An unofficial Client for former Skotos Games

Merciful is a very unofficial Chrome client for the former Skotos-Tech games which aims to bring the functionality you love from Zealotry into the Chrome browser. Games like:

Features include:

  • Macros with random text
  • Audio triggers
  • Scroll header autofill
  • Quick log-in
  • And more...
Download For Chrome

Features



Macros, featuring random text

Place options between two curly brackets and Merciful will automatically update your text when you hit space or enter.

Audio notifications and triggers

Get audio notifications when you get a new page or when you are in another window. Some events also trigger sound effects.

Template for scroll headers

(Castle Marrach only)

Always forgetting to add the date or a topic to your scrolls? Let Merciful insert some basic automatic text.

Merciful even includes basic syntax for entering the current date and time.

List of characters in the room

Any characters in the room will appear on the right-hand side of your screen. The options menu will let you filter out NPCs (usually) so you can focus on players

Click a name to add it to the input window: useful for those hard-to-spell names.

Quick login to all known characters

When you visit the character list, Merciful will remember the characters attached to your account and list them for you. If you haven't logged in it will even send you to the login page.

Logging (auto and manual)

By default, Merciful will offer you your logs as a download when you finish. You can also download your logs manually by hitting the download button.

Support for themes (dependent on game)

Merciful supports (most) themes for the games which use them and even has them listed on a familiar drop-down menu.

The client window recolours itself based on the theme settings, since themes can be user-defined.

Questions?

Is this an official client?

No. Nope. Not in any way, shape, or form...

This is just a labor of love by a player who wanted to play Castle Marrach in Chrome and then got a little carried away.

Is this legal? Does it breach the Terms of Service?

Merciful is just a MUD client based solely on looking at open-source clients rather than decompiling anything.

It includes some extra code to support some of the features used by these MUDs, but it doesn't interfere with the server.

Don't the developers mind?

I was told to make sure everyone knows this is an unofficial client and not endorsed or developed by the teams running any of these games.

If it goes wrong, blame me and not them. If it doesn't save your logs, blame me. You use this at your own peril!

Why doesn't it do something that Zealotry or the Flash client can?

The Zealotry client and the Flash client both use a few tricks that Chrome does not like. Saving to the file-system, for example, is something Chrome extentions are not meant to do.

What is the connection between this and the official clients?

Nothing. I took a look at the other clients (Zealous is based on an open-source chat client and Orchil is actually hosted on GitHub) and then used what I learned to build a new client. I think about 2% of Merciful is shared with Zealous code because both are based on the same Stack Overflow question.

Is Merciful on GitHub?

It is! I realised that if I walk away, I want to make it easy for someone else to make their own version. Or you can fork it, audit it, send a merge request that adds some features...

You can find the repository at https://github.com/AnthonyHJ/Merciful.

Why not use Orchil? Or Zealotry?

Good question; why not? Orchil may even run better on some PCs.

I was trying to work out how to fix Orchil when I ended up writing my own version from scratch. I just liked the fact that I could add new features if I coded my own.

Can I make a suggestion? Can I tell you about a bug?

Yes, yes you can.

I am on Discord and you can sometimes find me on the servers for Castle Marrach and Lazarus Project.

If you have a GitHub login, you can also add suggestions and bugs to the Issues Tracker for Merciful: HERE.

How can I support the project?

If you are a web-developer, you can head to GitHub and contribute some code (I'm sure there are parts that can be improved upon).

If nothing else, head to the Download page on the Chrome Store and leave a review.

What's up with the Conclave theme?

I seriously have no idea. It seems a little broken in Zealotry too.

There are one or two others that might be a little broken too.