Dead Souls and Mappings
A mapping is an organization of data that makes it possible to associate
data elements together in a human-understandable way.
For a builder with no coding experience, mappings can be a challenge to
understand. However, you must grasp at least the very basics of this data type in order to be an effective builder.
The Dead Souls mudlib has three kinds of objects that normally have other
objects inside of them: NPC's, rooms, and containers. When the mud loads
one of these, often they are intended to have stuff inside them already, such
as a teasure chest with jewels, an orc with an axe, or a room with an orc
guarding a treasure chest.
In such a circumstance, each of these objects is loaded from a file that
contains information about the contents of the object. This is called the
object's inventory, and it is determined by the SetInventory directive in that
file.
An example of a room's SetInventory directive might look a little like this:
SetInventory( ([
"/domains/town/npc/fighter" : 1,
"/domains/town/npc/orc" : "growl",
"/domains/town/obj/chest" : 1,
]) );
You can tell it's a mapping right away from the square brackets: [ ].
What this mapping does is identify a fighter, orc, and chest as objects to
be put into the room when it is loaded. If we wanted 2 fighters, we would have
put a 2 instead of a 1 there.
What the "growl" value does is provide that orc with a command to perform
when it appears. You could just have a number there, to specify the number
of orcs desired.
That's it. It's that simple. A mapping consists of pairs of data, separated
by a colon (the : symbol). The part to the left is called a key, and the
part to the right is called the value.
A mapping can contain more than one of these pairs, each separated from
the other by a comma.
As a non-coding builder, what you need to know is that when the creation system
asks you for a key, it is possible for keys to have multiple values, like
this:
({"room","here","area"}) : "This area looks very nice."
In this example, the mapping element is part of the SetItems directive.
When you modify a room's description items, you will be asked to enter keys until you are
done. This allows you to enter multiple words that respond in the same
way. For example, "examine wall" and "examine concrete wall" should both
provide the same description.
However, in the case of inventory, only one key is valid, so make sure you
only enter one.
