Trebuchet Tk FAQ Copyright ©1998-2011 by Fuzzball Software

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What is a trebuchet? What is Trebuchet Tk? What's So Great About It? What's Not So Great About It? What Will Be So Great About It? How Much Will It Cost? Where Can I Get It? Who Wrote It? How do I Report Bugs? What Are Those Critters At the Top of This Page?

What is a trebuchet?

A trebuchet is a medieval siege warfare weapon used to break down the walls of castles. It was the successor of the Catapult; it could take heavier rocks and projectiles, and fling them farther, with more accuracy. It worked by dropping a great weight that was attached to the short end of a long lever-arm. The long end of the lever was thereby raised with considerable velocity, pulling a sling that contained the projectile. The sling would increase the effective length of the lever arm, adding even more speed to the final projectile before the sling released it.

What is Trebuchet Tk?

Trebuchet Tk is a client program for connecting to TinyMUD style social MUD servers on the InterNet. (screenshot) This program is designed to be used with TinyMUD, TinyMUCK, TinyMUSH, MOO, and several other variants. It's probably not well designed for combat oriented MUDs like LPMUD and Diku, but it does support them.

I started writing Trebuchet when I became frustrated at TinyFugue's text-only interface, and at the lack of any GUI MUD clients that were both easy to use, and as powerful as TinyFugue.

When it came time to name the client, I figured that a Trebuchet would be an excellent way to sling MUD.

What's So Great About It?

What I consider nice about it may not even be interesting or useful to other people. However, here's some of the things it can do:

• TCL/Tk is a powerful extension language, which you can use to add new abilities to the client. You can even create fully interactive GUI dialogs from TCL/Tk scripts. Actually, the entire client is written in TCL/Tk. Yet it's amazingly fast.
• Trebuchet supports MCP 2.1 for close-knit client-server cooperation. It only supports a few (impressive!) MCP packages so far, but it should be trivial to create new ones.
• The server can request the creation of GUI dialogs via the MCP GUI package. This could make in-game bulletin boards, mail programs, and text editors much easier to use.
• If you have the TLS extension to the TCL interpreter installed, Trebuchet will support SSL encrypted connections to MU* servers that support it. The FBMuck 6.0 and ProtoMuck servers have support for SSL.
• You can create Hilites and Triggers that watch incoming text from the world. They can highlight all or part of each line, send automated commands back to the MUD, or even run TCL scripts. (screenshot)
• Pattern matching for highlights and Triggers is very flexible. The matching schemes include "Starts with", "ends with", "contains", "wildcard matching", and "regexp matching."
• Highlight Styles can include text color, background color, font, size, bold, italic, etc.
• Highlight Styles can have StyleMenu entries associated with them, that pop up in context menus when you right-click on the highlighted text. (However, there isn't yet a GUI interface available for setting these. Just a command line interface.)
• You can create command line Macros that can take multiple arguments and expand them out to much more complicated commands or TCL scripts.
• You can create QuickButtons that can send commands or execute TCL scripts with a single click.
• You can create KeyBinds to let you send commands or execute TCL scripts, with just a few keystrokes. (or only one!)
• You can connect to multiple Worlds at once, each one with it's own scrollback buffer.
• You can search scrollback forwards or backwards, using literal text or regular expressions.
• You can Log text from a world to a file, in either formatted HTML or plain text format.
• You can Quote a file to the world, with prepended and/or appended text for each line.
• An integrated Scratchpad lets you edit text files, or jot down descriptions, then send them to a world.
• Almost all these features have keyboard-based methods to invoke them. (Except Quickbuttons)
• All these features have command-line interfaces as well as GUI interfaces.
• Trebuchet is cross-platform, available for Windows 95/98/2000/XP, Unix with Xwindows and MacOS X.

What's Not So Great About It?

It's not finished yet. Oh, it's very functional now, but it has a few rough edges:

• There are parts that only have command-line interfaces, and no GUI interfaces, such as the StyleMenus.
• It eats up a lot of memory. The TCL/Tk interp is not a nice camper for memory usage. I typically get 7.5 meg process sizes under WindowsNT. At least it's not as bad as Java, though.
• The documentation at this time needs a lot of work. However, I have a framework in place to make a really nice help system. I just have to enter more screenshots, text, and links.
• Win95 users may notice some slightly odd behaviours with some controls like Combo Boxes. I'm working on fixing these issues.
• Unix users may get annoyed by the Windows 95 style controls like combo boxes and spinners. I didn't go for the strict Motif style interface.
• Macintosh users will wonder what drugs I was on when I designed the interface, as it's based on Win95 design.
• At the moment it's more complex than I'd like. I think I need to make optional "Wizard" interfaces for creating new hilites, etc.

What Will Be So Great About It?

I have a lot of plans for Trebuchet. Who knows how many of them I'll finish, or when they'll be done? Here's the major plans, though, in rough order of importance to me:

• Create support for Tools that can use MCP 2.1 to act as specific extensions to the client, allowing them to do what can't be done with the GUI interface package. For example, the Chess Tool. (screenshot)
• Create support for displaying pictures, in amongst the text. Imagine being able to look at some one and actually see a picture of them.

How Much Will It Cost?

As with all quality products, there is a cost to pay. In this case, though, the fee is not monetary. My entire asking price is this: If you have a moment where suddenly you find that Trebuchet has done something for you that makes you sit back and go "Wow!" drop me an e-mail about it. That will pay me in full.

Where Can I Get It?

You can fetch the latest binaries and sources of Trebuchet from:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/trebuchet/files/

Who Wrote It?

Trebuchet was written by the silly people at the institute for the mildly insane, more commonly known as FuzzBall Software. The primary coder is Revar, who wrote the program from scratch with some help from Fre'ta.

How Do I Report Bugs?

I've set up a web-based bug tracking system for the Trebuchet project. You can find it at: https://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=1440.

Please make sure to mention the following information in your bug report:

1. Your name. (If you are on FurryMUCK, use your character name.)
2. How I can contact you. (E-mail address is preferred. Page-mail on FurryMUCK is acceptable.)
3. What Operating System you are running Trebuchet under. (Win95/98/NT, Linux, etc.)
4. What version of Trebuchet are you running? (Look in the About dialog.)
5. What version of TCL/Tk you are using? (Did you install 8.3.2?)
6. A description of the error.
7. Are you able to reproduce the error?
8. What steps are needed to reproduce the error?

What Are Those Critters At the Top of This Page?

Those are Feeps. Feeps are the mascot critters of FuzzBall Software. They are sort of the cross between a tribble and a kitten. What have they got to do with software, you ask? Well, "Feep" is the shortened name for "Feeping Creature." Feeping Creatures inhabit code that has Creeping Featurism. When someone adds a cute extra feature to a program, we often refer to it as a "Feepture" or "Feep." When writing a new program, I try to design it to have as many useful features as possible. Lots of Feeps.