Zugg Software :: View topic - Need help for fixing maping problems for everyone

Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 10:16 pm

First I would like to state that I'm a complete noob at CMUD. I like the auto-mapper a lot, but it has a lot of bugs and I need help fixing these bugs.
1. The maper sometimes doesn't connect a room I've already mapped to the one I'm in.
2. When there is a door in a room the mapper doesn't mark where the door is, so when I'm speed walking it stops at the door.
3. Say I was in a room where the only exit was south and I go north and it says "Alas, you cannot go that way." so I go south but the mapper registers that I went north not south.
Thanks for your time.

Apprentice Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 137

1. The mapper will only connect your rooms if the correct Auto-Connect is enabled:
Config > Configuration Settings > Interface > Auto Connect > All directions.
This will mean all stub exits are connected (be aware of using this in complex areas however).

2. You can edit door settings in:
Config > Configuration Settings > Strings and Doors
However you must make sure you are adding the doors to the rooms as you make them, this is handled in:
Room Properties > Room Exits > Click the link with the door and set its type to "door".

3. The following trigger will stop your map making rooms that do not exist when mapping:
#TRIGGER {Alas, you cannot go that way.} {#NoMap;#NoDir}

Hope this helps.

Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 11:49 pm

I will try it. But what do you mean by complex areas?

Apprentice Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 137

I imagine your main problem is because you want to get too much done at once. Be slow when learning to map, its a tricky system. Start in simple areas and test them vigorously so you can see if there are any errors, unsurprisingly if you find errors here you'll find them in other areas so it's best to iron out your problems before making a huge area.

For example, I mapped a 1000 square grid area before I realized there was a setting to auto connect exits, meaning I had to manually walk though every possible exit combination to connect it all properly. :)

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

1)there is a special case for adjacent rooms involving exits that weren't there when the room was created. In this case, the mapper correctly moves you to the destination room but no exits are connected to each other. If this is what you are seeing, only way I've found to fix this is to manually connect them.

2)I've never actually seen ZMud nor CMud correctly detect and apply door settings in the map, even for games wherein ZMud/CMud supposedly works perfectly for it out of the box. Whenever a door was autocreated, it was invariably incorrect and usually happened when a new room was created in a direction that had no detected exit. I've taken to simply adding in my doors manually and using scripts to experimentally add them in (with only some success).

3)the mapper has a direction queue that stores all commands sent to the game (for the most part, anything that's not a direction or movement-related command is safely ignored but if you desire I suppose a small trigger could be made to remove it from the queue). It does not pop off the first command until it detects a movement, so things like bumping into walls (which usually are simple lines of text that don't match room format) will sometimes allow the mapper to get off-track. Triggers like Scarn showed are how you deal with that.

4)many zone maps are plotted in a nonadjacent fashion, like so (legend: O = room and -, |, /, and \ are exit links):

Apprentice Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 137

Good advice from MattLofton there.
A question for Matt, if I run a #SLOW . speedwalk and pause along it's route, is there a way to view the remaining (queued) path, or only the next step (with %nextdir)?

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

Dunno, any time I speedwalked somewhere I just doubleclicked or used #WALK/%walk(). I never bothered with #PAUSE or triggers to stop me/resume if I got caught by an aggro.

Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 11:39 pm

OK I have figured it out. My MUD it looks looks this:

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 12:16 am

Now with fixing comes problems. I have found 1 problem thus far.
- say the map looks like this:

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

Remoed, move the damn rooms. Mr. Green

On a serious note, the mapper does not ever create new rooms in a non-adjacent manner. If you imagine a 5x5 square of grid paper, with the square at (1,1) being your first room, the only possible exits for this room (on this grid) would be east, southeast, and south. If you traveled each of these exits to create more rooms, those three rooms would appear in (3,1) for the east room, (3,3) for the southeast room, and (1,3) for the south room. You could never have a room autocreated in (5,1) as a result of going south from (1,1).

Now, that being said, there is a relatively new mud protocol called GMCP that allows the game to send detailed information to the client in an out-of-band channel. CMud supports this protocol (ZMud does not, but I've seen at least one separate utility--specifically for Aardwolf, though I'm not sure it's limited to just that game--that adds it to ZMud in a translated fashion), and if the destination room does exist and is non-adjacent then CMud will in fact properly connect the two rooms with an unbent exit link. Without GMCP, though, there's no similar functionality available.

Also, the compass makes it easier to create a #TAG trigger for your entire room-info format:

1)#TRIGGER on the room name and top line of the compass. Make sure you surround the room name pattern in (), and you can then #TAG name %1 to only use the room name as the room name.
2)add a #CONDITION to the above trigger to match on the middle line of the compass. Any compass-work can be done here, otherwise all you need to include is #NOMAP.
3)add another #CONDITION to handle the third line of the compass. Ditto as #2.
4)add a final #CONDITION to match on room desc and the exits line, using an #IF to figure out which line goes where. This condition would be a manual state, so when you encounter the exits line you need to use #SET to return the trigger state back to 0 (or to whatever next state you might have for items/mobs/players/prompt).

Once this tag trigger is matching correctly, run the configure wizard again to activate it and almost all your room-matching problems will go away.

Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2014 1:59 am

Thanks for your time. But I'm no scriptwriter, I did try to look up in the help guides about what you said but it was so confusing I had to ask what you meant by what you said to do.

Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2014 6:49 am

Thanks Matt for your advice. But I'm having a hard time understanding what you wanted me to do in step 4

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA