Building Guide
From DevilshireWiki
Contents |
Your +Build Request
What Do You Need to Build?
What kind of project is this? A house, an apartment, a business? All builds can have two rooms. You will generally want a living room type area where the occupant's personal rooms (should they want one) are linked. Single garden rooms are popular, as are libraries.
Remember that one room on the grid can be several in the game - a description can tell you that the kitchen is at the back of the house, or some stairs lead up to the occupant's rooms. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself 'will I RP often in this room?', 'does this room really need to be separate from the other?' and 'does this room make the build less cluttered?' If you can imagine a character who turns into a werewolf at the full moon, you can imagine a room labeled 'main room' is a kitchen. Just sayin'.
Where Does It Go on the Grid?
Check out the apartments and the residential areas that are available on grid and see which would best suit you and your resources.
What You Do Once You Have Your Build Project
Once your proposal has been approved, staff will build the basics of your request - the main room, the garden, the clown room, whatever. (Please don't make a clown room.) Then it's up to you to desc it.
Describing Your Rooms
Parents
Look at your room; it should have a description telling you to use &rdesc to describe it. If it doesn't, staff forgot to @parent it. Put in the following command:
@parent here=#98
Room Descs
An rdesc is like an @desc. You set it much the same way. Because of the parent code, &rdesc will automatically indent the first line of your description. Any paragraphs after that you'll have to indent yourself.
Here's an example:
&RDESC here=The first impression one gets when walking into the Penalty Box is that of a square within a square. That's because the bar itself, designed to look like an overlarge ice hockey penalty box after which the sports bar is named, is situated right in the middle of the room, with shelving suspended from the ceiling to hold glassware and alcohol. Small steps lead up to the bar itself, surrounded by brass railing, with the area surrounding the bar set up with booths and tables.%r%tEach corner where walls meet has a giant flatscreen television braced in place by a shelf; hockey is the most frequent sport often seen on them though every now and then a baseball or football game will get snuck past. There's even been rumors of the occasional ice skating competition. There's a small, flat area that frequently has the tables moved away, for karaoke, or the occasional live band.%r%tThe walls are all covered in memorabilia, and again given the name of the sports bar, it's no surprise that most of it concerns hockey. Ranging from newspaper articles and photographs, to actual equipment, trophies, and fan swag, there is ample display in the Boston Bruins, the Devilshire Ravens, the DevU Black Hounds, and even the local peewee teams, past and present.
%r starts a sentence on a new line. It's good for breaking up paragraphs.
%t gives you a tab space, like indenting a paragraph.
Using %r and %t makes your text a lot more readable.
Try not to make a desc too long; a good rule of thumb is that a desc shouldn't take up or go over a screen in length. You can fill in extra details using +views.
+Views
The +view command is used when adding every little detail to the @desc of a room can really be spammy.
+view <lists anything that can be +viewed in the room>
+view <object>
To set +views in a room, use attributes that begin with &view. For example:
&view_garden here=The garden accessed through the French doors in the living room is designed to be a peaceful place, a refuge tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the town. There are several prize-winning rosebushes and a fountain with a statue of a little girl emptying a jar of water.
&view-basement here=The door to the basement opens on rickety, badly-lit stairs. The basement proper is much better lit and has been set up as a training area with a wooden dummy, mats, a rowing machine, and a weight lifting bench.
&view-study here=Tucked away in the eastern corner of the house is the study, a room lined with shelves holding books. Many books. There is a large selection of occult books, while one shelf has been devoted to mystery novels. A desk is set in front of the window looking into the garden, an ancient desktop computer dominating one half of it. The other half is piled high with papers held down with a snow globe paperweight of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.
&view-painting here=There is a large painting of an abstract cow here, painted with broad strokes of warm colours, mostly orange, applied with a palette knife. The signature in the bottom right corner reads 'KM'. The large frame is very ugly and coated in flaking gold paint.
To erase a +view, simply leave the &view_whatever here blank, like this:
&view-garden here=
If there are +views in a room, it's usually good to mention that in the room's description. ie. <OOC: There are +views here>
Exits
Exit Descs
Exits need descs. They work just like your @desc, only they're for an exit and not you. They don't need to be all that fancy. They could be something like:
A wooden door.
A sturdy wooden door.
A heavy steel door with a keypad lock.
A beaded curtain.
This wooden door has a whiteboard set up on it with a marker for leaving messages.
This door has a poster of Pamela Anderson tacked up on it.
Keep it short and sweet. Not many people care what a door looks like.
Exit Messages
Nobody ever really notices exit messages, but they're there to be helpful and that means you have to suck it up and set them. Exits need three attributes set on them: @succ, @osucc, and @odrop.
- @succ is what you see when you go through the exit. It's good to know where you're going, even if you never notice the little message in between.
- @osucc is what someone else in the room you left sees when you go through the exit. It's good for people you're leaving to know where you're going.
- @odrop is what someone in the room you're going into to sees when you come in. It's good for people in a room to know where you're coming in from.
Say you've got an exit going from your living room to your garden and your name is Greg. Your garden door's exit name is 'Garden <G>', where G stands for Garden.
Your @succ could be:
You enter the garden. You're the only one who will see that.
You would set this message by typing:
@succ G=You enter the garden.
Your @osucc could be:
goes into the garden. The people in the living room would see Greg goes into the garden. The code automatically adds your name to the message.
You would set this message by typing:
@osucc G=goes into the garden.
Your @odrop could be:
comes in from the living room. The people in the garden would see Greg comes in from the living room. The code added your name to the message there, too.
You would set this message by typing:
@odrop G=comes in from the living room.
There are two other attributes called @fail and @ofail that you are not required to set but can if you want to. @fail is what you see when you try to go through an exit that's locked. @ofail is what others see when you try to go through a door that's locked. The default @fail works fine, so you don't need to set it. @ofails are just annoying, unless you enjoy taunting people who can't go through an exit. Which, to be honest, many of us do, but it gets old after a while.
| Devilshire News File Topics | ||
| News Files | Building Guide • Copyright • Policy • Resources • Staff | |
| New Player Information | Application Procedure • Census • Character Types • Playing Villains • Restricted Concepts • Sample Character Background | |
| Game System | Attributes • Combat • Drama Points • Drawbacks • Fear • Global Commands • Experience Points • Human Qualities • Human Drawbacks • LP & Healing • Magic • Magic Spells A • Magic Spells B • Note • Package Qualities • Rolling • Skills • Supernatural Qualities • Supernatural Drawbacks • Superscience | |
| Setting and Theme | Overview • History • Folktales • Speech • The Four Families • Town • Conflict • Theme | |
| Characters | Casting • NPC Casting • The Devlin Family • The Harget Family • The Moore Family • The Swann Family | |
