From - Sun Oct 04 09:06:18 1998
From: Ragnar Fyri <ragnar.fyri@daf.no>
To: myrla@kef.net, ragnar.fyri@daf.no, sfox@funtv.com, josefcub@usa.net,
        tigra@lionking.org, Jamzhart@aol.com, Talbain@ix.netcom.com,
        sfox80@juno.com, gyroplast@wtal.de
Date: Sun, 04 Oct 1998 08:23:04 +0100
Subject: New uses for old actions! ;P [and *sigh* problems]

I have tried sending this and the next message to the FL mailing list a
couple of times but it keeps bouncing, and mail to majordomo is rejected too. 
So rather than wait until Monday for someone to find out what's wrong and
fix it, I'm sending this 'manually' to the people who were on the list last
time I checked. (That's what I wanted to write majordomo for, to get an
updated list...)
Well, at least the muck is still up; it wasn't (?) yesterday. At least I
could not connect. Feared the worst (remember Watertower?) for a moment,
then I calmed down and tried some of the other MU*s on the same machine, and
*they* worked.
Anyway, over to the business at paw... 

You have probably noticed by now that things get listed in the opposite order
of the one they entered a part of the database. Walk into a crowded room with
your pet in tow, and the pet will see you at the top of the room's "contents"
list. Pick up (or create) a new object and it appears in the first line of
your inventory. Characters (and puppets) sometimes carry gimmick objects
that somehow belong together and should be listed in a particular order.
For example, my first puppet was a kind of Hitchhiker's Guide joke carrying
"The Question!" and "The Answer!". A later creation (now a character) was a
squirrel carrying "an acorn" and "another acorn". Getting the acorns right
was much easier than the two HG items which I even went as far as renaming!

Then there's exits. In room set to show the exits, they get listed with
the new ones first too. So if you want them to appear in a partuclar order
(alphabetically, by number, compass directions listed clockwise (N-E-S-W) or
whatever) you must make the one you want to appear last, first.
But what if you forgot this or just want to insert a new exit in the middle
of the list (SE between S and E for instance - it doesn't look very nice
with SW-N-E-S-W!)? That's where the theme from the heading comes in: You can
use @attach to move an exit to the beginning of the list! You don't even have
to attach it temporarily to something else (like yourself or an object), just
@attach exit=here and it will reattach!

-- 
We'll be right back after these messages.