OOC:Seasonal Room Descriptions

This how-to describes, hopefully in plain language, how to give a given room a set of descriptions which will vary with respect to the island's seasons. There are one or two tricky parts, but on the whole the process is straightforward, and leans upon the very useful Yuriba Room Parent, dbref #5123. Parents are a useful PennMUSH concept, but for the moment it's not terribly important to know what it does.

In the room you are building, parent the room to the Yuriba Room Parent:

@parent here=#5123

Naturally, throughout this how-to, you don't necessarily have to be in the same room that you're editing. If you know the dbref of the room (and if you're changing descriptions around, you'd better well know it), you can substitute that as necessary:

@parent #5078=#5123

For simplicity, we shall simply use 'here' from now on.

The next step is where we are creative. You must create four description attributes, one for each season. For each season (desc_fall, desc_spring, desc_winter, desc_summer), you can set the description for whatever you wish. For example:

&desc_fall here=You stand in a dense forest, a carpet of crunchy brown leaves underfoot.
&desc_winter here=You stand in a dense forest, a blanket of crunchy white snow underfoot.
&desc_spring here=You stand in a dense forest, a cushion of crunchy green moss underfoot.
&desc_summer here=You stand in a dense forest, a mattress of crunchy gray squirrels underfoot.

As with any room description, you can use ansi, views, and so on. From a stylistic point of view, you may find it easier to start with a single description, then copy/paste and subsequently edit it as appropriate for your needs, but that's only one way to do things.

If you are modifying an existing room: if you set its description the most usual way (@desc here=something or another), that will override the above attributes. You'll have to clear it for the attributes to take effect:

@desc here

And that will do it for you. No further work is necessary; the room parent takes care of switching around the seasons, which as a rule will transition on the first day of the calendar month corresponding to the season. Thus, the winter description takes effect on 1 December, rather than the exact date of the solstice (21 December). For further information, refer to 'help season,' 'help parents,' or just ask on the technical help channel (@chan/on techies, +t Hi! I need help on something or another!).