Building Guide
| OOC Notes |
| This is a transfer of an old forum post; it has been only minimally wiki formatted. |
It's recently come to my attention that this isn't entirely clear for everyone, so I thought I'd lay out some general guidelines on what makes an area on theme enough to justify for linkage. Most people we have to turn down are in arrears in one of these areas, so...
Firstly, Yuriba is a small village. In fact, village might even be overstating. You know the sort of places you drive through in rural areas that seem to consist of two or three streets, a gas station, and maybe a grocery store? Yeah. That's us. Well, perhaps not that bad, but keep in mind that the village's population is currently around the 2000 mark, and probably only half of those as semi-regular players. So, the goal here is often to build small. Towering mansion? Nuh-uh. Sprawling mega-mall? Nuh-uh. A good sized mall would probably be almost as big as the town! So in general, one is best off sticking to smaller, fairly traditional buildings. One or two stories, homes probably not bigger than 3 or 4 bedrooms, and so on.
Relatedly, we are a small island, some 200 miles away from any other land. No, we don't have cars. Where would they come from? If a cruise ship visited Yuriba, it'd have to dock out at sea and ferry people in on smaller boats. There really isn't any major commerce from outside, so there's really not any way for big corporations to deliver stuff. This is why we don't have Wal-Mart, The Gap, etc. (Also, above size thing, but.) Who would open a retail store in an area where they are incapable of effectively delivering inventory, and have next to no market? It's not like people from the next town over can drive here to shop at the Mega-Mart. Therefore, business that focus on artisan crafts or personal services are much more likely to get linked. A tailor or dressmaker? Great! Old Navy? Not so great. Businesses also should try not to closely duplicate something already on grid, as there's very few things that can afford competition in a place of this size. We've got a wealth of hotels at present, a handful of restaurants (although there's almost always interest in more of those, when well done), and so on. We cannot support 4 jewelry stores or 5 laundromats or whatever, so check what is out there first, so you won't get let down.
Businesses also need to be, well, usable. We definitely strongly prefer those that sell actual items, or RP services that people genuinely find interesting. (Medical services have done well, for example, but I've seen more home building and descing services than I can count crash and burn from lack of interest.) When we cleaned up the grid, most of the stores that, well, don't do anything have been removed. So if you do have a store, think about ways to make it an actual interesting place to be.
One thing that I think a lot of people are not aware of, although it makes sense if you carefully look around, in that Yuriba has no standing electric grid. None. Zero. Nada. Now, this is not the same as 'you can't use electricity', as it's well established that some homes and businesses have personal generators, while many rely on more old fashioned or magical methods of lighting and heating. This does mean that the tech level is naturally limited, though. You can sell laptops, but it's not going to be on theme because probably at least half the people in town don't have somewhere to plug them in. Ditto for any area that's very high tech, whether it be spaceships or just a home filled to the brim with consumer electronics. This is a bit more flexible, but it's definitely something that should be kept in mind.
Outside of these things, most of the rest is more minor. We want the place to feel only a little bit removed from the 'real world', so areas that are strongly magical or fantastical might not fit in. While Yuriba is not part of the country of Japan, architecture in the Japanese style is a slight plus. (Of course, our other main style is probably Old English, so your mileage may vary.) Areas focused on something that raises AUP issues are also, of course, very unlikely to be linked. (Brothels, death match arenas, gun shops, etc.)
Is there a water tower hidden somewhere in the woods, or do all the homes and businesses have to provide themselves with running water?
I'd honestly never considered it, but I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume some level of indoor plumbing, although probably more along the lines of a central cistern... Hmm... Yuriban aqueducts... *muses*
Er, anyway, you can probably go either way - Either assume your home has it's own well and water treatment system, or that there's at least some degree of running water available throughout the island. While I'd have to poke around and research to be sure, I'd think a water system similar to that used in ancient Roman cities is probably along the general lines of what one would likely see in Yuriba.
EDIT: Okay, being me, I dug up a few useful links - None of this seems outside the realm of reasonableness for Yuriba, other than I'd think we have the good sense NOT to use lead pipes, thankyouverymuch. http://academic.bowdoin.edu/classics/research/moyer/html/intro.shtml http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/roman/ http://www.theplumber.com/pom.html
| OOC Notes |
| Since this post, it's been established that Yuriba does, indeed, have a standing aqueduct and resevoir system with bronze and copper pipes providing water to homes and businesses. |
Being too lazy to add a new thread just for this, and since it is related, a few more useful resources for building on the MUSH:
news building, news building2, news building3 - These are all good. Instead, you can @mail one of the royalty (Um, okay, 99% of the time, me) or if they're online and unidle, page them to arrange an inspection. Homes can usually be linked quickly if they're up to code, businesses may take much longer because of the desire for the admin to discuss if it's appropriate and useful (see the first post in this thread for more on that).
+help places, +help places-setup, +help view, +help view2 - Directions on using and creating virtual objects (views) and virtual a-e objects (places). These allow you to build more detail into your room without having really long descs, to detail something someone might only notice if they looked closely, emulate a seating arrangement, create a hot tub without spending qouta, etc.
Seasonal Room Parent (#5123) - This is probably one of the least known but most useful building aides. By parenting your room to #5123, it's automatically set up to the main description, if left blank, will default based on the MUSH's season function to desc_<season>. This is what the roads and so on on use, and basically requires setting an &desc_spring, &desc_summer, &desc_fall, and &desc_winter rather than a main desc. There are, of course, many other ways to write time or season based code, but this is quick and simple for users who don't want or need something too advanced.
Smart Exit Parent(#11), Smart Non-Directional Exit Parent(#12) - These are parents that will give your exits automatic @success, @osuccess, and @odrop messages. The first one is designed for use with cardinal and semicardinal directions (north, east, south, west, northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest, up, down) and relies on use of the LIGHT flag to determine if the relevant rooms should give a message for moving between outside areas, into an indoor area, or into an outdoor area. The second parent is designed for non-directional exits. For both, whether or not the name of the area you're entering or exiting from is prefaced with the word 'the' depends on if the exit is set TRANSPARENT. (ie) an exit set TRANSPARENT will display its source/destination as 'the <room name>'.)
WEATHER - The flag used to tell the weather system to send weather messages to a room. To set it, just type '@set here=weather' when you're in the room in question. The Smart Exit Parent assumes that all rooms set WEATHER are outdoors, as do a number of other bits of code around the MUSH. In general, an area that is intending for gridding and is designed to be outdoors should have this set.