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One of the neat things about being on a muck versus a chat client is that you can play with the text of your description and have it do some pretty amazing things automatically. One way to do that is with a built-in language called MPI (Message Parsing Interpreter). There are a great many tutorials and reference sites on the Web for MPI, most notably the official MPI Manual. The following page is not meant to be instructive about MPI itself, and a basic knowledge of how to get around on a muck, how to write simple descriptions is assumed, as is some basic knowledge of MPI. This is a page of some things that I've used MPI for that I think others might find handy and draw ideas from. If you have any questions or better ideas on how to do things, you can certainly e-mail me. I'd love to hear them! I share
this code mainly because there's not a whole lot of information about this
specific type of thing on web, at least not that I've found. If you
understand it and want to use or adapt parts of it, go for it. The only thing
I ask in return is that if someone asks you how you did what you did, that
you point them here or give credit where it's due. And if I've helped you out
or given you an idea of something new to do, I'd love to hear about it as
well! One word of warning. I have taken out many of the safeguards I have in my code for the sake of the examples here, mainly because they had my dbref # in them. For this reason, strange things may happen should someone with props named the same things as yours look at you. It would be wise to adjust your {prop:} commands accordingly. ;) And
finally, I know there are better and worse ways to do what I've done here.
This is simply how my system evolved. At some point, I may overhaul it and
make it all concise and elegant, but right now it meets the main criterion I
have for such things: It
works. I started with the grow and shrink commands a long
time ago, then branched into the species settings, then branched into my
size-specific lists, then my clothing, and only recently added the part that
sets my height in whospe. In other words, none of this was planned from the
beginning, but rather put together as inspiration struck, and the code
definitely shows that in some places. Take it as an object lesson in legacy
programming. :) Enough babbling! Enjoy! Modular Desc A good
habit to get into on a muck is writing what can be called a modular description.
Instead of writing all of your description as a single unit, you split it up
into parts. For example, let's say I set up a simple description like this: @desc
me = Mataki is a tall, brown wolf, around seven feet in height. She is
dressed in a blue, loose-fitting T-shirt and a pair of old, worn blue jeans. While this
is nice, if I want to change any part of it, I end up having to change the
whole thing at once. If I want to change my height to 100 feet, I have to
redesc myself with "100" in the place of the "seven". If
I want to wear different clothes, I have to rewrite my desc with different
clothing and resend it to the muck. This may not be much of a problem for
small descs like this one, but it gets very problematic for larger ones.
Here, then, is an example of my brown wolf form desc, and the code that
generates it. Description:
Mataki
is a brown-furred wolf femme, 10' 0" in height. She is lean and
powerful, taking pride in her body, working out frequently to keep it in
shape. Speaking of shapes, hers is curvy, her feminine hips wide and toned,
her chest showing off her two largish brown-furred orbs. Her arms and legs
are long and muscular, also well-toned and smooth. As you look over her body,
you hear her giggling and are drawn to her smiling face. Her intelligent
yellow eyes look at you warmly, her dark brown muzzle smiling with
contrasting white teeth. As she smiles at you, her long, brown tail wags
lazily behind her, showing her carefree spirit. Her current size puts her
much taller than normal, more than twice her original height. Her smile
widens a bit as she considers her new stature, her bigger muscles flexing and
relaxing when she moves around. Code: {eval:{list:{prop:species}_form}}
{if:{lt:{prop:height},18000},{eval:{list:size_out}}}{if:{ge:{prop:height},18000},{eval:{list:size_out2}}} You can see that the code to generate the desc is much shorter than the desc itself. This is done by using lists. A list is just a bunch of text that's stored on a player or an object. I use lists to hold all my different forms, my different outfits, and my different size descriptions. Everything in magenta, for example, is generated by the appropriate species list. Everything in red is generated by the appropriate size list, and everything in blue is generated by the appropriate clothing list. The next sections of the page will show how each of the lists works. By the
way, knowing how to make a list is something you'll definitely need to know.
The program to do this is called lsedit.
