So, I created my own room building guide, hopefully to help new builders as they stumble their way through building on 4D. I'm always glad to help, but I'm not always around, so here you go!
Room editing.
This is what you will see when you first redit a room:
-- Room number : [4400] Room zone: [44]
1) Name : An unfinished room
2) Description :
You are in an unfinished room.
3) Room flags : NOBITS
4) Sector type : Inside
5) Exit north : -1 - Nowhere
6) Exit east : -1 - Nowhere
7) Exit south : -1 - Nowhere
Exit west : -1 - Nowhere
9) Exit up : -1 - Nowhere
A) Exit down : -1 - Nowhere
B) Descriptions : Extra
C) Descriptions : night description
Not Set.
E) Descriptions : Look under
F) Descriptions : Look behind
G) Descriptions : Look above
H) Smell :
You smell nothing interesting.
I) Listen :
You hear nothing interesting.
J) Mine : Num: -1 Level: -1 Tool: None
R) Descriptions : Quests flagged - NOT SET
S) Script : Not Set.
Q) Quit
Now we will change these one by one and show you how to do it.
-- Room number : [4400] Room zone: [44]
The room number and room zone can not be changed. This is the room you are editing and the zone it is in – hopefully your zone.
1) Name : An unfinished room
Let’s change the name of the room. This is what will be at the top of the screen when someone walks into that room. This should be something like the name of the street they are on, what’s most obvious in the hallway they’re in or the special thing about the room they are in. Room 4400 is one of the rooms that’s around the path of the Dragon Master’s fort (zone 44). So, we’ll change this to:
1) Name : Dragon Fort Northern Wall
This tells us exactly where it is in the Dragon Fort zone.
2) Description :
You are in an unfinished room.
This is the actual description of the room. As you see, it starts out with “You are in an unfinished room.” Well, we want to make the room finished. This is where you show the players what they see in their immediate surroundings – whether it be a room or outside area. Remember that small details can be added later. So, you can describe that there is a pine tree here and later go into descriptions of a knot in the tree if you wish – the knot in the tree does not have to be supplied here. If you’re going to make a pine tree object though, you don’t need to describe it in the room description as it will load as an extra object. For our example room, there isn’t much too it as it’s just a path around the Dragon Fort so, we’ll put in this:
The dirt path created by adventurers like you tramping around the outer wall of the fort continues to the east and west. The wall itself is devoid of any hand or foot holds making it impossible to scale for humans, animals or even plant life. Not that there is any plant life around here to speak of as its all been
worn away.
Always use /f when you’re finished with your description. This will format it to the screen without the indent (Molly doesn’t like the indent).
3) Room flags : NOBITS
This is where you get to make your room special by adding flags to it. Is it dark so you need a light source or infravision to see in it? Is it a deathtrap so anyone entering automatically falls to their death? The choices of roomflags in 4D are many and make sure you choose the right one for your room. Here are the choices:
1) DARK 2) DEATH
3) !MOB 4) INDOORS
5) PEACEFUL 6) SOUNDPROOF
7) !TRACK
!MAGIC
9) TUNNEL 10) PRIVATE
11) GODROOM 12) HOUSE
13) HCRSH 14) ATRIUM
15) OLC 16) *
17) VEHICLE 18) !RECALL
19) ARENA 20) GOOD
21) EVIL 22) HP
23) MANA 24) MOVE
25) ROLEPLAY 26) !TELEPORT IN
27) !TELEPORT OUT 28) !SUMMON IN
29) !SUMMON OUT 30) WILDERNESS
31) !VIEW 32) DO_NOT_USE
33) GOLD DEPOSIT 34) SILVER DEPOSIT
35) COPPER DEPOSIT 36) IRON DEPOSIT
37) ANTIMONY DEPOSIT 38) CHROMIUM DEPOSIT
39) QUARRY 40) COAL MINE
41) SPRING 42) PASTURE
43) DRAGONPORT 44) TIN DEPOSIT
45) PLASTONIUM DEPOSIT 46) BURNING
The path around Dragon Fort has nothing special to it, so we made no changes.
