Theme-Programming

Interesting local changes

Sun, 03 Mar 2006 21:06:12 GMT

Okay. I've been working on a variety of tweaks to local systems, to help put things together in a spiffier fashion. Among recent changes:

1) ANSI titles for rooms. They're not pretty, but they work. You need to set the room's .ansi_title property to a list of the form {{text,text-with-color}} - for example, if you had a place called The Green Room you could set its .ansi_title to {{"green","[green]green[normal]"}} and it would show up as "The [green]Green[normal] Room". (I make no promises regarding the default-type bolding present in rooms' headers. Use a $region if you'd care to override this...)

2) Pronoun substitution changes. Chances are, you won't notice this, but... you can now define a :get_pronoun verb of the same sort as $gender_utils:get_pronoun. This is now called by $string_utils:pronoun_sub (and thus $you:say_action).

2a) Player descriptions are now piped through $string_utils:pronoun_sub. I'm sure people can come up with interesting things to do with this- I don't know that they care to, though. Once I get my Hook Player Class running perhaps it will be good for some sort of morphing system. In the meantime, if you're using things like "his" and "he" and "her" "herself" in your description, consider using pronouns like %p, %s, %o, %r... the usual, you know?

3) @where enhancements. This verb is actually useful now! Instead of just a who-where report it's now a where-who report: it will put the most popular place first so you can know where to go if you want to Hang Out. Also, it uses the ANSI colors for the various places.

4) This has been around a while, but: @when. It shows you the last connect *and* last disconnect times, and the present time: which is more than @who will do.

5) Did I mention $region? Ah, yes. If you have a room and set its .place to an object, the room will now try to get special formatting-type metadata from the object, instead of the room. Right now, this is mostly about the room header, normally that blue line of squiggles ~~~~~~~. If you intend to have a number of related rooms, you should probably make a $region to attach them together. Just set each room's .place to the region, manually for now... In the future we may come up with fancier things to do about grouping these rooms together like this.

6) Random useful generics. $pin. $wearable. $carried. $foldable. We have a $furniture and will soon have a $chair, once I can get SunNET to port the darned thing over. $stick. $remote! (It opens temporary portals from one room to another!) For that matter, $portal. (If you want to just have one around, try to be sure and set its .permanent before it automatically collapses...)

7) Room generics. Please consider using #958 as the parent for all your rooms. It supports all sorts of neat stuff like integrating descriptions... some day we may add electricity support and lighting, too (the bulk of the code is already available elseMOO, it's a matter of installation...)

More useful stuff as it happens!

Pages, note about @when

Mon, 03 Mar 2006 16:14:22 GMT

A note from before: @when is actually on InFO, the Information FO, #411.

Pages! I've ported over LogMOO's pages. They're pretty shiny. You can now use the shortcut ' to page someone or even several people. For example:

'venef yo, dude, what's happening?

'ge Have we ever thanked you for running this place?

You can also continue a conversation just using the ' by iteself:

'fen,za You two are both GENIUSES!!!

' Can I have your autograph?!?!?

There are now also two @page-option settings: one to echo the message you just sent (in case you're using a client without any local echo or something) and one to surpress your recipient's page echo. Hey! On that note, everyone ought to set up their personal page-echo messages; it does a lot to give a MOO personality. Teleport messages and such would be cool too. I know that I've been slacking off with these as well.

Any bugs? I may be porting LogMOO's remote-emote as well, which integrates with the remote-pages somewhat (multi-recipient, and conversation-continue.) Bug me if you run into a bug. And have fun.

Old-style details? Ick.

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 22:25:41 GMT

Okay. Old-style details. You know, the kind where you go '@detail ceiling is "The plaster is peeling."'

Well, they're pretty stupid.

This is nothing but the worst kind of tinyscenery. They add nothing to the room. No one ever looks at them. Occasionally, I'll admit, they're cute, but they're pretty bleah.

I have renamed the command @detail to @olddetail - I've left the '@det' alias - if anyone wants to use it. We have a much more robust system now which takes detail_msg stuff on objects and turns it into room description material. And I want to be able to set the @detail message on an exit. Which I can't if @detail is present in every room.

Rant mode off. Anyway. That's where @details went, if you want 'em.

@go and messages

Sat, 03 Mar 2006 03:29:41 GMT

I don't know who programmed our @go. I didn't like it, though, and I revamped to use this:teleport(player, dest); like normal @go does. I've squished the @oleave and @oarrive messages. You want @self_arrive and @oself_port, respectively, for NORMAL arrive/leave messages.

Clean-up and housekeeping

Sun, 03 Mar 2006 15:16:29 GMT

I'm going to be putting together some housekeeping stuff to help clean things up, returning objects to wherever they go to; sort of a "soft" locking down of objects, where you can still let people walk off with them but they will come back.

You can get started by setting objects which you would like cleaned up to have a valid .home and set object.clean_me to 1. It won't work yet, but if you're trying to get ready...

@generics

Sun, 03 Mar 2006 17:14:47 GMT

New verb on #411: @generics, to list generic objects you can (ab)use to make Themely stuff. You can do @generics <object> for generics based off an object; it defaults to $thing.

lol

Sun, 03 Mar 2006 18:51:51 GMT

Some people don't know how not to use 'lol'. To deal with them, there's now a new 'say' verb on the Generic Fancy Room (#159) which will deal with people saying "lol" or a sentence that begins and/or ends with "lol".

Please let me know if it interferes with stuff.

Integrating descriptions on players

Sun, 03 Mar 2006 19:19:10 GMT

$carried objects and $wearables no longer show up when you look at a player, if they're being worn or carried. They should still show up in inventories.

Room Security & Courtesy

Sat, 03 Mar 2006 16:59:58 GMT

A system for securing one's room is in the process of being implemented. Currently, if you @chparent your room to Generic Fancy Room ($fancyroom), you can set your room's .private property, if you would like people to @knock before entering. On the @who list, private rooms will show up as [private] (after the room name). This means that, as a courtesy, one should @knock before entering these rooms.

A room's .free_entry property can be set to 0 if you would like the room to be locked. (This shows up as [locked]). This currently does not work completely, but the main purpose at this point is to be able to specify if your room is private or not.

Rooms that do not have .private set to 1 or .free_entry set to 0 will be considered public and people can enter them at will, without @knocking.

Random Connection Locations

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 16:45:08 GMT

I modified player connection so that players who have their home set to #62 will connect into a random room in the mansion or the town. The idea behind this was to allow people to get a fuller sense of the MOO by connecting in a different place each time. Perhaps it would prompt people to explore more. And, you can always opt out by setting your home to something other than the Patio (#62), using @sethome.

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