Zugg Software :: View topic

Beginner Joined: 01 Sep 2002 Posts: 27

The search feature seems broken, so sorry if this has been addressed. How can these muds be automapped?

Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2003 8:03 pm

The same as any other mud, I guess..

Which version are you using, and what is your specific problem?

(Which search function, the one on the forum? should work..)

Lady C.
(Mapping LPMuds in German with zMUD == no problems..)

Beginner Joined: 01 Sep 2002 Posts: 27

I'm using 6.53, but I imagine the mapping is the same as in the latest non-beta version.
The problem is that lpmuds are notoriously impossible to automap without a clever script, since the room name and description aren't normally displayed together and it doesn't send a prompt on every new line.
Here's typical output from look:
You're looking out over the northern alley of the village, just north of
McDiddles and west of the smithy. You can see the pallisade quite clearly here
and you can look down and spy on the people below. This roof is lower than the
rest of McDiddles and is perhaps above the kitchens. A set of planks provides
access to the smithy's roof.
There are two obvious exits : east and south
>

Right now, I'm just using brief mode, which outputs the room name and exits only. This is less than satisfactory to me.

As for the search feature on the forum, it just sits there for a long time before finally reporting:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired

Magician Joined: 25 Oct 2000 Posts: 461 Location: USA

The way I've dealt with this in the past is to beg the mud developers to give an option to display both the room name and the long description together. On all muds where I've requested this, it has either been ignored, laughed at, or flat out refused. No idea why.

So, as an alternative, I've created scripts before that will do a 'glance' (or whatever command gives you room name and exits), and will then immediately do a 'look'. Then with some clever gagging based on text color/etc., you get a display that represents what you want. Reconfigure the automapper and off you go.

Now, the disadvantage to doing this is that if you are on a laggy connection/mud, you will occasionally get text appearing between the room name and long descript (ie., Soandso enters the room.). If your gagging triggers are good, you may in fact _miss_ this or similar lines. Remember, you are actually sending two commands! My hope was that mud admins would find this wasteful and actually implement my request to see room name and long descript together, but this hasn't panned out.

It isn't a perfect solution, but it generally works. The trick is making good enough gag triggers to block out everything after the glance room name until the long description (so you don't see objects in the room twice, etc.). Conditional triggers based on color seemed to be the best way to do it, but now that requires the ability to color objects in room/players in room a color that is different from roomname/long descript.

GURU Joined: 26 Jul 2001 Posts: 1958 Location: Canada

Usually the key to many LPmud and mapping is manual mapping.

If builders are feeling nasty or are wanting to have areas hard to traverse
automapping will not work. Especially when you can inject changing time, weather,
knowledge of the PC into parts of the room description and room name.
(Mainly as I do the above myself)

Daagar puts forward great ideas how to use triggers and gag concept to smash
what you see in the mudoutput into the mapper.

Ton Diening