Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 9:51 am

So I thought I'd give this a bash since IRE mapping always made me want to punch something. I have a couple of thoughts and and a couple of problems.

My first questions are these - if we set up our own Room.Brief and Room.Exits triggers, will that override the ones that CMUD includes? Do the current ones just do #tag name and #tag exits, or is something more complex going on?

I ask because the detection of room names and exits is spot on except for one small thing. You can be in the trees or in the air above a room, in which case the Room.Brief begins "In the trees above" or "Flying above" - it'd be nice if CMUD could edit those out, otherwise CMUD can't track you when you're flying or in the trees. Doing that once is much easier than adding in an extra room for those different elevations since any room that's not indoors has a flying elevation and any room that's forest, garden or jungle has a trees elevation.

Secondly, and most seriously, while the room detection works fine for creating new rooms, walking around with the keypad in edit mode and all the rooms appearing, it's still pants when walking back through rooms you've created, either in edit mode or follow mode. This is the major problem I had with the mapper in the first place, and the fact that using ATCP to guarantee room detection hasn't fixed this is very annoying. Basically, when you first create a room, it's created and you move into it fine. But once I've finished mapping an area and want to move back through it, oftentimes the mapper simply won't detect change from one room to another. The direction enters the queue and the description appears on the screen, but then the direction isn't be removed from the queue and the blue dot doesn't move. In either edit mode or follow mode, it works fine for a while and then starts failing. As you can imagine, that sucks. (See PPPS for possible explanation of this)

Finally, speedwalking doesn't seem to work when using ATCP and the mapper. This could be related to the above, but could also be a separate issue. Also utter pants.

Has anyone else seen any of these problems, or is it just me?

PS. Also, a feature request for the future - it'd be nice if, when you're using the #tag command or ATCP (assuming that ATCP doens't use #tag itself) that other text is ignored. The number of times I had rooms created called "A wolf growls at you aggressively" or "There is a door in the way to the east" or "You need to swim that way" before I had all the lines triggered with nomap. It'd be much easier to not have to create a ton of triggers. (See PPPS for more info on this)

PPS. And another thing - is it just me, or is the mapper really insensitive to where to click? Trying to click links between rooms to set options like door, or to delete an incorrect stub link is really difficult, and using the properties menu is annoying.

PPPS. Yet another thing (I feel like Columbo) - sometimes, very rarely, CMUD seems to put the wrong directions on a room on the mapper. I haven't managed to duplicate this yet, and short of logging everything with debug until it happens, I can't think of a way to test if it's even CMUD's fault. But it's happening, and I'm curious if anyone's seen it. Addendum: It seems like this is a more serious issue than I first thought. See PS for explanation of how the mapper's still looking for "real" text as well as #tag commands - it's that that's causing this issue. The misdetected rooms have incorrect room names, too - like "You see exits leading east and west", a line the mapper should never even see. Perhaps this is the cause of the misdetection problems I talked about secondly and thirdly in the main body of the post?

The simplest solution I can think of for this is having an option somewhere (either in the mapper or in CMUD itself) "Decouple mapper" that stops the mapper from scanning lines in the buffer. That way it could only be communicated with via scripting commands.

PPPPS. I've no idea what I did (if anything), but follow mode seems to matching rooms consistently now, and speedwalking has started working. I'll post again if it starts failing again. In some ways this is worse than when I had an idea what was causing it to fail =/

Enchanter Joined: 09 Sep 2007 Posts: 605

My mud does not use ATCP, but I have all the same problems. Even the fact that my mud supports MXP not help the mapper to parse descriptions properly, only the dumb Fast mode works. Sometimes even it fails, duplicating rooms I left and return to. That why I set the rule for myself: you may either map mud (Map mode), either play (Follow mode). Or go offline and map manually from logs.
About rooms named like "You need to swim that way" - yes, I've got them too. Sometimes mud send extra description ahead of room name like "You jump to the rock <RName>Cross Roads</RName><BR><RDesc> Blah-blah..." (where those tags defined as <!ELEMENT RName FLAG="RoomName"><!ELEMENT RDesc FLAG="RoomDesc">...) and the mapper still fails to recognize that. And like someone reports in the nearby topic, mapper forgives its own setup (or in other words setup works only for room in which that setup was made), you need to switch to Fast mode in order to get the Mapper to work somehow.
I think that getting the mapper to work requires too much efforts and we will see them in cMapper only, after CMUD gets to public version (IMHO), only bugs that causes crash would be fixed immediately.

Enchanter Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 511 Location: USA

Fang, do you have MXP and ATCP enabled at the same time? I believe this came up as an issue on IRE muds in another post (don't have time to find it myself) and since IRE doesn't use MXP you should be safe disabling some of it. Find the post though, it is more exact on what to disable.

Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 6:59 pm

Fang... remember to *number* your issues instead of using PPS so that it's easier for me to respond.

ATCP *does* use #TAG. The "room.brief" calls "#TAG Name" and the "room.exits" calls "#TAG Exit". In 2.09, there isn't a way to override this. However, I have modified v2.10 so that if there is already a #TAG set, then it doesn't get changed by the ATCP default. So this will allow you to intercept the ATCP and use your own #TAG command to set the name or exits the way you need.

With speedwalking, the mapper doesn't use #TAG or anything related to the mapper configuration. The way speedwalking works is that the mapper creates a temporary trigger for the name of the room. The script for that trigger is just #OK. So, when CMUD sees the name of the room, it uses the #OK to confirm that the speedwalk was successful (which then updates the position in the map).

One thing to check in your mapper configuration is the setting "Room name starts at beginning of line" and "Room name end at the end of a line". These two options determine whether a ^ is placed at the beginning of the trigger pattern, or a $ is placed at the end of the pattern (or both). You might want to make sure these options are both disabled so that the room name trigger can match the name anywhere in a line.

As far as suggestions for changes to how #TAG works, or other mapper changes, Arde is correct that these will all have to wait until I work on the new mapper. Until then, you need to use #NOMAP and #NODIR triggers to tell the mapper to ignore lines like "You need to swim that way".

Finally, remember with ATCP that you probably need to turn off MCCP until Iron Realms gets all of their ATCP/MCCP issues fixed.

Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 7:51 pm

Yeah... this was written as a bit of a stream of consciousness. I kept thinking I was finished only to come back and add some more, sorry about that.

I'll try with MCCP disabled and see if that helps.