4) Sector type : Inside
There are plenty of types of sectors including air (need to be able to fly), space (need a space suit), or even the benign forest or inside. The default is inside. Here is the list of choices you will come across:
0) Inside 1) City
2) Field 3) Forest
4) Hills 5) Mountains
6) Water (Swim) 7) Water (No Swim)
Underwater 9) Air
10) Desert 11) Space
12) Road 13) Entrance
14) Atmosphere 15) Sun
16) Black Hole 17) Vehicle(coded)
18) Swamp 19) Reef
20) Tundra 21) Snow
22) Ice 23) Prairie
24) Badlands 25) Rail
Since the outside path of the fort is, well, outside, then the first two don’t work (Inside or City), it’s not in water, so any of those don’t work. The best I could come up with at this point of time was “Field” so we’ll enter that.
4) Sector type : Field
5) Exit north : -1 - Nowhere
6) Exit east : -1 - Nowhere
7) Exit south : -1 - Nowhere
Exit west : -1 - Nowhere
9) Exit up : -1 - Nowhere
A) Exit down : -1 - Nowhere
Entries 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A are all exits so we’ll handle them together. I mentioned in the description that the path around the fort continues to the east and west so, I don’t have to worry about 5, 7, 9, A, but I do have to fill in 6 and 8. When you first open up the exit number, you get this table:
1) Exit to : -1 - Nowhere
2) Description :-
<NONE>
3) Door name : <NONE>
4) Key : 0
5) Door flags : No door
6) Purge exit.
Like the main room, this too has to be filled out as much as you need to. First is the exit to – this is the room vnum that the exit goes to. For example, the east exit of the room we’ve been working on goes to room number 4497, so we end up with this:
1) Exit to : 4497 - DragonFort Northern Wall
But, that’s not the only part that *has* to be filled out. The second step is filling out a description of what someone sees if they look in that direction. It is useful at this time to look at the room description of the room this exit goes to – what would the players see that could be important. In room 4497 – which really is just a continuation of the path around the dragon fort, except that it’s a corner and there is a large rock out from that corner which is peculiar, so I’ll mention it here as the player should be able to see it. So, we end up with something like this.
2) Description :-
The path continues around the fort and you can see a rock in the distance.
Usually, you’re told not to use the word “you” in descriptions, but that can easily be broken here as you *know* the player is looking in that direction so you can refer to them as you. This is what *you* see when *you* look there.
There is no door, keys or door flags for this room so we don’t need to use those. But, in case you need those, you do it this way:
3) Door name : <NONE>
This is the name of your door – for example if you wanted a secret door with the name trap door, you’d put it here, but know that this name is only one word. So you will never be able to open the trap door, but you can open the trap or the door, but the first word is the word it will use when the player opens it. So if you put in trap door and the player opens door, the player will see that s/he opens the trap.
4) Key : 0
This is the vnum of the object you have created to be the key for this door. It can seriously be anything and doesn’t even need to look like a key.
5) Door flags : No door
When you open up this choice, you get these options:
0) No door
1) Closeable door
2) Pickproof
No door is the default that you use when there is no door, just open hallway, open space, etc – but, if you had that you wouldn’t be using this choice.
Closeable door is what you would choose if you want the door to be able to open and close – whether it has a lock or not doesn’t matter.
Pickproof is if you want it so thieves can not pick the lock on the door, otherwise, they won’t have to find that key you made. Use this sparingly though as picking lock can be one of the useful skills for thieves. A pickproof door should only be in front of very important things like people or objects that shouldn’t be ran into unless they have the key first.
6) Purge exit.
Purge exit is used if you realize the mistake that the western exit was supposed to be to the north. This gets rid of the everything you’ve done in the exit choice.
