Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 4:53 pm

For those of you who use the mapper in muds with excessively large 'outerworlds' where it is more or less impossible to link zones+areas, do you still use zones in which the areas just don't link or do you use separate map database files?

Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 5:03 pm

You mean MUDs that use some sort of world map system that doesn't actually use "rooms" but just tracks your position on a large map? Then you get to an area and ENTER AREA or something to move into "real" rooms?

Whenever I've played MUDs like that, I've used separate zones for each area and left the wilderness in between alone. Changing zone is much easier than changing map file.

Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 5:05 pm

well they use rooms, but our outerworld is over 1 billion rooms big. You make your way to a part of it and the area is usually marked by something like '?' unless they are secret...then there is some syntax to get into the area.

Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 5:09 pm

Mmm, that's exactly what I was talking about. And saying it's 1 billion rooms big is a bit misleading, because they're not actually rooms, and they don't normally need mapping because they're pretty easy to navigate.

So yeah, use zones and not map files. Changing map file all the time would be annoying.

Posted: Sat Dec 20, 2008 6:42 pm

Ok now when I enter a zone, what would be the best way to load it automatically? Would a room script suffice or would it be better to trigger of the first room's desc to load the room and set it as the current?

Posted: Sat Dec 20, 2008 11:46 pm

I just did it manually, it wasn't that much hassle. You want to specifically tell when you enter any of a quite small subset of rooms, which means that most of the time whatever script you set up is going to be wasted. Perhaps if there was some line like "The entrance to xxx is here" in the room before the zone, you could do it that way, but really, I think any script is going to be more hassle than it's worth.

Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 12:37 am

Well I can do something like that, but I didn't see any functions to do what I wanted.

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

Well, if you explain what it is you wanted but didn't see, we might be able to help.

Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 6:06 pm

Well I more or less have it like this:

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

For the first, it is a simple matter of comparing %roomname to "Newbie Zoo" (or whatever the actual name of that room is).

For the second, you need some way of identifying the room name or description and capturing it in a variable when displayed by the mud. In my own mud, there is a piece of text (actually a small set of possible texts) that occurs in every room description, so I can do this easily. I can also identify the exit lines. I have a trigger that fires on the exit line and compares %roomdesc to the room description captured to a variable by another trigger. It flashes a warning of possible mapping error if the descriptions don't match. If you can't create a trigger that successfully identifies room names or descriptions from mud output (without misidentifying other text), this will be difficult.

Magician Joined: 17 Apr 2005 Posts: 496

I can't remember how BatMud does it, but if there's a command like "ENTER AREA" or whatever, you can alias that to enable your where-am-I triggers, and then turn them off when one matches.

Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 3:43 am

Well you either enter from a cardinal direction or a special syntax like 'approach'. I just took the first line of the first desc inside the area and trigged it to #te to the corresponding vnum. If I don't want to use the map I have an alias that disables all my map related triggers.