Here's a good lsedit tutorial. Changing Species On
FurryMuck, as on must furry mucks, there is a species property for every
player. People set this property to show what species they currently are. My
description uses that property to determine which list it should display, and
it uses the code {eval:{list:{prop:species}_form}} to do this. Here's
how: If you
look at my Background page, you'll see a list of
all my different forms at the bottom. I have each of these forms in a
different list. The hyena form is stored in a list called hyena_form, the
lioness is stored in a list called
lioness_form, and so on. I basically just named the lists the
same as the species they represent, plus a _form on the end. This allows me to do
a neat trick with my desc that keeps me from having to have a lot of {if:}
statements cluttering up the code. I could, for example, do this: {if:{eq:{prop:species},wolf},{eval:{list:wolf_form}}}{if:{eq:{prop:species},hyena},{eval:{list:hyena_form}}}...etc. And this
is, in fact, how my species part of the desc looked until I got too many
forms to deal with and had {if:} statements overrunning the thing. Using the {eval:{list:{prop:species}_form}} instead has the
following effect. The {prop:species} is evaluated first, so if I'm currently a
wolf, the code gets replaced with {eval:{list:wolf_form}}. If I'm a hyena,
it gets replaced with {eval:{list:hyena_form}}. Pretty neat! If you plan out your names
for your lists carefully like this, you can save yourself a lot of work
typing all those blasted {if:}s! Another handy hint: I always use {eval:}s along with my {list:}s because I never know when I might want to embed more MPI in a list further down the way. If you don't put an {eval:} before a {list:}, any MPI in the list you're calling won't get parsed, but instead will just be spewed out as code. That's not something that looks really good in a description. ;) Size-Specific Descriptions One thing
I realized after being on FurryMuck for a while was that being different
sizes often meant writing completely different descriptions for each
"level" of size. Let's face it, a 150' wolf should look a bit more
menacing than a 6' one! There should at least be something to give a sense of
scale in a macro desc, as simply replacing a height prop in an existing desc
doesn't always work. So, I came up with the idea of having a specific portion
of my description tailored to match my current size. This kept me from having
to rewrite everything completely for every level; instead, I could simply
write a sentence or two and insert them in the appropriate place. This is
done with the above portion of the description: {if:{lt:{prop:height},18000},{eval:{list:size_out}}}{if:{ge:{prop:height},18000},{eval:{list:size_out2}}} This code
checks my height against 18,000 inches (1500 feet). If it's less than that,
it looks in the list size_out.
If it's greater, it looks in the list size_out2. I had to
do this because I got a bit carried away with writing the size level
sentences, and I wrote 17 of them. The if statement to do this was too big to
fit in one line of code, so I had to split it up into two lists. (By the way,
I know I could combine these into one if statement; I'm just too lazy to
change it. ;) ) To see what each list does, let's look at what's in the size_out list:
{if:{and:{ge:{prop:height},90},{lt:{prop:height},120}},{eval:{list:size01}}} There are
about seven more if's in the list, but they're all very similar to these. The
first line of code there checks to see if my height is between 90 inches and
120 inches (about 7' 6" to 10 feet). If it is, it puts the list size01 in my desc,
which looks like this: Her current size puts her a bit taller than normal, and the smile on her face gives evidence that she enjoys it quite a bit, standing head and shoulders above the average furry populace. The next
line checks to see if I'm 120 inches to 240 inches (10 to 20 feet), and if
so, puts the following text, located in the list size02 in my desc: Her
current size puts her much taller than normal, more than twice her original
height. Her smile widens a bit as she considers her new stature, her bigger
muscles flexing and relaxing when she moves around. And
finally, the last line of code checks to see if I'm between 240 inches and
480 inches (20 to 40 feet), and if so, puts the following text from size03 in my desc: Her
current size gives her a bit of difficulty getting around in a normal-sized
world, as she would be a tight fit in most rooms, assuming she could crawl
through the door. Outdoors, where she probably belongs at this height, she
would be taller than most small houses and trees. That last
sentence is a good example of what I mean by giving scale in a description,
and most of my remaining size sentences are like that. You'll just have to
catch me online to see the rest of them. ;) By the way, there's nothing
