room building detail (Room Building)
(This is the walkthrough. Command references: help dig,
help describe, help detail, help roomstate,
help weather, help tp. Builder permissions required.)
Building a room, start to finish:
1. Dig it. From the room it should connect to:
dig North Bowl;bowl = north;n, south;s
One command makes the room plus both exits - the exit out,
then the exit back, each with ;aliases. tunnel n = <name>
is a shortcut that knows the compass pairs; open <exit> =
<room> adds an exit between existing rooms; teleport gets
you around while working. Every new room is an extended room
on Pern time - everything below works out of the box.
2. Describe it.
describe <text> (describe/edit opens the editor)
That's the year-round look, and for interior rooms it is
usually all you need. Where the setting breathes with the
year, add seasonal variants:
describe/winter <text>
Winter, spring, summer and autumn swap in on their own with
the Pern calendar, following the room's region (step 4). For
a line that shifts with the time of day (morning, afternoon,
evening, night) or with a room state, use $state inlines
inside any desc:
$state(morning, Dawn light creeps down the east rim.)
$state(on_fire, Flames roar along the roofline!)
(Seasons don't work in $state - for season-shifting text,
use the describe/<season> descs.)
3. Detail it. Things worth a look that don't need to be
objects - walls, carvings, the view:
detail walls;wall = The walls are covered in ...
detail/del walls
4. Bind its weather.
weather/here = <region org>
This ties the room to a region (a Weyr, Hold or area org)
and drives the weather command, which season the descs
follow, local IC time (time) and the IC date stamped on
scenes recorded there. The org itself needs a real-world
weather equivalent (org/weather) and possibly a timezone
(org/timezone) - normally already set for your area; if
weather complains, that's what's missing.
5. Walk it. look at it, check weather and time, try the
exits both ways, look at your details. Seasonal descs can
be previewed by pinning: roomstate winter forces winter
until you toggle it off again.
# subtopics
## room states
Beyond seasons, rooms can be in arbitrary states - a fire, a
gather, flood damage:
describe/on_fire <text> (write the state's look)
roomstate on_fire (toggle it on/off)
A state desc wins over the seasonal one while active, and
$state(on_fire, ...) inlines light up in any desc. roomstate
alone lists the room's current states.
One state is structural: roomstate sky marks a sky room -
dragons must be in one to learn jump points and go between
(see help between).
## tp rooms
A TP room is a stage: players redress it from a shared
library of saved locations (tp <location>) instead of new
rooms being built for every plot. Staff make one by digging
with the typeclass:
dig The Clearing:typeclasses.rooms.TPRoom = <exits>
Dress its default look with the tools above, then
tp/default captures it (it also auto-captures on first
use). Any nicely-dressed room - TP or grid - can be saved
into the library with tp/save <name>. See help tp.
## room images
A room can carry a web image (its profile portrait) - shown
with the room in published scene logs and saved into TP
library entries. Staff attach these via the web admin.
Building