From - Mon Sep 14 18:20:34 1998
From: Ragnar Fyri <ragnar.fyri@daf.no>
To: fuzzylogic@mudservices.com
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 23:18:16 +0100
Subject: First message

Habari! Hujambo?

This is Jabari (young male lion) speaking, uh, writing! So we've got a
mailing list now. Great, that's more handy (pawy?) than page mailing and
bulletin boards that noone seems to read anyway. (sigh) At least it will
be when/if everyone or at least most of them gets on the list. (I talked
with Canon on TFF and he said he's got on it too. Hi, Jim! [In-joke - see
the desc of the engineering dept at the SFOXS space station for a possible
clue...])

Okay I hope this works. The welcome message didn't say anything about what
address to send messages for the list to, so I'm making an educated (?)
guess.

Talking of the space station, the ground 'entrance' (the space lounge/
recruitment office) has been relocated to 100S Angora (right south of the
park) from the rather crowded North Main (w and n of the park). It would
probably be a good idea if a few of the others in that area (NM) did the
same and spread out a bit. (I mean relocate somewhere in the area, not
in the same block!)

>From one thing to another, I see the guest skunks I sneaked in as a little
joke have become a permanent feature. Grrrreat! May be an idea to make them
a little more 'guestish' by adding something like "She looks shyly at you,
wondering if you have the time to answer some questions or show her around."
If they have permanent descriptions now and don't get reset to the same one
when activated or deactivated, it may be an idea to make them slightly
different by altering the colours of their purses etc.

So what have you other creators been up to of late? It strikes me that I
haven't seen very much beside my own constructions, the starting area and
a couple of things a few others wanted to show me.
To answer my own question and give you something to waste your time on, my 
own construction work has been in three areas.

1) The SFOXS Space Station was really Canon's project but most of the time
he just created rooms for me to detail so it has become more or less mine.
<g> (Check the description of the engineering dept again) Some of the descs
are temporary just to make the rooms a little more interesting/funny to
look at, but may be worth a look anyway. If you don't want to go through the
Space Lounge miniplot to get there you can find a teleport location on the
bulletin board.

Oh, and the name of the place was originally "sfox's Space Lounge" because
Canon (not to be mistaken for Cannon) was originally registered under his
FurryMuck name of sfox. When he changed his name I took the apostrophe off
the sign and made it an acronym for... Uhm, go to the lounge and see for
yourself! <g>

2) The Rainbow Maze. Some of you may have noticed that i carry an item
called Rainbow Crystal. This is a magical crystal that sends you into
another dimension... Oh well. Look, it has an exit action on it that leads
to the start room of a maze, okay? I may make some duplicates to spread
around to make the maze more accessible. Let me know if you want one to
either carry around or put in one of your rooms (which must be fairly
accessible to the public of course!).

The maze itself consists of intersecting bands of different colours and
I'm trying to come up with special desciptions (and even some actions!)
for each combination. Go have a look and let me know if you have any
suggestions.

3) The Domain project is a planned area for fans of the web comic "Kevin
and Kell" to build their own version of Domain, the suburb where K&K live.
So far I have made a bus route from south of the park to the Domain area.
The 'board' action on the bus stop sign is locked so the first time you try
to get on the bus the driver will direct you to a web page where the
uninitiated can find out more about the project and where to find the strip.
And how to identify yourself as a K&K fan to the driver so you can get on
the bus. If you are just curious about what I have come up with and don't
care about missing the in-jokes, the secret is to set the property 'kkfan?'
on yourself to 'yes': @set me=kkfan?:yes

>From one thing to another, does anyone know if you can use MPI to check
flags on things? The maze is set up so I can change the layout by locking
and opening doors and setting the locked ones dark, and i would like to have
descriptions that change depending on whether the edit is dark or not. (The
current descriptions say "A door leading (for example) east - maybe..."
Pretty lame, huh? ;)) And sometimes I need to check if a character is a
guest. Before the guest handler got fixed i could just check the character's
name, but that soon ended. Then I considered checking the sex and/or species
but now the guests are all female skunks the best way seems to be to check
if they are players and not builders. (Of course, if I check just the builder
flag it won't be able to tell guests from zombies, or what?)

I'm asking a lot of questions, right? But just to show I have some answers
too: Many (too many IMHO) builders make a lot more or less interesting places
with a lot of exits and don't bother with putting messages on them. Okay so
it's boring to sit and type "@odrop n=comes in from the street" and
"@osucc=disappears into the bar" all the time, but there are easier ways.
On Toon Furr and Fluff someone has made a small program called SGE
(presumably short for Setup Generic Exit or something) which gives exits
standard messages with MPI code that tells you all about where an exit leads,
and where you go and come from when you use it. Until someone imports it
here this batch file will do the same thing:

@act exit=here
@desc exit=You see the way to {name:{links:this}}.
@drop exit=You leave {name:{loc:this}} behind.
@odrop exit=arrives from {name:{loc:this}}.
@osucc exit=wanders to {name:{links:this}}.
@succ exit=You wander to {name:{links:this}}.

All that is left is to link the exit and rename it. Maybe someone can make
this into a macro that takes the exit's name as a parameter? (To modify
existing exits you leave out the first line of course.)

Okay, that should be enough for now (and more than enough for an experiment
to test the address!). In case you wonder, the greeting I opened with is the
swahili (roughly) equivalent of "Hi, how are you?" (No I don't speak the
language [Siwezi kusema Kiswahili!] but I found some terms on the web to use
(occasionally) with my character. :P)