Greetings, my friends, it has been a while. A long time ago I warned you about how foolish everyone was being. I branded into your beating hearts the dream of one day, maybe even Soon(tm), boosting the MUD experience to more than just a crappy wall of text. And I broke my manifesto into 3 parts... and then I never published the 3rd. Oops, my bad.

"Holy balls!" I hear you say. "Fiendish hasn't written an article in...wait...what's he talking about?"
 

I understand, mis compañeros, 2 years is a really long time. You've got more important things to worry about like dumping the optimal amount of trains into instincts or, if you're Canadian, smashing windows and setting cars on fire (lol). So I'll forgive you JUST THIS ONCE if you don't know what I'm talking about.

GO READ NOW parts 1 and 2 (of some number) of my original manifesto here:

Part 1 (http://www.gaardian.com/page.php?issueid=26&articleid=210)

Part 2 (http://www.gaardian.com/page.php?issueid=27&articleid=216)

So when we last left our intrepid hero (hey, that's me!) I was JUST about to spill the beans and uncover the lost treasures of the Sierra Madre, the golden city of El Dorado, the holy grail, the ark of the...ok, ok. So I was just about to lift the veil on the deep dark secrets of how to make the world a shiny, happy place. I wrote:

"Next time I'll demonstrate how to do it wrong and how to do it right. Hint: The current Aardwolf MUSHclient package does it wrong. Sorry, but it's true. With some large amount of luck maybe that will change before the next edition is published."

And then I never published again.

And now I'm back, and unfortunately I've completely forgotten what I was going to write. I do not remember anything about why the then current (now obsolete) Aardwolf MUSHclient package was bad. Obviously it wasn't in great shape after a while, since I ended up strangling Lasher in his pajamas (or was it with his pajamas?) and taking over the project myself because 2 years had passed without updates to it, but I don't have any notes on why it wasn't any good. Luckily, since I'm the one making the damned thing now, I can just say that the new MUSHclient package is perfect and surely exactly what I meant back in 2009! Surely! I'm glad I had the foresight back then to predict that I would just solve the problem by solving the problem. So let's just call this one problem solved. For now. At least until I make it even better. Then you can look back at the current version and exclaim profusely how bad it was...uhh...is...uhh...will have been.

So what am I going to write about now? Well I thought I'd try to answer a few questions that many people seem to have about the Aardwolf MUSHclient Package.

Q: When will the package be finished?

A: Hahahaha. Never. Software projects never get finished; they only get released (or abandoned). And then bugs are fixed and features are added and they get released again. And again. And so on. There will always be fifty cool new features that could be added. And each of those features will likely introduce small bugs, because hey nobody's perfect. But eventually I'll decide that I've had enough of the project and decide to hand development and maintenance over to someone else. And the project will still not be finished. It will just keep getting better without getting done.

Q: Why are there so many bugs all the time?

A: Because you never report them to me. I've heard "I didn't tell you because I figured you already knew" or "I didn't think it was important" more times than I can count, and I can count pretty high. If you have the latest development snapshot and a particular bug hasn't been fixed yet, odds are great And then I never published again.that I don't know about it. And I can't fix things that I don't know about.

Q: Why doesn't the package have X feature?

A: There are three reasons why I haven't added a particular feature to the package. 1) Someone else has already done an admirable job of providing that feature. Don't ask me to add a spellup script, because Bast has already made one. I use it. It's amazing. 2) I tend to code in spurts. One day I may add several new features and fix a bunch of bugs, the next week I may decide that I'd rather go biking or hang out with friends at the pub. This means I don't always get to things right away. So maybe I plan to add it in the future, but just haven't added it yet. 3) Sometimes I just decide that I don't think that a particular feature is in the game's best interest. The biggest problem with making advanced scripts is that it seriously encourages botting on a massive scale. Not only do I not want to be responsible for that, but I want a giant heavy wall between what I make and bot-territory. I'm just not interested in toeing that line. If it were at all possible (and if I were in charge), I'd make it so that everyone had to do global quests without any aliases or triggers at all. But I can't do that. When things like global quests become less insanely bottable, then we can talk again.

Q: About Bast's stuff. It's really great, why isn't it just made part of the official package?

A: I tend to agree for the most part about how great it is. I use his spellup plugin, for example. It does just about everything I could imagine wanting a spellup plugin to do. The problem is two-fold. 1) As much as I like using the product of his work, I don't like his coding style. Part of the goal that Lasher and I had when talking about putting the package together was that I would try to keep plugins self-contained for the most part. This is why a lot of the included plugins have duplicated code; so that you can look at any of them and see a complete working example of a good plugin in a single file without having to track through ten other files of subcomponents to figure out how things work. I try to only violate this principle when absolutely necessary. 2) I don't want to be responsible for maintaining (and getting bug reports for) a large block of code that isn't mine when he's already put so much effort into making it super easy to drop in place.

Q: Why is the upgrading process so complicated?

A: Mostly because a lot of the things that I update when making the package better are also things that other people customize on their own. Your own private aliases are stored in the same file that controls, for example, what plugins get loaded. And when I create great new plugins that you need to have loaded, I need a way of making sure that you get them while still being able to keep your old aliases and triggers. That complicates things.

Q: Someone told me to type "tags off" and now my map doesn't work. Fix it?

A: Anyone who tells you to type "tags off" deserves a punch in the face, except for possibly someone like Abelinc who actually has a clue and understands the rare situation when it's useful. 99 times out of 100, if someone tells you to turn off all tags they aren't just wrong, they're stupid and ignorant. And you don't want to take advice from stupid, ignorant people. It's the equivalent of nuking an entire city from orbit in order to get rid of a mosquito. Will it solve that immediate problem? Yes. But it will cause you many more problems.

Q: Why do YOU get to make the officially endorsed client for the game?

A: Mostly because I can, and I did, and Lasher trusts me more than he trusts you to be able to do this sort of thing. Actually, I can't guarantee that last part.