Control Panel
The Main Window
MB's main window has five tabbed pages: Chat, Actions, Location, Telegram
and Announce. Select the window you want to use by clicking on a tab. In
Magsbot version 3.0 and higher, you can resize
the windows by dragging on the horizontal divider between them. You can
also drag each page to become a separate floating window itself. Drag a
page by clicking on the bar at the top of that page. Drag the window back
onto the main form to "dock" it there. If you close one of these windows,
you can get it back by clicking on the corresponding selection of the Window
menu.
If you remove all of the tabs from the main window, then the chat window
expands to fill the space.
Main window with all tabs removed
The Monitor Bar may optionally appear
at the bottom of the main window.
Actions Panel, floating
Chat Panel
Enter chat into the edit box and press Enter or click Send to chat.
To whisper, click on "Nearby List" and select the names of the avatars
you want to whisper to. (See Chat/Show Nearby
for details.)
The most recent lines that you entered are saved in the dropdown part
of the edit box. To conveniently repeat a phrase, click the arrow button
to the right of the chat box and select the line, then click Send or press
Enter.
Location Panel
Enter the desired location, world name and avatar type and click the
Set button. (Note that the Set button will be grayed out and inactive if
MB is not connected.) The coordinates are in AW SDK format; that is, positive
for North or West, negative for West or East, and
1000x the value of AW Browser coordinates. If you have trouble with this,
you can click the "AW Coords" button that will allow you to enter coordinates
in AW Browser style, like "15n 775e 0a", etc.
The color of the world name and coordinates indicate
when the bot instance is in the world and visible. If the world name is
grayed, then the bot has not entered that world. If the coordinates are
grayed, then the bot is not visible.
Actions Panel
This page contains buttons that can be user-defined. Left-click a button
icon to perform the associated action.
To modify the Action Buttons, right-click on a button or anywhere on
the page. A pop-up menu will ask if you wish to add a New button, Edit
an existing button, Save a button to a file or Remove a button. (Some of
these choices may be grayed out if you don't have a button currently selected.)
(See Actions for information on Action
descriptions.)
When you create a New button or Edit an existing button, the edit box
will appear for you to type the actions that you want to associate with
that button, the same as when you edit an Action in the Behavior
Table.
While the Action Buttons page has the focus, you can also use hot keys
F2 to edit, F4 to save, DELETE to remove the selected button, and INSERT
to create a new button.
To find a particular button where there are many on the page, left-click
on any button description (not the gray button icon itself) then
begin to type the name of the button you're looking for. The highlight
will skip to the button whose name matches what you type.
New in Magsbot version 3.0:
The buttons panel is now arranged into tabbed categories. When you
right click on the Actions panel, along with options to add, edit and delete
buttons, there is now also a submenu for adding and deleting a category,
as well as for saving the currently selected category. The category name
is saved with the button, so when you load it back in, it will automatically
go to the proper category tab, creating a new tab if necessary. Old button
files can still be loaded, and will be put into the default "root" category
(the "." tab). You can also copy, cut and paste buttons for easy sorting
from one category to another.
To
find a particular tab when there are many tabs, press Ctrl-D and type
the tab name. To find a particular button within all tabs, press Ctrl-D
and type part of the button name. A list of all tabs containing buttons
with similar names will appear; when you click on this list of tab
names, the selected tab will highlight all the buttons with matching
names.(For some descriptions of the buttons included with the MB package,
see here.)
Telegram Panel
(Telegram Panel shown floating.)
Magsbot uses ImaGenius' Bot Bone
Telegram System. (See here
to register as a Bot Bone user.) In order to send or receive telegrams,
you have to first log in to the Bot Bone system, either by selecting Menu
Item Connect/Log in to Bot Bone Server or by having Autoconnect=1
in the [Bone] section of the MBot .ini file. (You can also set
autoconnect by checking Menu Item Options/Auto Connect to Bot Bone Server
and then File/Save Configuration.)
To send messages, enter the recipient's name in the To: edit
box, the message in the edit box at the top of the Telegram Panel, and
then click Send. You can also send a status request or ping
by clicking the Status or Ping buttons instead of Send.
When you enter the name of a recipient, it is automatically stored in
the dropdown list under the To: edit box so that you can recall
it later, if desired. (Recipients' names are automatically stored in bcontacts.txt
when MBot quits.) Similarly, text entered in the message box will be saved
in the dropdown under the message edit box.
NOTE: More recently, the ability to send "bot telegrams" has been added to the SDK. This is implemented in Magsbot via the BOTGRAM
command. However since these SDK "bot telegrams" can only send a
message to all bots owned by a specific citizen, I decided not to add a
tab to Magsbot for them, as they don't seem to be of general use for
sending messages to an individual entity.
Announce Panel
(Announce Panel shown floating.)
New in version 3.0 is the Announce panel,
which allows you to send console
messages to the world the bot is in (if the bot owner is a world
caretaker).
As with the Chat panel, merely enter the text and then click Send or
press Enter. You can select a text color by clicking the Color... button,
and set Bold or Italics using the checkboxes.
If you want to limit who sees the announcement, then check the "to Selected
Only" box and select the names of the desired receipients on the Nearby
List.
Next: Menu Items