List Abilities Command

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Now we’re going to examine a few of the Cortex plugin commands to see how they work. These commands are pretty standard across all skill systems.

Back in Create a Config File, we added a lot of configuration entries for skills, attributes, etc. But we need a way for players to view that information. We’ll create a set of commands – attributes, skills, assets and complications – to show the different categories.

Let’s look at the simplest one first - the list of attributes. There are only a few, and they have only a name and description, so our display is pretty simple.

module AresMUSH    
  module Cortex
    class AttributesCmd
      include CommandHandler
  
      def handle
      
        # Get the hash of attributes out of the configuration
        attrs = Global.read_config("cortex", "attributes")
        
        # Sort the hash and then convert it to a list of the form "Name    Description"
        list = attrs.sort_by { |a| a['name']}
                    .map { |a| "%xh#{a['name'].ljust(15)}%xn #{a['description']}"}
                    
        # Use the standard bordered list template to show the list with a title above it.
        template = BorderedListTemplate.new list, t('cortex.attributes_title')
        client.emit template.render
      end
    end
  end
end

Skills, on the other hand, are a little complicated. Not only are there potentially a ton of them, they also have specialties to show. Here we’re going to use the BorderedPagedListTemplate to let the player browse the skills list a page at a time using skills, skills2, skills3, etc. The desired page number can be accessed straight from the command class via cmd.page.

module AresMUSH    
  module Cortex
    class SkillsCmd
      include CommandHandler
      
      def handle
        skills = Global.read_config("cortex", "skills")
        
        # Sort the hash and then convert it to a list of the form "Name - Description (Specialties)"
        list = skills.sort_by { |s| s['name']}
                    .map { |s| "%xh#{s['name'].ljust(15)}%xn #{s['description']} (#{s['specialties']})"}
                    
        template = BorderedPagedListTemplate.new list, cmd.page, 25, t('cortex.skills_title')
        client.emit template.render
      end
    end
  end
end

The BorderedPagedListTemplate does a lot for us – it figures out which piece of the list to show, formats everything, and even shows the handy ‘page x of y’ text at the bottom.

There are similar commands for assets and complications, but we’re not going to go into them here.

This article is part of the Creating a Plugin tutorial.