ZMUD™ FAQ

How do I connect to Materia Magica using the ZMUD client?

Zmud is one of the most widely used clients on MUDs and IENs and is a product of Zugg Software. Very diverse and offering many different options, although only for windows, it is still a widely recommended client for most beginners and offers lots of more complex features for advanced players.

Triggers, speed walks (which may be reversed for easy use) and aliases are just a few of the many options it supports with an easy to use interface. On top of these great features, Zmud is customizable to almost anyway you like including changing of colors and fonts. However, Zmud has been notorious for crashing randomly, its graphical interface (Screen while playing on a game) is a little lagged and jumpy and it takes awhile to load. Although Zmud isn't free, it offers a 30-day trial version for version 6.16 which can be obtained at www.zuggsoft.com . If you would prefer to get a free version of Zmud, you can get version 4.62 from here; this version offers the basics of the current Zmud because it's a much older version.

Once you've downloaded the Zmud.exe to install the client, run and install it. In that directory Zmud.exe will open it up. It will pop up a box asking if you would like to trial it or buy it etc, if you're just trying click trial (Please remember you may only do this for 30days before it wont let you anymore). After you click on agree (or if its already registered) it will bring up a small display box saying its loading, just ignore this and let it finish.

Now that Zmud is installed and loaded, it will bring up a box with the basic help files showing you how to start a new character. As it says click the New button and it will give you a long list of MUDs/MUSHs/IENs down the left hand side of the screen. In the host part place materiamagica.com and for the port place 4000, then hit enter. This should create a small icon on the main display of the client (This display will open up each time you run the program) named materiamagica.com. To connect, just double click the icon and it will open a new window. The new window will then open a connection to the server. To edit this character file, right click once on it and hit the edit button on the top of the screen, or right click and go to edit. Once in this area you may customize it a lot more, including giving it a name in the main area, clicking on the Character tag and adding a Character name and Password and a few other options in the other tabs.

Now that you should be connected to Materia Magica, you should have a long bar sitting at the top of the screen, this has several options including speed-walks aliases and triggers. These become a fair bit more complex so I'm not going to explain them in this. To edit your colors and font (most people make them lighter to make it look better) go to View at the top of the screen, then to Preferences then to either Colors of Front, in these you can pick from a variety of things to make it look how you prefer.

If you wish to get more into Zmud, like using triggers, aliases and speed-walks, the help file is a very informative resource although it may be a bit confusing at first, it's moderately easy to get the hang of.

How do I get game sounds working in Materia Magica?

Materia Magica supports MXP and MSP, protocols supported by ZMUD. To enable sound with your system, following this step by step procedure:

Download the following sound packs provided by Materia Magica and take note of where you place them:
http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack1.zip
http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack2.zip
Locate the Materia Magica subdirectory underneath your ZMUD installation directory. On most systems it will be located at the path: c:\Zmud\MateriaMagica.
Unzip the zip files you downloaded into the Sounds folder, which should lie under the MateriaMagica folder - using the above example, this would look like: c:\Zmud\MateriaMagica\Sounds.
After all of the files are unzipped, start ZMUD, and go to your sound preferences (View->Preference->Sounds).
Once in the sounds folder, make sure the "Enable Sounds" box is enabled.
Click the [+] on the [+] Sound in the left preferences pane to reveal all sound options.
Click the MSP option below sounds, check the boxes marked "Enable MSP Sound Protocol", and "Allow Inline MSP".
After this click the "MSP Sounds" option below the MSP in the Preferences window to the left. Make sure the sounds are in the left scroll box and have checkmarks, If they don't, restart ZMUD and check again.
To enable and disable sounds ingame, type SET SOUND ON or SET SOUND OFF.

If you are having problems getting the sounds in the above referenced sound packs to work, it may be because MP3 support is not fully enabled on your machine. Try downloading the WAV versions of the sound packs and installing those into the appropriate directory:

http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack_wav1a.zip
http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack_wav1b.zip
http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack_wav2a.zip
http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack_wav2b.zip

The WAV versions of the sound files are around 16MB each, whereas the MP3 versions are much smaller, so the MP3 versions are preferred if you can use them.