There are special
kinds of events that are used only when charting with the Cartographer. These events do one of two things. The first is used when charting, to determine if the way you just
traveled is valid or not. The second is
used for a more aesthetic purpose, in that it’ll help you see where exits
exist, but you just haven’t mapped them out yet.
In either case,
charting event conditions are only active during charting mode.
Note: Don’t even think about reading
onward into this help file until you’ve read the Cartographer help
file.
Exit Failures
The usage of Exit Failures is
explained in the cartographer help file, but here’s a recap of the basic
explanation. Since there’s no
accurately standard way for the MUD to confirm that you did, in fact, move
during a chart, you instruct the cartographer to instead look for failure of
you to move. For example, “You can’t go
that way” or “There is no exit north” would be examples of failures. These are the kind of messages you program
into the cartographer to tell you when you can’t move in a direction.
You are given five different
strings to define for different failures.
If you don’t need all of them, just leave the ones you don’t need blank.
Use this spin edit to change
the countdown to failure delay used when charting. If
you experience heavy lag
with your MUD, you might want to increase the delay.
See Exit Stub Basics below.
The exit stub concept is a handy little feature when charting a map. What it will do is create shortened exit links (stubs) for any
cardinal
(n, s, e, w, ne, se, sw, nw) direction that you haven’t chartered yet. This helps you see where there are still
places to explore. Other than that,
exit stubs do not have any functionality beyond the aesthetic help when creating
a map.
Note: As with the initialed directions (n, s, etc.) this also applies to the full names like north, northeast, southwest, etc.
Note: If your MUD does not separate directions, and only uses cardinal direction initials to indicate exits (e.g. [NSW] to mean "there's a north, south and west exit from this room") then leave these fields blank.
This command is used with the
“;room refresh” command (discussed in the Cartographer help file). Here you define the default command that
will be used.
Capture Only Cardinal Exit
Stubs when Charting Checkbox
If this box is checked, only
cardinal exits will be captured and represented as exit stubs. If the box is unchecked, non-cardinal exits
will be represented as a small circle on the left upper side of the room in the
cartographer.
Complete Current Chart when
Stubs are Grabbed
If this box is checked, the instant an exit stub line is grabbed, the stubs are processed and the current chart is forced complete, just as if you hit the Enter key.
Room Label Event
This box defines and event for grabbing text you want to automatically populate into the room label for a chartered room. For example, if you enter a room and you see the text "Dungeon (n,e,w,s)" that defines the room, you can grab the word "Dungeon" by using the text in the screenshot above as a pattern-match. The {$} defines the actual text you want to grab, *'s act as dummy variables to take whatever other text appears and the rest of the characters (in this case a space and the left and right parentheses) finish defining the pattern which the cartographer tries to match with text it sees. Using this example, if you chart the room above, the room you end up charting will have the word "Dungeon" automatically put into its label property. Cool huh?
Direction Defaults
These boxes allow you to customize Portal© to allow non-English cardinal directions. Simply replace the corresponding boxes with the exit directions your MUD uses. Each "direction" consists of two boxes. Use the larger, left box for the full name of the direction and use the right box for the one or two letter shortened version. If you use English, you shouldn't even touch these things. Otherwise, as an example for our German friends, you would use "nord" for "north," "nordost" for "northeast," "unten" for "down" and so on. You can use any words your MUD does, as long as the word for each direction is different from each other.
Exit
Stub Basics
What you need to do to make
this work with your MUD is two things.
First you need to setup the Exit Stub “Grabs” with appropriate
events. As this all depends on how your
MUD displays the exits from a room, It’s best to use a few examples to
illustrate this:
Example 1
Your mud defines the exits as
the following string:
There
are six obvious exits: north, over, southeast, west, in
Setup your Exit Stub Grabs as
(quotes are presented only to show spaces):
Exit
Stub Grab 1: “obvious exits: {@}”
Exit
Stub Separator: “,”
Explanation
You’re probably wondering what
the {@} thing is. Well, it’s used to
indicate “this is a block of exits that I want the cartographer to use in creating
exit stubs.” If you look at the blue
text above, you’ll see that what we really want from the line is “north, over, southeast, west, in” These define the exits from the room, and we
want all of them. When you setup the
Exit Stub Grab 1 to be “obvious exits: {@}” you are telling the cartographer
to grab
everything after “obvious exits: “ and put it into the exits block.
