Builder:Useful Applications

From Wormhole Sci-Fi MUD Homepage

Useful Applications

This section is for listing applications useful in building, feel free to add to it if you think something should be listed here that isn't.

Tips on choosing useful applications:

• Some applications that are actually quite basic can be useful. Avoid fancy word processors that substitute characters as you type, for example if they put in 'special' characters such as long hyphens or smart quotes. These will mess things up when your area is uploaded, and they'll have to be hunted down one by one. So don't do it. Whatever editor(s) you end up using, keep to the basic, common ASCII characters.
• Whatever you decide to use for your typing, begin with a diagram of the room layout. Areas where you begin with room descriptions are a slower build.
• It's still useful to type in long passages of text using an editor that allows you to spell check (maybe grammar check too). The language used for any spell checking should be UK English, since that's the Wormhole standard.
• Anything that works for you, share your experiences here! Thanks.

Apps

Gedit
A small text editor included with most Linux distributions. It supports spell checking and does not do any weird ASCII characters that may cause issues in zone files, like smart quotes.

Dia for Windows
A free, open source Visio equivalent. It is a fairly simple to use program, useful for quickly producing zone room layouts if you do not want to work on paper for one reason or another.
It is available for windows using the link above, is included in the package managers of most Linux distributions, and is available for OS X via the Fink or Darwinports projects.

Example floor creation
Creating the example did not take much time at all, as drawing out a room is simply a case of selecting the box tool, and then clicking and dragging. Text can be placed anywhere on the workspace and dragged around at will.

Artoo's choice of Apps

I use Omnigraffle Professional for producing diagrams. I used to generally do them on paper, but the electronic version allows me to move things around, while I'm still trying to figure things out.

For areas that are a regular array of rooms (such as Deep Space, or Giedi Prime) I wrote a simple program called Myriad. Tell it how big you want your area, in X, Y and Z, indicate if you want movement to wrap around, and you're done. Then you get busy in OLC, to put in the room descriptions and so on.

In order to emulate the drag-and-drop nature of Omnigraffle, I made the 'KAOS' editor, which figures out the connections between rooms based on where you drop them. Clicking on the connections switches them between walls, doors and open pathways. It's a quick and neat way to generate a .wld file. If only .mob and .obj files were so simple to make! These affect game balance, and take a LOT more thought.

Fine-tuning things with OLC takes forever - as does getting the .zon file finished. Instead, I recommend using a text editor. That's much faster, once you know what the files should look like. (See the Wormhole Builder Docs for this.) Of all the text editors I've tried, I think Xcode is the best. Server-side, Pico works well for me, too.

One problem with text editors is the need to reboot in order to see the results of your changes. It's probably best to work upon a developer port, so as not to bug players with endless reboots. Also, it means you can try 'dodgy' things that might cause a crash, with impunity. (My latest heroic example of this was purging a zone while I was switched into a mobile...)