B) Descriptions : Extra
This is where you put in your extra descriptions (as many as you want) to fill out what the room looks like. This is where you’d put that knot in the tree we discussed earlier (provided you didn’t actually make the tree an object). If I hadn’t had a specific idea for the magical outer wall of the Dragon Fort, I may have used this for someone looking at the wall and let them know that there were hand or foot holds there. I still could, just in case someone looked at the wall to make sure. Or maybe it’s just on the surface that it looks like it doesn’t have hand and foot holds and if you actually look at the wall, you see cracks where you may be able to climb up the wall…
C) Descriptions : night description
Not Set.
Night descriptions are something new to 4D and have been used rarely. These are best used when the lighting would make the room look quite different than it would in the daytime. For example, you have a forest. In the daytime the forest is bright and cheery with squirrels and rabbits hoping around, but at night, once the sun sets, that same forest – even though it doesn’t actually change – could look quite dark and sinister. It’s all in the lighting.
E) Descriptions : Look under
F) Descriptions : Look behind
G) Descriptions : Look above
E, F, and G are all like B, except you are looking under, behind, or above the object. So, let’s say we had that pine tree, using E, I could have the player look under the tree and find something (there is a rabbit burrow in the ground) and that may tell them that they should look in the burrow and maybe they’ll find something. These are used for good places to hide things.
H) Smell :
You smell nothing interesting.
This is the smell that is in the room. All rooms have some particular smell or other whether it creates it itself (like a kitchen baking items) or whether it’s a strong smell coming from another room (you smell the sweet smell of cookies coming from the west), either way, again you can use *you* because if they type this, you know they are actually smelling for something. This could also be used to go into detail about a smell you have touched on briefly in the room description. For example if you’d said there was a sweet smell in the air, if they typed smell then you could detail about the aroma of cookies coming from the west. This is one of the extra items that Molly wants filled out for a complete zone.
I) Listen :
You hear nothing interesting.
Like smell, but the player is listening for some clues. Again, every room has a sound whether it’s created in the room, or by things close to the room. Be careful using this to let players know there is a mob nearby as that mob could have been killed. Again, you can use *you* in this as the player is actively listening for sounds. And you can use it to describe a sound in detail that you briefly touched on in the room description. For example, in the room description maybe they heard some birds squawking , in the listen description they could be squawking from the west – or maybe they’re squawking over a kill in the same room. Hrm… maybe that kill can be a clue – or harbor something inside its belly that the birds were squawking over. They do like shiny things.
J) Mine : Num: -1 Level: -1 Tool: None
I’ve never used this myself and taking a look at it really doesn’t explain it.
R) Descriptions : Quests flagged - NOT SET
This is a new option so that people can now have rooms changed on whether a person has completed a certain quest or not. For example if you have a forest that is evil until the player kills the evil queen then you use this for the description of the good forest once the queen is killed. Please note that now two people in the same room may be looking at different descriptions – one that’s killed the queen with the good description and one that has not, with the bad description. Let’s look at our choices here:
1) Quest Type: 0
This is the type of quest – whether it affects a player or the whole zone. Let’s look at the options:
1) Zone wide quest flag
2) Player only quest flag
A zone wide quest flag would affect the whole zone once the quest is completed. Let’s say to complete a quest, someone has to blow up a dam. They do so and the affect is that the area is flooded. Everyone who then comes into the area sees the area as flooded – because the quest had been done.
The Player only quest flag only affects the player – as stated above in the example of the evil forest/evil queen. The one player will see the room differently than the other, because they’ve completed the quest and the other hasn’t.
2) Quest Keywords:
<NONE>
This is the flag that the player has from completing the quest.
3) Room Description:
<NONE>
This is the description the player (or the room if zone quest) will have if they’ve completed the quest.
4) Goto next quest description: <NOT SET>
As you can see, there can be many different descriptions for a multi-layered quest. Say that they have one description for before the quest starts – say, building a death star – their quest is to get product to
Build the death star, they succeed in getting metal for the outside (new description as the death star starts being put together). Next quest, get some weapons to make the death star have teeth, they finish that and get a new description as the weapons are being put on, etc, etc, until the final quest and the death star is finished.
S) Script : Not Set.
This is for the scripts set on the room. Each script is its own vnum.
Q) Quit
Erm… obviously when you’re done editing your room.
