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Wod
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Joined: 29 Jan 2018
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 4:01 am   

Variable room descriptions confusing the mapper
 
Hi,

I've just downloaded CMUD and so far it looks very nice. I'm running it under Parallels on OSX (*). I was trying to get the mapper working and for a while I thought it was buggy or idiosyncratic then realised actually that it was the room descriptions that are upsetting it. For a while it would follow me around the map I'd created then it would suddenly start creating new rooms on top of old ones. I merged these a few times before I realised what is going on. I'm playing CthulhuMUD where there is weather and there is a short description of the weather in the room description like this;

Code:
Western Shore of the Asylum Lake (forest-sunny-clear)


A bit later on it might say

Code:
Western Shore of the Asylum Lake (forest-cloudy-clear)


Note that it was sunny now cloudy. The mapper thinks these are two different rooms. I don't see a way to switch that off in the MUD, so I need to tell the mapper to ignore it. I looked in the config and I saw a regex for the prompt but not for the room desc. How can I fix this?

Thanks,
David.

(*) For anyone interested I made the following changes to get it to work: a) Changed the default profile directory to c:\temp (from %DOCUMENTS% yadda yadda), b) Compatibility Mode to Vista SP3 and 3) Run as admin. b) and c) may not have been necessary but a) definitely was - without this I was getting a SQL error - evidently the sql module could not read the mac-style path which got resolved from the DOCUMENTS variable, so falling back on a bog-standard DOS-style path fixed that issue. Perhaps that's a Parallels issue that will hit me later - those kind of variables should point to DOS-style paths.


Last edited by Wod on Mon Jan 29, 2018 4:27 am; edited 1 time in total
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shalimar
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Joined: 04 Aug 2002
Posts: 4662
Location: Pensacola, FL, USA

PostPosted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 4:27 am   
 
Under the mapper window, go to the Config menu and select Configuration Settings.
Switch to the Room Description tab and check the Room Description Changes option.
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shalimar
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Joined: 04 Aug 2002
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Location: Pensacola, FL, USA

PostPosted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 4:33 am   
 
Alternatively, you could make a trigger for the various weather messages that fires a #NOMAP command, and that line would not be acknowledged by the mapper at all, but it looks like its attached to the Room Name.
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Wod
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Joined: 29 Jan 2018
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 4:58 am   
 
shalimar wrote:
Under the mapper window, go to the Config menu and select Configuration Settings.
Switch to the Room Description tab and check the Room Description Changes option.
Hey Shalimar,

Thanks, I found that option and checked it. That certainly helped for some rooms but not all. Sometimes there is a message like this when moving:

Code:
You proceed down Miskatonic Street


And other times there is not - it seems to depend on the location. Also if there are objects in the room and so on, then the paragraph containing the room description is variable. How can the automapper cope with this?

I think for these reasons the weather string is edited out of some rooms in the mapper but not all - it seems to be highly variable. Are there any other tricks I'm missing here?

Thanks,
David.
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shalimar
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Joined: 04 Aug 2002
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Location: Pensacola, FL, USA

PostPosted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 5:57 am   
 
Use of the #NOMAP to exclude strings is my suggestions.
Just like you use #NODIR on failed movement messages.

Of course, you should make sure to reconfigure the mapper after making such changes, just to make sure it is keeping up with what you expect from it.
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Wod
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 6:47 am   
 
Ok, thanks - I'll play with those variables to filter out the unwanted messages.

I went to a more 'stable' area inside a building and got better results, however with another oddity. The area has many levels (perhaps 5 or so) and moving up and down seems to be OK, but oddly when I move to level -1 the links on level 0 still appear in bold - they are not greyed out. Why should that be? I cannot click on them until I move back to level 0, so I definitely know they belong to that layer, but the output looks very messy. What is really odd, is that this doesn't happen for all the layers. Is this is bug or have I done something to upset the map?

Thanks for all your help so far.
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shalimar
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Location: Pensacola, FL, USA

PostPosted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 7:20 am   
 
I'm not entirely certain what you mean unless it is the visual appearance of the rooms either above or below you by one level showing faintly in the window.
If that is indeed the case, those can be adjusted somewhat also in the Configuration Settings, but this time on the Appearance tab to the left, and then the Colors tab up top.
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Wod
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 30, 2018 2:47 am   
 
Quote:
I'm not entirely certain what you mean unless it is the visual appearance of the rooms either above or below you by one level showing faintly in the window.
If that is indeed the case, those can be adjusted somewhat also in the Configuration Settings, but this time on the Appearance tab to the left, and then the Colors tab up top.


What I mean is that the links in the level above or below are not showing up faintly, but in bold as if they were on the current level (the rooms above and below are faint). I've got a feeling that the map has got corrupted somehow as I ran into a SQL Unique Key error here (if you search the forums other people have had that error due to some corruption). This doesn't bode well. What I'm thinking I will do is:

1) Proceed in smaller segments, checking the map as I go, backtracking to check consistency.
2) Taking regular backups.

One problem which confuses the mapper was moving into a closed/locked door. Doors which are closed are shown as #north and locked as |#north| so I might be able to get the mapper to recognise that or input them manually. Things got very confused, when I typed north into the closed/lock door - it would draw a new room, even though I hadn't moved. I deleted the room and moved my pointer back to where I was, but there was something not quite right from there on in. I noted that the mapper moved me north when I moved east sometimes, and things like that.

I believe that the map can be solid, but I think I need to do points 1) and 2) to be sure.
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shalimar
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Joined: 04 Aug 2002
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Location: Pensacola, FL, USA

PostPosted: Tue Jan 30, 2018 8:10 am   
 
I put rooms above and below both as solid and use bold colors so I can tell what is there at a glance.
In my configuration, the links on other levels show as the same color as the solid color I have set them to.

And so long as the mapper recognizes the exit is there at all, it is usually easier to manually set a given exit as a door (and whether it is locked) in the room properties window, and then edit the door manipulation commands (Strings and Doors in Configuration) so that all such exits are handled accordingly.

For the movement into the closed/locked door, there should have been some error message which you could then fire a #NODIR off of to keep it from updating the map position, assuming the map is in safe mode. Though once you have edited the locked/door settings that should not be much of an issue, outside of creating new rooms.
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