HUB - Henry's Universe Builder Basic Area and Object Construction Manual NOTES N' HINTS N' STUFF This file is Copyright 1995-1997 by Henry McDaniel. All rights reserved. See NOTICE for further details. -------------------------------------------------------------------- BUILDING AREAS There are three main sorts of areas: Social, Combat and Mixed. Your area will be one of these three types. A social area should have a meeting place where players will get together and socialize. We suggest placing this spot in the heart of the area. A combat area should have plenty of NPCs and promotion type objects. All NPCs in the area should be for players of 2 or 3 different levels but no more. A mixed area should simply have a central meeting spot and combat type NPCs. NOTE: No need to set any "stat" in an NPC intended for social only areas. But you still must set energy (and level wouldn't hurt either.) Any area may have houses (or the equivalent) set aside for special players to OWN, SELL/TRADE, etc. Simply create lockable rooms/small areas (of whatever sort) and unique keys which do not return or decay but can be obtained in some special place but not too obvious a place. On the key, describe what it is for and optionally where it goes to. Lastly, set the "start" attribute for the room(s) so that a player may choose to start-in game there. SUGGESTIONS 1. Try VERY hard not to use "You" or verbs refering to the actions of the reader when describing ROOMs and NPCs (it may be necessary for some other objects however.) 2. Be sure to describe what should be obvious exits near or at the bottom of a room description (or dpoints, if in a sized room) Use "North", "South", "East", "West", "Northwest", "Northeast", "Southwest", and "Southeast" for compass directions (but use the shorter forms like "n" and "ne" in the actual exit mappings!) 3. Try not to be redundant with extra descriptions. Especially, do not use (if possible) the same extras in multiple rooms. This will waste memory needed for use by the game. HINT: You can use both an "extra" mapping and extraXX mappings in a sized room. Then the "extra" mapped descriptions can be viewed from anywhere within the sized location, but the extraXXs only work in the XX point of the room. 4. Try to keep the length of most room descriptions under 7 lines long. If a room description is less than 2 lines long, chances are that room doesn't belong in the game. HUB's SIZED ROOMS 1. Try not to use too many sized rooms! Sized rooms should only be used in large open spaces (such as halls, plazas, open fields, and etc.) It would be silly to have (for example) a sized bathroom. Sized rooms are also useful in easily constructing long winding tunnels, passages, corridors and so on. If most of a sized location you are thiniking about building is blocked off, consider using smaller rooms (plural) together or a smaller sized room to represent it. 2. Don't get bogged down in a 2-dimensional view of the area you are building. Don't hesitate to build up or down, when that seems called for. ABOUT BUILDING OTHER OBJECTS 1. HUB objects exist completely transparent to game shutdowns. So it is imperative to manage the occurence of items within the game. Set return time to be at least 2 or 3 hours (120-180 minutes) on items you want to be common AND set a decay of something like 30 minutes. This will keep items from accumulating. Otherwise you might end up with nearly EVERY player in the game having one. For far less common items, consider a return time in terms of DAYS(!) 2. Don't make more than 2 or 3 copies of any single item. The exception might be things which players cannot get. Set weight to a -1, if you do not want players to be able to take an item. END OF AREAS.TXT