You can set EXTRA and DIRECTIONAL and NIGHT DESCS in rooms. All of these desc commands toss you into the desc editor. Type .h for a list of commands once you're in there. I won't explain those here.
Extra descriptions are really good. If you can add at least one in every room it'll get people in the habit of looking at things. It means you DON'T NEED AN OBJECT for every bloody thing -- you can just put it in the room desc and add an extra desc.
You might want to make it a little obvious that there's something to look at. That is, the room desc might say, "An interesting sign hangs over the shop door." and not say what it is, leading the player to type "look sign". And you better have gotten into redit and typed extra add sign so they have something to look at!
Two more things. 1) You can give an extra desc several keywords. It's a very good idea to think about whether there's any other word they might pick to try to look at this thing, and add a few more keywords. Just type extra add sign door picture if you think those are good keywords. 2) You will get some more help info if you get into redit and just type extra. That is, you use this command to add, edit, and delete extra descriptions, and there's syntax help on all the subcommands.
Boxmud has a special feature for descriptions. If you've built before, you might know how you have to make sure that the default room description is direction-independant if there's more than one way to get into the room. That is, you can't describe how "the woods are thinner here" if they might have gotten into this thin portion of the woods from either the more wooded portion or from a road. It's not kosher for building. It makes it look like you're a beginner. You don't want THAT.
But you might've wanted to add some info for people coming from a certain direction and been frustrated that you couldn't. Well, now you can.
To add directional descriptions to a room, get into redit and type desc south or whatever direction you want. You get tossed into the editor to edit that desc. And that's what appears when someone enters from the south. So if you want to say that "the woods open up into a field" when you enter the field from the woods but it's stupid to say that if you're coming from another part of the field, this is what to use.
I'm assuming you get into redit and type desc night to do that one too. I just haven't added any yet. I've been way too booked up just doing default descs!
When in redit, if you type show desc, you'll get a list of the default, night, and directional descriptions. The show desc command only shows descs that actually exist. Directional descriptions will be listed as "coming from the south" etc.
If you type show extra you'll get a list of the extra descriptions.
Last Modified: 11 Aug 05