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Novice Joined: 21 Mar 2003 Posts: 38 Location: USA

I'm on an LPmud, so mapping is real challenge. I've got it working, for the most part, but the mapper persists in making duplicate rooms with annoying frequency. As I make the map I leave the properties window open, because even with all my #NOMAPs, I sometimes get a stray transient line in the description. With the properties window open to text, I confirm each description as I go.

I've learned that if a transient line like "Bob arrives from the east." Ends up as the first line of a description, when I return to the room mapper won't recognize it if Bob doesn't conveniently reappear just then. Then, of course it makes a duplicate room, which needs to be merged or deleted. If I merge the rooms, the vNUM ends up as the later vNUM created, while all the correct links reference the prior vNUM, which has now disappeared in the merge. I foresee problems with this, so I recreate the links. Not really a problem if it happens occasionally, but prohibitively tedious to do every several rooms. Ensuring there are no transient lines in the description in the first place should prevent the problem. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

I've had this happen repeatedly: I make sure the description is accurate, that is, it will match the description next time I enter the room. I move one room over to create a new room, again checking that it was created with the correct properties. When I move back to the first room, it creates a duplicate room, and saves a new description, which now has a transient line such as Bob, etc.... In every case, the 'Reload' options are not checked, yet the mapper tries a second time to load or verify the description recorded the first time.

I suspect this isn't a bug, but a feature. Perhaps the mapper considers all links tentative until it has traversed them in each direction, and each time, it reloads the description to verify its tentative link is linking the right rooms. Redundancy to prevent errors, sort of thing. With an LPmud, where the prompt is a simple ">" and there's no color option for the room description, distinguishing between the description and the transient lines is a beaslty business, difficult enough to do right the first time, nigh impossible to consistently do twice for each room. So I'f I'm correct about the feature, can it be defeated?

If there is no such intended functionality, why else might it be loading descriptions twice?

Novice Joined: 21 Mar 2003 Posts: 38 Location: USA

I think I've figured it out. Upon yet more scrutiny, I realized some lines that look much like description are in fact transient - they appear upon entering a room from one direction, but not another. They don't look like the "Bob arrives" sort of thing, so I missed them
I'm happy to solve my own problem and save you experts the typing. =)