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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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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
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>