Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 12:05 am

I have written an external help file viewer for CMUD. It is available in the CMUD Download area (direct link).

This is a simple EXE file contained within a ZIP archive. So you will need an UnZip program when you download it. Extract the CMUDHelp.exe file to the same location as your CMUD.EXE file.

There is no installer for this simple program. It will be added to the CMUD installer in the next release of CMUD. If you download the help viewer separately, then you need to extract it to the cmud.exe directory yourself and create your own desktop icon for it.

Once CMUDHelp.exe is in the same directory as CMUD, just run CMUDHelp.exe and it should load the help file and display it.

This program uses the same code as CMUD itself to display the help form. So as I add features to the Help system, both CMUD and the Help Viewer will get the same features.

The 1.0 version of the Help Viewer has a few new features that you'll see in the next version of CMUD:

Image maps work. For example, go to the Feature Reference, then Preferences, then User Interface. You can click on a tab in the image to jump to the relevant help topic.
When the help topics are filtered by a search, you can now still click on Related Topics or other links and still view the topic instead of getting a "topic not found" error.
Entering text into the Search box and then clicking the Search button should now work as expected. Pressing Tab or Enter from the Search box will also perform the search.
Fixed bug where expanding or collapsing a different help topic than the one selected (for example, scrolling the topic list and clicking a + button to expand another topic) no longer forces the topic list to scroll back down to the current topic
Clicking on topics in the Related Topics area should now work as expected.
Edit/Copy Link: copies the BBcode needed to post a link to the selected help topic to the clipboard. Paste this into a forum post to get the link to the topic
From the Edit menu you can select the What's New command. This will sort the topic list by the Last Updated timestamp and jump to the most recently modified topic at the top of this list. To return to the regular tree view of topics, select the What's New command again (it's a toggle).
If you right-click on the help topic tree, you will see a Sort by Last Updated and Default Sort commands. These can also be used to sort the topics by last updated time, but this right-click menu option doesn't change the current topic being viewed.
The topics that were updated during the last Get Updates operation are colored in Blue in the topic tree (no matter whether it's sorted by date or not)

Those are the main changes. As I said, all of these changes will also appear in the next version of CMUD.

If you find problems, just report them in this forum as you would report normal CMUD bugs. Since the code is shared between the help viewer and CMUD, any bug in the help viewer is also a bug in CMUD.

I hope you enjoy the new program and all it's new features!

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

Sounds great! Thanks for this.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

Downloaded and placed the .EXE inside "D:\Program Files\CMUD"
Ran it and saw

Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 4:45 am

Ahh, the standalone viewer doesn't yet update your existing help file to the newer format for that field. Delete your CMUDHELP.DB file in both your D:\Program Files\CMUD\Help and your My Documents\My Games\CMUD\Help directories, and then run the help viewer and click the Get Updates button.

Warning: Doing this will allow the Help Viewer to work, but will then cause an error in CMUD 1.24 if you try and view the help. Basically, you can only use one program or the other until the update for CMUD is released. The CMUD update will properly update the help database field structure.

Sorry I didn't think about this. Since my copy of CMUD already has the updated help database field structure, I didn't run into this problem. This probably makes the standalone Help Viewer less useful until the CMUD update is released.

Oh well.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

Did that and it's updating. Oddly every time I run it I can get updates on Pattern matching, some other topics (it flashes past too quickly) and #PUEBLO
Once I've got updates once it thinks everything's up to date until I restart cmudhelp, then it'll fatch the same updates once again

Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 5:59 pm

I'll take a look at that.

Actually, I've decided to remove the Help Viewer from the downloads page until the next version of CMUD is released. People are having too much trouble with the incompatibility between the two program's help database format for now.

We'll try this again after the next CMUD release.

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 10:26 pm

I was a big fan of this program, and hopefully not the only one. Any chance of it making a resurgence?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 4:51 pm

Yep, definitely. I've just been so busy with CMUD bug fixes. Now that the help system is stable, it shouldn't be a problem. I just need to write an installer script for it (which takes a different mind-set than bug fixes ;)

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 9:51 pm

I updated the Help Viewer and have put it back into the Download area (in the CMUD files section). Still just a *.ZIP archive with no installer. Just extract it to the same directory that has your CMUD.EXE files. Should work fine with CMUD 1.26 or later.

Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 1:23 pm

We'll need another update to this to accomodate the SQL Lite dll name change.

Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 7:14 pm

True. I'll add that to my list. Right now just make a copy of the SQLITE.DLL and call it SQLITE28.DLL. If you have both files in your CMUD directory, then both CMUD and the Help Viewer should work.

Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 7:31 pm

I did that, but that didn't work. I think that's because I tried to a get update the first time it errored out (i.e. before I copied and renamed the dll). Now when I start it's still blank. I do a get update and it pulls down data but errors with message saying