I've been playing with ideas on how to make TradeWars more friendly and accessible without losing its vintage soul, and tonight's project was an optional mouse overlay I implemented in Weapon M.

It works by detecting a mouse curser hover, and if present, highlight the data item in the terminal, providing a default action on a left click or a popup menu of all applicable options on right click.

Here is what it looks like on hover when it detects a warp:

And when you right click on hover:

Notice the default action, Move, is in bold.

I have to admit it is fun warping around and trading with just a mouse click. The nice thing about this feature is it is totally optional, and only activates when the mouse is in the terminal area. Where this idea gets interesting is when it is combined with automation scripts, and ultimately, with a more touch-driven device like a ipad.

I love the idea. it implements my quick move panel i thought of in a way.

You could have a option to set the default to a custom script. and do a separate loader for the right click. maybe scripts in a specific directory. or load a init file that has default and extra custom scripts set.

one problem i see, but there should be a work around, is when we get a option to copy and paste text in the terminal.

Very nice! It's exciting to witness the "birth" of a new TW helper.

You stole my idea... Are you a Vulcan? Get out of my head

Hmm..what else is lurking in that head then?

Well, since there seems to be some interest, I'll put more time into this. Making it configurable and extensible with custom scripts is key. I was thinking of a new extension point that has:
- A trigger function to help the menu determine if the action is applicable (trade port detected, for example, or presence of a scanner or planet)
- The function to perform the desired action. Having the full db at your scripts desposal will be nice.

I have a lot of ideas for FirstMate, and I plan on releasing something soon even though it isn't ready. I just added tabbed sessions (like IE8+/Chrome) to it, so you can play multiple games in the same window. I still need to make the tabs draggable though.

Now I'm working on a dialing directory that interfaces with MicroBlaster.net (MBN) to get server listings, and fixing a bunch of stuff I broke implementing the new tabbed frame. I'm thinking of using a web service to access the MBN database, so other helpers will be able to use it too if they want to.

FirstMate for DOS in 1996 had an enhanced sector display that included port information, so that's probably what I will work on after the dialing directory.

Man, too bad you didn't open source that earlier or we would have been working on FirstMate all these years instead of just getting started with Weapon M now.

I retired from TradeWars in 2001, and didn't come back until I heard about the 25th anniversary edition. At that time I was working on a windows version of FirstMate, when my boss fired me. He formatted my desktop because he was paranoid and thought might have left a trojan or backdoor behind. I lost the source code to my website, telnet crawler, and FirstMate.

Do you do c#/wpf?

Yeah, know what you mean. I played a lot in the early-mid 90's, then bits and pieces every now and then, though my interest is mostly in helpers. I've accepted TW is my "forever project".

Sorry to hear about the loss of source code. All the more reason to open source As for c#, I run Linux at home, and OSX at work, so I haven't gotten much into c# other than some dabbling years ago. Java is really crap for UI but at least it runs in all operating systems. Someday I hope to push the UI into the browser, where it can reach even more platforms.

I went with WPF, because I wanted local hard drive access, but most of what I am doing could be ported over to Silverlight for the browser audience. Unfortunately, Microsoft has dropped all support for Silverlight. HTML5 has WebSockets, maybe that is the direction someone needs to go. You need IE10/Chrome/etc... though as IE8/9 do not support this.

Agreed, but as my day job is writing web apps, I view the lack of IE 8/9 support as a feature, not a bug

Technically, Mongoose did a good job pulling out the display from network and ansi processing, so I don't think it would be too hard to send the events to the browser instead of the Swing canvas, however, first I want to play with this overlay idea a bit more.

I hacked something like this into JTA when I was first experimenting with the idea of writing a helper. I'm planning to add a similar control to JTX.

Ok, I put in a very simple plugin system (zip of JavaScript files), so now I have a framework for building new extension points to let folks customize more than just add scripts, though that's all that exists for now. To get the ball rolling, I added a set of default scripts delivered via a new starter plugin that is bundled with Weapon M. Will look into bringing the overlay feature into master + making it extensible with plugins.

To deploy a plugin, just drop the zip file in .weaponm/plugins (or where ever the weapon m home is for your os). This is what a plugin looks like (starter.zip):

Then plugin.yaml looks like this:

Thinking of moving preferences over to a simple yaml file in the home directory...