Ladies and gentlemen, I think I shall step forth and bring you the Mechanic's Corner ever rant.

In other words, feel free to ignore me.

So, there I was thinking I'd try and have a look at plugin coding for zmud, you know, coding something in a proper language like C# or whatever and plugging it into zMud, instead of using zMud's own incredibly kludgy and bothersome mumbojumbo of a scripting syntax. Kind of wondering why there are roughly zero plugins on the market, too.

My discovery was, lo and behold, in order to produce said plugins, one is required to have a registered zMud's developer package, which just so happens to cost $40.

So, lesson of the day: zMud plugin coding stinks.

Ah well. So much about my dreams of making a zMud system that won't require me to bend backwards thrice over in a squaredance, eh?

Now if I just wasn't so addicted to the mapper...

There are alternatives to the zMUD plugin development kit. Write your code to be callable through COM and use the zMUD COM functions to load it and pass data. It's still slightly kludgy, but you should be able to get speed out of it by having your COM objects do all the logic with aliases to interface to it easily.

I've thought of that too, but as you said, it's still pretty awkward.

The main idea was to hopefully do with as little zmud scripting as possible. Meh.

You don't need to pay for the zMud developers kit... I don't think you read all of the zuggsoft documents fully if that is your thinking. Refer back to the page in question:

http://forums.zuggsoft.com/index.php?page=...file&file_id=16

and notice the huge "DOWNLOAD" button towards the top.

Paying for the developers kit only gets you a registration number for your plugins, so that when other people load them up instead of saying "UNREGISTERED" the plugin instead says "REGISTERED".... you don't lose any functionality for creating an unregistered plugin, nor will it ever "Expire" or anything else. There's absolutely no reason to purchase the developers kit.


-malaphus

To add DLLs (non .exe plugins) you need to register. From the help file.

Bummer, I got my hopes up after reading your post =\\.

There's two different registrations that come into play, one when loading a plugin, and one when compiling a plugin (from what I could see on my glimpse).

To load a plugin into your zMud, you need to have a registered version of the client.

In order for a plugin to work at all, its auther must have registered his copy of the devkit. Or at least I thought it worked that way. I'll give it another try some time and see if it isn't like Malaphus said, so registering the devpack just adds a "Registered" line to your plugin.

Mind, it's really the same either way. If you want to distribute a plugin, i.e. not for personal use, you are supposed to register it. Just like you're supposed to register zMud if you use it longer than 30 days.