"). So anyway, I know where you are coming from...I started with Turbo Pascal myself.

The original scripting language for zMUD came from an old MUD client called "TinTin" that was written for mainframes many years ago. There are still some versions of it floating around, including a Windows version. zMUD was written to be compatible with TinTin originally because a lot of MUD players (myself included) were using TinTin and wanted something compatible for our scripts on Windows.

Since then (1995) the zMUD scripting language evolved and many new features were added. CMUD started with the zMUD language, but then fixed a lot of the problems with zMUD scripting. So going from zMUD to CMUD is sort of like originally going from TinTin to zMUD.

As Fang mentioned, because CMUD fixes a lot of the problems in zMUD, it's a bit easier to learn CMUD scripting instead of zMUD. But you'll need to remember that these are SCRIPTING languages. So you can't really compared them to "compiled" languages like C, Pascal, etc. Writing scripts in CMUD is more like working with Perl, or Python, or even PHP.

Even though lots of languages share common features, each one has it's own syntax. For example, variables in Perl start with a $ character. In CMUD variables start with a @ character. So it's always going to take some time and effort to learn a new scripting language like CMUD.

As people have said, the best way to learn is to just start playing with it. Reading the help files is a good start, but that's sort of like just reading a text book. It's better if you are logged into a MUD (in a safe area) and just start trying different examples in the help file to see how stuff works.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

The place to start is probably these sections of the manual (or the on-line manual I link to): "Getting Started\Scripting" and the Introduction to... topics underneath that.

Then start experimenting as the need or feeling takes you.