Ok, once it’s in the exits
block, you then need to define how the elements in the block are
separated. In this case, a comma and a
space separate the exits, so that’s why you put the comma alone as the Exit
Stub Separator (you don’t need to worry about the space as it’s ignored). This will separate each element in the block
and assign the appropriate exits as stubs.
Now, you’re still way confused,
and I don’t blame you. It’s a bit
hairy, but once you get used to it, it gets easier. Here’s a recap of what you just did.
1. Pattern that
exits appear on the MUD: to look for
“There are six obvious exits: north, over, southeast, west,
in“
2. Pattern that is
unique that we want to use an event with
“obvious exits: “
3. Pattern to put
into the Stub Grab to grab the exits block
“obvious exits: {@}”
(the {@} will be populated with the exits block)
4. When charting,
and the failure timer is ticking down, the cartographer is now in “grab mode.” This means it’s ready to grab all the exit
stubs it can. When you’re charting, you’ll
“move” in a new direction, which means that you’ll catch the exits of the new
room as they come across the screen.
This is the pattern we’re grabbing.
Once they come across the screen, the grab occurs.
5. At the time of
the grab, what happens is this. The
exits block “north, over, southeast, west, in”
is grabbed and then separated into elements via “,“ until there’s a handful of
individual exits: north, over, southeast, west and in.
These individual exits are then
checked against the cardinal directions and the invalid ones are tossed out. This leaves us with north, southeast and
west. It is also remembered that there
was at least one non-cardinal direction (two in this case: over and in). These will be used in a moment.
The exits are then put into a
buffer until the timer finishes or you force/abort the current charting. If you abort, or a failure occurs, the
buffer is emptied.
If you force the chart, or the
timer completes without a failure, the new room is placed as normal but NOW it
will also have stubs appear in the directions of north, southeast and
west. There’s also going to be a small
circle just to the upper left of the room.
This indicates that a special (non-cardinal) exit stub was created (from
the over and in exits).
One other note here is that
let’s say you just moved east to get to the room, thus creating an east/west
exit link between the old and new rooms.
If this is the case, the west exit stub won’t appear, only the southeast
and north ones will. This is because a
stub can’t exist in the same direction as an actual exit.
Getting a little
clearer yet? Let’s try some more
examples.
Example 2
Your mud defines the exits as
the following string:
Exits
are (ne-w-s-in)
Setup your Exit Stub Grabs as
(quotes are presented only to show spaces):
Exit
Stub Grab 1: “Exits are ({@})”
Exit
Stub Separator: “-” (hyphen)
Explanation
Similar to the first example,
except that the exits block you’re shooting for is “ne-w-s-in”
This particular block is not separated by commas, but the hyphen mark instead.
Now, you’re doing a chart, and
the exits come across just fine. After
all the processing is done, and you’re moving north into the room, what will
the new room look like?
Think about it, then read the
next line.
The new room will have an exit
leading south to the room you just left, it will also have exit stubs in the
directions of northeast and west. It
will also have a small circle indicating there is a special direction from the
room (in this case: in).
Example 3
Your mud defines the exits as
the following string:
There
are six obvious exits: north, over, southeast, west, in
Your mud also defines the exit
string as:
There is
one obvious exit: east
Setup your Exit Stub Grabs as
(quotes are presented only to show spaces):
Exit
Stub Grab 1: “obvious exi*: {@}”
Exit
Stub Separator: “,”
Explanation
This is the same as the first
example, except that you need to take care of the “single exit” case which will
not work with the first example. The
only change we made here was adding the * to the Exit Stub Grab 1 to accommodate
for the indefinite pattern of “obvious exits” vs. “obvious exit” This way it will grab both.
Example 4
Your mud defines the exits as
the following string:
There
are six obvious exits: north, over, southeast, west, in
Your mud also defines the exit
string as:
There is
one obvious exit: east
There’s also another case,
which occurs when there’s a ton of exits and they flow into another whole line.
There
are eight obvious exits: east, west, northeast, southwest, up,
over, south (indented by 20 spaces)
Setup your Exit Stub Grabs as
(quotes are presented only to show spaces):
Exit
Stub Grab 1: “obvious exi*: {@}”
Exit
Stub Grab 2: “ {@}” (20 spaces before the
{@})
Exit
Stub Separator: “,” (comma)
Explanation
This is another variation of
the first example, which takes care of the indented exits with the Exit Stub
Grab 2 entry. You must match the spaces
up correctly for it to work.
·
Each
Exit Stub Grab must have one (and no more) exits block symbol “{@}”
·
You
cannot have two pattern-match *’s next to one another
·
You
cannot have a pattern-match * next to the exits block symbol