Manual:Alias Engine
The aliases are the most basic way of automating the gameplay - you can use aliases to shorten the amount of typing you do. For example:
- Brew’o'Matic 6000 You’re walking around the epic dungeon of the Unholy Firedragon of Westersand, gathering roots in order to brew a potion and thus restore the growth of hair on Farmer Benedict’s bald head. Once you see a root, you need to:
- open the bag of tools
- get the sickle of damnation from the bag of tools
- cut the root of hair-growth
- clean the sickle of damnation of deadly root acid
- put the sickle of damnation in the bag of tools
- close the bag of tools
- open the magical bag of storing
- take the root
- put the root into the magical bag of storing
- close the magical of storing
- and once you’re done, do the exact same thing nine more times… trice a day.
Alternatively, you just create an alias that would do this all with a single command - for example, quest.
1.8 Making a simple alias
To get started, go click on the Aliases button in Mudlet, and then on the Add one. This will make a blank alias for you, which we’ll now fill in.
The Alias name field is optional - it’s mainly used for the alias listing that you see on the left as an easy way to distinguish all of the aliases. You can just name our alias test for now. The Pattern field is where you put your regex pattern to describe on what command that you are typing in the command line, your new alias will spring into action. Let’s say, we want our new alias to send the command "say hello" whenever we type "sh". The regex pattern would be "^sh$". Then we put "say hello" into the substitution field. After you have saved and activated your new alias "test", whenever you type "sh" Mudlet will not send "sh", but "say hello" instead. We call this substitution process alias expansion.
Mudlet uses Perl regular expression aliases. Regexes are a special way of matching patterns of words. For the beginners it is enough to think of them as a general way to specify the words itself and their placement within the line. For basic alias it is enough to know that the character ^ symbolizes the beginning of the line and the character $ symbolizes the end of the line. If you want to make an alias "tw" that sends the command "take weapon", you don’t have to care about placement or pattern matching in general. All you need to do is fill "tw" in the field called "Regex" and type "take weapon" in the field called "substitution". Then you need to save the new alias by clicking on the "Save" icon in the top middle. The symbol for unsaved items disappears and makes way for a little blue checkbox. If this box is checked the alias is active. If the blue box is empty, the alias is deactivated and will not work unless you press the "activate" toggle padlock icon. Now you are ready to go. Type "tw" in the command line and press the enter key. Mudlet will send "take weapon" to the MUD. Alias as basically, a feature to save you a bit of typing - much like buttons which will be described in detail in section two of the manual. To learn more about more complex aliases have a look at section 2 of the manual.