LPC Area Builder

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valder
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LPC Area Builder

#1 Post by valder » Mon Aug 29, 2005 9:35 am

I've looked over the tutorials for LPC, and although I don't think I'm quite ready to dive into the C code used in the driver (yet) LPC itself looks pretty approachable. I'd like to try my hand at area building, and I was curious if there was a specific area builder IDE that y'all prefer. If writing rooms in Notepad is the traditional way to do it, I'll try that too.

This is primarily a project for myself. While I'll try to write things with Geas in mind (I have no other MUD to base things on!) I'm not trying to "get my name in lights" by adding to the game. I understand that even if I write a 4000-room area and think it's brilliant, the admin of Geas are under no obligation to use it, look at it, or even open the attachment in their email. Similarly, I'm not asking for access to all the source code in the game so I can steal it and start my own MUD. I don't want to see any original Geas code, and I especially do not want to start a MUD. Criminy sakes, that would take up too much of my time!

I just want to tinker with code, and see what its capabilities are.
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#2 Post by Abharsair » Mon Aug 29, 2005 11:13 am

Unlike with Diku MUDs and their derivatives, LP MUDs usually don't have any AreaBuilder tools. Or if they do, it's very specialized for this very one MUD and can't be used by others. The reason for this is that each and every non-stock LP MUD tends to be very different from the others, and is unique in its use of standard functions. While that makes most LP MUDs unique, it also makes it near impossible to have a widely used standardized Building tool. Therefore you can sum it up this way:

LP MUD advantages:

1) You can completely customize it.
2) You can make most updates without the need to reboot.
3) A builder has more features available for his code.
4) You usually end up having a unique MUD.

LP MUD Disadvantages:

1) Requires more work to set up (not many stock areas available).
2) No OLC (Online Creation) tool.
3) No standardized commands and therefore not many potential players who are used to your command set.

Personally I prefer LP MUDs, because most Diku/Smaug/Merc/whatever MUDs are either stock, or technically crap, or run by teens, or all of the three points. Plus, it always irritated me that I couldn't go northeast or northwest, but was stuck with the four cardinal points plus up and down. Or with people who strip the possibility to resurrect from a Diku MUD, remove all OOC channels, call it an RPI, replace technical innovation with a biased Roleplay Police, and then have the nerve of adopting an elitist attitude.

Erm, alright, I stop ranting now. To return to the original topic, we don't really have a tool to create areas without being a wizard. I once started writing a PHP script with which anyone could create simple areas for Geas, but I pretty much abandoned it due to the lack of time. I might eventually continue with it, but I don't have any idea yet when. Basically if you want to contribute to Geas as a player, write the descriptions for the areas as a text file and send it to us. There are some mandatory rules for our descriptions, so if you're interested we'll let you know what we require.
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#3 Post by valder » Mon Aug 29, 2005 11:48 am

Sure, I'd be interested to see what the rules are. Writing room & object descriptions would be better than nothing. Though I'll keep studying what LPC code I can find; I suspect it would be useful to know. So far it looks pretty similar to a few other languages I've written in. (The pervasive influence of C syntax, no doubt.)

And don't worry about the Diku/Merc/ROM rant. I've worked on the guts of a couple of those, though it was years ago, and I'm completely done with them. The whole style of most MUDs is repulsive. If I'm checking a MUD's website and I see the word "remort" it's pretty much an instant Ctrl+W.
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#4 Post by Abharsair » Mon Aug 29, 2005 12:30 pm

Alright, in case one of you wants to write room descriptions for areas:

1) The description should have a minimum of three lines of text. No line should be longer than 80 characters (for those among us who still use a plain telnet client). There is not really a maximum for lines of text in a room desc, but more than eight or nine tend to get annoying.

2) The descriptions should not contain what the player feels. "You feel an evil aura" is an example for such a bad description. A description should not dictate what a player does, feels, or thinks. To avoid that, one should completely avoid to use the word "You" in the room description except where it makes sense.

3) There should be an extra description for every noun in the room description. E.g. if it says "There's a red flower growing here." the player should be able to look at the red flower. There's nothing more annoying than if something nifty is mentioned in the room description and you can't even examine it.

4) While each room description should be unique, extra descriptions for items in a room do not have to be unique. What I want to say is that an oak tree is an oak tree, no matter if it's the fourth or the 78th room of a forest. If you really want it, you can write 200 different descriptions for those trees, but we sure as hell don't require it.

5) If you copy/paste elements of descriptions between your rooms, please make sure that part does not contain any typos. Chara once had to de-typo hundreds of rooms of one of our wizards (who had the title "Master of Copy&Paste") just because he made mistakes in the part all rooms had in common. She promised the next one who'd do it would lose a finger joint.

I would also like to point out that this MUD started out as a project of people whose native language is not English. It's not my native language either (as you can surely tell). Since then some of our American/Australian wizards and players have invested a lot of work to fix many of our grammatical mistakes and other typos, but it's a tedious and annoying process. Therefore we'd appreciate it greatly if the descriptions you might possible submit in the future are mostly typo-free. They don't have to be perfect, but they shouldn't be completely wrong either.

Alright, those are pretty much all the requirements we have nowadays for our descriptions, so if you feel like writing some, be my guest. We would surely appreciate it. If you have other questions concerning the technical aspect of areas, I'll gladly try to answer them as well.
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#5 Post by chara » Mon Aug 29, 2005 12:31 pm

If you are interested in creating areas for Geas as a wizard, you do not need to be a fantastic coder or anything like that. Time, dedication, and imagination are the most important things. We are quite used to training new wizards, and one of the best ways to learn is to experiment with the code itself.

That being said, it's pretty easy to convert descriptions into rooms/objects for any of you who have no interest in wizardizing yourself :D

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#6 Post by chara » Mon Aug 29, 2005 12:36 pm

Please, dear GOD, do not copy-paste descriptions into a hundred rooms! Just create a separate file with stuff that is used repeatedly, and define it there. then just say: TREE with TREE being described in the separate file. Then I won't have to hunt you down and kill you ;)

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#7 Post by Naga » Mon Aug 29, 2005 5:11 pm

The whole style of most MUDs is repulsive.
You don't even know repulsive until you've played FurryMUCK. http://www.furry.com/

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#8 Post by hsparks » Mon Aug 29, 2005 5:29 pm

Hah, I knew someone that played that.


I'm not really seeing what MUCK stands for anyways... I mean... or they trying to be cute? Or special or something?

I know MUD is Multi-User Dungeon... But...

Is MUCK like Multi-User Crappy Kraptasm? Dunno. Don't really care. It just bugs me.


And yeah Furrymuck is repulsive.
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#9 Post by Abharsair » Mon Aug 29, 2005 6:55 pm

Multi-User Chat Kingdom. So basically a big chat room with some game elements. It's similar to a MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination), but uses different software. Despite the nauseating sound of it, they tend to have quite a few people "playing" them. But then again, there are chats with thousands of users as well.
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."

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