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Building a Place

Building a place is a piece of cake, using the @build command, which guides you right through it.
 @build
interactively build a new place.
Let's say I am in a new place my admin has built for me, and I want to turn it into a home for myself to the north. Usually you will be given a blank place from which to build by the administrator, so you will want to start from there.

Destination Name

When you first type @build, you will be asked for the name of the new place. Here you can type in the name of the place, as well as any aliases you might want to have. You can also specify a name type, which defines what (if any) article to prepend to the place's name (remember from mid-school english that articles are "The" and "A").

I want my new place to be called "Murray's Castle", with the alias "castle". Since Murray's Castle is a proper named (ie. it wouldn't make sense to say "The Murray's Castle" or "A Murray's Castle"), I need to specify the name type to be "proper".

Murray's Castle,castle +proper

Make sure you don't put any spaces after the commas! Otherwise you will have an alias with a space in it.

Since Murray's Castle doesn't already exist, I get a message saying this, and that it will be created for me.

Realms

Next, the builder wants to know what realm to place Murray's Castle in. A realm is a general location of something. As places represent rooms which can contain players and other objects, so do realms represent groupings which contain places and even other realms. A realm might be used to represent a continent, city, street block, or house. Or in my case, a particular themed part of a theme park.

Your system may have one or many realms. To get a list of available realms, type @realms. Decide on an appropriate realm (if you only have one realm, just hit enter and you'll get the default).

After reading the list of realms with @realms, I decide Murray's Castle should probably go in the Fantasy Land. So I type in the name of the realm:

Fantasy Land

Exit To

Now the builder wants to know the name and aliases of the exit to the new room. I've already decided I want to make the castle to the north, so that's what I'll call it. The default name type, "normal", is okay here, so I just type in:

north

The builder will recognize north and add the alias "n" automatically for me. Note that it isn't necessary to put cardinal directions here, the exit could be named anything: "down", "ladder", "manhole", or even "Ted".

Exit Coordinates

Next, the builder asks me what the coordinates are to Murray's Castle. This is used internally for mapping and for the VRML interface. Here, you want to specify the coordinates in the format radial,asimuth. Radial is in degrees counterclockise of north, asimuth is degrees above the horizon. This can be a confusing concept, and in most cases you can just type in one of the shortcuts (viewed with shortcuts).

For Murray's Castle, I can just tell it north.

north

Note that the coordinates are reversed for the return exit, which means that, Main Street (that's where I started from, remember?) will be mapped to the south of Murray's Castle.

It might suffice for most users to think of this as an annoying extra step where you type the direction specified in the last step again.

Return Exit

Now I am asked for the name of the exit from Murray's Castle back to Main Street. Here I type "south", although I might want to call it something like "drawbridge", with "south" as an alias.

south

Descriptions

Lastly, the builder wants some descriptions. Here I am free to type whatever I want as a description of the places and exits I've just created. Try to go along with the theme of the MUD you're on, or even the realm in which your new place is located.

For Murray's Castle: Towering above you is a beautiful white castle with many spires, which yearn to touch heaven. There seems to be a magical air about the place.

For the north exit (the one to the castle): To the north you see a glimmering white castle.

For the south exit (the one from the castle): To the south you see a street lined with shops.


Neale Pickett <zephyr@nmt.edu>

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