Mudlet 4.12 released

This release has some nice quality of life stuff in it, but a couple things specifically aimed at package developers and their users.

New Package Manager

One of the more obvious changes will be the package manager for installing and uninstall packages has changed a bit.

The new look is not only nicer, but it also paves the way for new functionality. You can include new metadata in your packages and also a custom icon for your package.

New Package Exporter

Along with the new package manager is a new package exporter to aid in getting your package together and adding the metadata you want to it. The new metadata is entirely optional, though.

The new metadata you can set are as follows:

• Author: Your name here.
• Icon: Image shown in the package list in the package manager. Scaled to 512px512px so something that size works best. The computer with horns in the Package Manager screenshot above
• Short Description: This will show up in the package manager to the right of the package name. “The recognition maker” in Package Manager screenshot.
• Description: The long description for your package. This supports Markdown and is the bigger block of text starting with the heading The RecogINATOR in the screenshot.
• Version: The version of the package. Typically higher = newer.
• Dependencies: A list of other package names which should be installed for your package to work. MDK,MMSolver in the example pic

In addition, it will timestamp the package with the date and time it was created, which can be helpful in confirming the version is the same one originally created as well.

File watching

Mudlet 4.12 also introduces the ability to watch a file and have an event fire any time the file changes. This is described with more details at https://wiki.mudlet.org/w/Manual:Lua_Functions?#addFileWatch but you use addFileWatch(“/path/to/file”) and it will then raise the event sysPathChanged with the path to the file as the first parameter after the event name. You can use this to reload a package when it changes on disk or to read configuration data from a file when it’s updated, things like that.

And more!

This was just a quick whirlwind flyover of the new features in Mudlet 4.12 which I think will benefit script authors specifically. As usual there were a lot of other fixes and additions included in the release post than I could go over here, and it’s worth taking a moment to look over the post.

Muddler has been updated to reflect the new package metadata as well and will be getting its own post before long as well!