Unless you're an Ixian thinking machine (Or a ZMud Bot) at some point Dune is going to be so magical that it might kick-start your heart into caring. In such an event it becomes important for players to be able to express their bubbling emotions of joy. Dune (like most LP muds) offers several ways for a player to do this based on both the generality of their feelings and the intended audience.

Free-form emotes are similar in purpose to the /me <third person message> command found on IRC chat. The idea is that one can enter a third person message and have your username automatically added to the beginning.

To use a free-form emote on a channel you must type the name of the channel, followed by a : followed by your third person message.

For example:

chat :commands that the code must flow!
Would end up doing:
[chat] <your username> commands that the code must flow!

To use a free-form emote in a room you must type the *emote* followed by your third person message. This can alternatively be shortened by replacing the word emote with a : character. It will be replaced with emote.

For example:

emote commands that the code must flow!
: commands that the code must flow!
Would both end up doing:
<your username> commands that the code must flow! (inside the room you are in only)

Pre-built emotes allow you to draw on the list of emotions created over the past ~17 years by the Dune players and wizards. Plenty of them don't make sense, coming to appreciate these emotions is a tell-tale sign that you are hooked on Dune. These emotes can be stacked, qualified and targeted. We will cover that shortly.

For a complete list of pre-built emotes (“feelings”) see here.

To use pre-built emote on a channel you must type the name of the channel, followed by a ; followed by the emote name, and potentially a target if required.

It's easiest to show with an example:

chat ;wave paradox
Would end up doing:
[chat] <your username> waves happily at Paradox (if Paradox is online).

In that example wave is the name of the emote used. For a list of available emotes you can run the command feelings. For a much longer, spammier, list, that shows both the list of feelings, and their outputs, type feelings list

To use pre-built emotes in a room you must type the emote name and potentially any targets if required. That's it!

Another example?

wave paradox
Would end up doing:
<your username> waves happily at Paradox (if Paradox is in the room).

For those of you with the need to express a lot of emotion in as few keystrokes as possible, advanced operations are available for the pre-built emotes.

Emotes can be stacked, combined with adverbs, and targeted at multiple people. For instance, consider:

chat ;dance wild baja lick me slap all

This would produce the (bizarre) message:

[chat] <your username> dances wildly, goes 'Bajajajajajajaja', licks himself (or herself) and slaps <names of every player on chat> in the face.

For the ultimate in customization, why not try to explain the motive of your madness?

chat ;dance wild baja lick me slap all say “I do it for the cheese man…“

This would add clarity to your chain of emotions and produce:

[chat] <your username> dances wildly, goes 'Bajajajajajajaja', licks himself (or herself) and slaps <names of every player on chat> in the face and says: I do it for the cheese man…

Much better! Don't forget the quotation marks around what you *say* in your emote string.