Pueblo frequently-asked questions |
Last updated September 8th, 1996
Pueblo is a network MUD (multi-user dimension) game client for Windows 95 and NT (See below for info on the status of other platforms) that brings you together with other fun-loving folks on the internet.
Pueblo supports both normal text MUDs and MUDs enhanced with hypertext (HTML), 2D graphics (GIF, JPEG, BMP), 3D graphics (VRML), and sound (MIDI, WAV). It is easy to add support for multimedia to a normal MUD server. Chaco has patches for many mud server types and general instructions for other mud server types on our web page at http://www.chaco.com/products/servers.
Pueblo is free for non-commercial use. If you're interested in using it commercially, email us at info@chaco.com, and we'll see what we can do together. If you're not making money from Pueblo, just have fun!
The easiest way to download Pueblo is to start at the Pueblo Home Page, and select "Download Pueblo". If you want to use ftp to download Pueblo, you can find the latest version at:
Pueblo is available for Windows95, Windows/NT, and Windows 3.1 right now.
A version of Pueblo for Unix is in development currently. It should be released in a few months.
We don't currently have a version of Pueblo for the Macintosh in the works, but we'd love to do one. We're a small company, so we have to wait until someone licenses something from Chaco for the Mac to do a port. We're working actively on setting up that kind of license now.
If you're interested in using Pueblo commercially, we can port it to whatever platform you require, as part of the license of Pueblo for commercial use. Contact us at info@chaco.com for more info.
Sometimes users get errors or the download 'hangs' when trying to download Pueblo from our web site. The problem is almost always an unbuffered UART in an older machine trying to run a modem serial port at 19.2kbps, which it just can't do. If this sounds like you, we recommend that you "downshift" your modem to a lower baud rate when downloading Pueblo or VR Scout.
Several resources are available to you for learning how to write MUD areas specifically for Pueblo. Here are a few:
These are the canonical reference for Pueblo programming. The help docs list all of the HTML supported by Pueblo, including examples of many common usages.
PuebloMUSH II is Chaco's main Pueblo demo world. It has examples of some of the latest Pueblo features, along with explanations of how we implemented them. This is like an interactive version of the really important concepts covered in the help docs, but it's important to remember that the examples in PuebloMUSH barely scratch the surface of what Pueblo can do. Check the help docs for complete documentation.
Take a look at what other Pueblo-enhanced MUDs are doing with Pueblo. Are they using centered room names? <hr> between rooms? <ul> lists of room contents? Pop-up help docs? Use the new Trace window feature available under Pueblo's View menu to see the raw HTML other MUDs are sending. You can use the Log to File feature under the File menu in the same way. (Be sure to log to a filename ending in ".htm", so Pueblo knows you want the HTML to be stored in the log file.)
Pueblo is relatively new technology, so your imagination is really the place to turn for ideas about how to use Pueblo. Let us know if you think of features that would make some of the things you want to do possible, but check the help docs first, so you're sure we haven't already done what you need!
This question is asked a lot. Chaco has historically done licensing deals with other (usually larger) companies. So, if a company wanted a cool MUD client they could use for training, or customer support, or whatever, they could license Pueblo. We have many deals like this in place currently, and more are in the works. Let us know if you're interested in this kind of arrangement.
In the future, it is possible that we'll add support to Pueblo for "charge-for-time" MUDs, and do billing through Pueblo, but we haven't done that yet.
It's also possible (even likely) that Pueblo will eventually have an advertising revenue model, like Yahoo, InfoSeek, and others on the World- Wide Web. While the constant deluge of advertising can be annoying, it seems to be the best way to fund cool products for the Internet, so it's a model we're looking at actively.
Chaco does not sell individual copies of Pueblo to users. It's such a pain dealing with Mastercard numbers, printed documentation, etc. that it's not quite worth it. Maybe we'll have a huge sales staff someday and sell shrink-wrapped copies of Pueblo at Egghead, Fry's, and Comp-USA, but not anytime soon.
Here are some of the most common problems folks encounter with Pueblo, and the solutions to make them go away.
Pueblo has only been tested with Microsoft's Winsock on Windows 95. We've had reports of problems with Trumpet Winsock. For info about configuring Microsoft's Winsock, try reading the following web page:
We recently added SOCKS and proxy support to Pueblo, which should enable many Pueblo users to get through their firewalls. To set up your SOCKS or proxy server, select 'Preferences...' from the 'Edit' menu item. Then click on the 'Proxies' tab.
If you get this message, delete the file MSVCRT20.DLL. This file is located in windows\system directory. After you've deleted the file, reinstall Pueblo and everything should be fixed.
If you get this message, you need to install Microsoft Win32s version 1.30 or later. You can get Win32s from the Chaco ftp site:
This problem occurs when your screen is running with 65,536 colors on Windows 3.1. There is a problem with Reality Lab 3D engine and certain video drivers. Running with 256 colors should fix the problem.
Before you try loading your own VRML files, try one of ours (because our web server is configured right, the files definitely work, etc.) For example: http://www.chaco.com/pueblo/vrml/pueblo/pueblo.wrl
Once that's working, try some of your own files. You may need to modify your web server's configuration so that it knows that a .wrl file has a MIME type of x-world/x-vrml. If you're using NCSA or Apache HTTPD, add this line to config/mime.types:
x-world/x-vrml wrl vrml
audio/x-midi mid midi
This is due to a bug in Microsoft's latest comctl32.dll (or their File Manager. We can't tell which.). To get the File Manager back, copy the old comctl32.dll into your system32 directory. You can get a copy of the old comctl32.dll from:
There are lots of ways you can control what Pueblo does, many of them intended to let you speed things up on your machine. We suggest that you go through the Preferences settings under the Edit menu so you know what's configurable about Pueblo.
Right-click in the VRML pane, then select Draw Faster. If Collision Checking in that same menu has a checkmark next to it, select it from the menu to disable collision checking.
Another way to speed up Pueblo's drawing is to decrease the number of colors your display uses (in the control panel's "Display" item). It takes twice as long to move around 16-bit color as it does to move around 8-bit color.
Pueblo 2.0 uses Microsoft's Reality Lab, so hardware accelerators that provide Reality Lab drivers could give you a big boost in terms of speed. We don't know of any that really work yet. (We'll be supporting Direct3D in a future release of Pueblo, so hardware that supports it will work well with Pueblo.)
Pueblo 1.0 uses Intel's 3dr rendering library, so you could always get a polygon accelerator card (Several will be released over the next few months, some of them not that expensive.) which has drivers for 3dr. Pueblo will recognize that you have the card and speed up. Unfortunately, 3dr hasn't taken off, so we don't anticipate widespread support of it (which is one reason for our switch to Reality Lab).