Charting Setup

 

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.

 

Failure Timer

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.

 

Exit Stub Grabs

See Exit Stub Basics below.

 

Exit Stub List Separation (parsing) Character

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.

 

Room Refresh Command

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.

 

Rules

·         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