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Beginner Joined: 01 May 2002 Posts: 18

Anyone know if it would be possible to write an explorer script in conjunction with the automapper to go and map an area? There would be problems with most areas but still...

Adept Joined: 09 Nov 2000 Posts: 222 Location: USA

Yes, it's possible, and yes, it's been posted. In fact, there have been several posted that I remember. Try doing a search in the forum, and try the finished scripts forum.

AzCowboy

Beginner Joined: 01 May 2002 Posts: 18

I just looked through all the topics, didn't find it.

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

Even if you did, MUDs vary so much that you won't find one that works right of the bat for you. Also, since this is generally a script that is not very fun to write, and mcuh less to debug (debuggin this type of script requires a lot of tweaking that needs to be done by the user and it is hard to do it over a forum), you probably won't find anyone that will write you the whole script.

The biggest problem with this is grabbing all of the rooms. You can have the script randomly walk in one of the directions presented in the exits line fo the room, but as you have more rooms maps, you will find the script wandering in circles more and more often. Also, with this solution, it is almost impossible to grab every single room.

A more inteligent script would walk until it encounters an intersection. In this intersection it will choose a direction based on some pre-defined order (east, north, west, south, up, down - for example) and remember all of the exits it didn't go through. It continues until another intersection and chooses another direction. It once more remembers the exits it didn't go through in such a way that it knows it is "one level deeper", and so on. Once it arrives at a dead end, it backtracks to the nearest intersection and chooses one of the exits that it didn't go through. Rinse, lather and repeat. This should, in theory, walk to every possible room, but the lists of intersections will keep growing and it will get quite large.

Finally, another solution would be to use the new map format of recent beta versions. This map format is a real database and can be accessed using ADO and SQL. For this script you first map one room manually, then you go through the datbase looking for exits that have an exit type of 11 (an untested link) and walk in that direction from the room that contains it. Every time you find one of these exits, you are guaranteed that it will be either an unmapped room or a link between two rooms that has not been walked through. This solution should also, in theory, map every possible room with the added advantage that you will leave no unlinked rooms. The disadvantages are that you have to use the beta version, and that scripts involving ADO and SQL are quite complicated and you need to be knowledgable in both to get anything done.

All of these solutions have the problem that MUD areas are not always organized in a logical way. Sometimes you walk in a circle (east, south, west, north) and end up in a room different from where you started. There are also room traps, random teleports, one-way exits, aggressive mobs, player-killing, non-standard exits, random exits, power outages, computer failures, little brothers, cats, dogs, fires, other people and all of those little things that make life so unpredictable which are all trying very hard to make this a near impossible task for someone other than an actual human being to do.

Kjata

Adept Joined: 09 Nov 2000 Posts: 222 Location: USA

Actually, it's rather easy to make one that's generic to all muds... I did it once, for Achaea, and used it on several muds. The key being that I used the automapper itself to do it... (it grabbed the exits from the map, rather than directly from mud output) As long as the mapper could be set up it would work... I'd post it, but I've long since lost it.

It was a modification of one of the mappers that was posted here.

Adept Joined: 09 Nov 2000 Posts: 222 Location: USA

Kurosh,

I did find one post which spoke about an explorer type bot, maybe that will help you out:

http://www.zuggsoft.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=7399&FORUM_ID=7&CAT_ID=1&Topic_Title=Mapping+Bot&Forum_Title=zMUD+General+Discussion

The other bots that I remember are gone... evidently the forums were lost at some point during that LONG period when I wasn't mudding.

Hope that this helps, and do remember what Kjata said in that post... it's all too true.