stopping you from putting even more MPI in these little sentences. For
example, here's my size05
list: Her
current size definitely puts her in the giant range, as she could currently
look on the roof of a {div:{prop:height},150}-story building without even
having to stand on the tiptoes of her {div:{prop:height},72}-foot long feet,
and her {div:{prop:height},144}-foot long muzzle might look fairly scary to
anyone that might happen to be there. This inserts some numbers to tell how many stories tall I am (assuming a story is 150 inches), and how long my feet and muzzle are, which are of more than passing interest to some people. ;) So, if I were 100 feet tall, the appropriate part of the desc would look like this: Her
current size definitely puts her in the giant range, as she could currently
look on the roof of a 8-story building without even having to stand on the
tiptoes of her 16-foot long feet, and her 8-foot long muzzle might look
fairly scary to anyone that might happen to be there. Pretty
neat! This is the part of my desc that could probably be tweaked and refined
quite a bit. I know some ways to do this, and as I've said, I've just been
too lazy. If you have any ideas, though, I'd be glad to get some e-mail from
you. Changing Clothing This last
part of my desc works very much like the code in the Changing Species section
above. Rather than rehash the explanation, here's the bit of code: Today,
Mataki wears {eval:{list:{prop:clothing}_out}} So, once
again, if I name my clothing lists carefully, I can simply set the prop
called clothing to be whatever I'm wearing, and the appropriate clothing list
will be displayed. Putting A Height In The Species Prop In the past couple of years, I've noticed some people have their height listed along with their species whenever a whospe is done on the room. I thought that was a neat idea, and after several failed attempts (you can't just stick MPI in the species prop and expect it to work), I figured out a way to do it. There is a prop you can set on yourself called species_prop. It holds the name of the prop that will be displayed for your species whenever someone does a whospe. So, I made a prop on myself called ws_prop, and I pointed species_prop to it. Ex: @set me=species_prop:ws_prop. I have
commands that change my size called grow and shrink,
respectively. (Duh!) Whenever I do one of these, I simply make sure to store
the size and my species over to ws_prop.
So, if I grow to 100' tall hyena, the grow command itself sends 100' and hyena over to ws_prop, and since
my species_prop
points to ws_prop,
100' hyena
will get displayed for my species. This is explained a bit more in the next section. Confusing?
It can be. It reminds me of pointer variables, which can cause a lot of
headaches. The whole reason I did things this way was that I already based my
species descs off my species prop, so if I started messing with the species prop
directly, I'd have to change the way I did my Changing Species code. Yet
another example of working around what you've already done. ;) The docs
for what I've tried to explain here can be found by doing a whospe #help on
FurryMuck, by the way. Grow And Shrink The last part of my MPI system that I haven't covered is the one at the heart of it all, the commands I use to actually change my size. I use two easy-to-remember commands. Grow makes me bigger, and shrink makes me smaller. For the MPI of the command, I use the @fail prop, just because it's how I learned to do things. Here's the code: You
grow to
{store:{add:{prop:height},{dice:{div:{prop:height},{&arg}}}},height}
inches. ({store:{if:{lt:{prop:height},360000},{div:{prop:height},12},{div:{prop:height},63360}}{if:{lt:{prop:height},360000},',-mile}
{if:{lt:{prop:height},120},{mod:{prop:height},12}"}
{prop:species},ws_species,me}) The green code above is the
part that actually changes my size. I like an element of randomness, so I use
the dice
command to randomly determine how much I'll grow. The &arg is an
argument I pass to the command. It basically sets a limit on how much bigger
I'll get, on the order of my height divided by x, where x is the
argument. For example, if I'm 72 inches tall, and I type grow 1, I have a possibility
of growing anywhere from 1 to 72 inches. If I type grow 2, I have a
possibility of growing anywhere from 1 to 72/2 (or 36) inches. If I type grow 3, I have a
possibilty of growing anywhere from 1 to 72/3 (or 24) inches, and so on. The red code above is the
part that stores my height and species in my ws_species prop. If I'm taller
than 10 feet, it leaves out the inches. If I'm taller than 30,000 feet, it
measures me in miles rather than feet. Shrink works almost exactly the same as grow, except the random height it rolls is subtracted instead of added to my current height. |
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