On 21 Aug 2019, HusTler said the following...
Hi.. I'm going to ask a dumb question so go easy on me. I'm fooling around with Mystic BBS. I've got my servers running (ssh telnet http) so
Congrats!
now I'm looking into customization. After watching Mystic guy on youtube I've learned nothing about ansi screens. I understand the "Themes" part
of Mystic. My question is Are are there any premade themes available for Mystic? A demo theme per say? Am I to understand I will need to create
my owm ansi screens for the BBS? I'd appreciate any info on the subject.
You can create your own ANSI screens if you wish. I don't know if there are pre-made themes available or not. My experience has been the opposite; I'm trying to replace the default ANSI screens with 40-column ASCII ones, in a retro-looking way. For example, instead of a menu screen with hotkeys, Mystic can be made to act more like a command-line interface, with menu commands selected by typing commands at a prompt. It's up to you.
If I do need to create my own ANsi screens where can I learn this craft?
I'm not sure if it's the best option, but Mystic has an ANSI editor in the configuration program, under "Other". Pressing escape from within the editor brings up a menu.
My install of mystic does not have a themes directory as outlined in the Mystic youtube videos. Thanks in advance for any info.
Same here. I just made a new directory called themes/simple/ where "simple" is the name of my theme, and then made menus/ scripts/ and text/ subdirectories under that.
If you want your theme to be mostly similar to the default one, but with some changes, you can either:
1) Set "Allow Fallback" for the new theme to "Yes" and copy only the files
that you want to change from the Mystic default directories into these directories.
2) Copy everything from Mystic's default menus/ scripts/ and
text/ subdirectories into these new ones and change whichever ones you wish.
If you want your new theme to be radically different in appearance,
structure, and behavior from the Mystic default theme, leave these
directories empty and start from scratch.
Either way, you'll also want to copy the "default.txt" file in Mystic's data/ directory to another file in the same directory, [your theme name].txt; in my case "simple.txt". This file contains all of the prompt texts, which I think would be incredibly difficult to recreate from scratch. You can edit prompts
in Mystic's Prompt Editor, or as a text file. In either case, identify the existing text of the prompt that you want to change, search for it in this file, and change it to whatever you want it to be. The prompts file uses |-codes (explained in Mystic's docs/mystic.txt file. These codes change fb/bg colors and can perform other operations as well.
Hope that helps,
Jeff.
--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: Perceptronica (21:1/180)