HM Home Building Guide

The following is a guide for sending in descriptions for HM homes. Its purpose is to describe the best possible format of your HM home description to make it as simple as possible for the coder to create the home. (The easier it is to create the home, the sooner you will probably get to use it.) Before you ever see your home installed, you will need to get approval for the location of your home. I've broken this guide into a few separate parts:

1. The Basics
2. Layout & Exits
3. Additions
4. Room Descriptions
5. Item Descriptions
6. Senses
7. Examples

The Basics
You will be sending this description via mail to the wiz(zes) that are coding the homes by mailing the "hm_maint" mailing group. You should include everything mentioned in this file if possible. Anything that is missing will need to be retrieved from you at a later date, thus prolonging the completion of your home... or we can improvise and you'll be stuck with the results until we can get around to changing it at a much later date. Go ahead and include the location of your home at the beginning of the description so we know where it will go. (Remember to get the location approved by the planet's caretaker(s) first.)

• Each line in the mail should be wrapped in quotation marks. (" ")
• Each line should not be longer than 79 characters including the quotations on either end of each line.
• If a description requires more than one line of text, you should insert a space at the end of the line before the quotation marks at the end of the lines.

Examples:

"This line should be less than 79 characters long including the quotes."

"This line is less than 79 characters long, but the description is "
"longer than one line so a space is added at the end of each line "
"before the final quotation mark is included. "

Some of you may already know some LPC. That's great, but we would much rather just take your descriptions and insert them into our own pre-coded templates. It's much faster using a template that we already know is debugged than to try figuring out what's wrong with yours.

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Layouts & Exits
A simple description of where each room is with respect to the main room would be the minimum requirement.

For example:
From the main room, the bedroom/second room would be to the north,
the lab to the east, the dock to the northeast, and the exit to
the walkway labeled exit.

This would have the main room show the following exits:

There are four obvious exits: north, east, northeast, and exit.

A small ascii map like the one shown below would also be sufficient.

         bedroom  dock
              |  /
             main — lab
              |
             walk

Feel free to change the exit directions to room labels such as 'lab', 'dock', or 'bedroom'. Not every exit has to be a direction. Just make sure you let us know or you will get defaults.

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Additions
Your basic HM home will already include two rooms and a walkway. The main room will be where you appear when you enter the home via the walkway or with the beeper. The walkway is the room that's actually on the planet where you want your home to be. You can write a description for all three of the rooms. If you do not provide one for the walkway one will be provided for you.

Beyond the basic home included, you may purchase additions for your home as mentioned in the HM FAQ file.

The following additions are available to you at a cost of 500K credits each:

• A private dock by the HM home. (for pilots and smugglers)
• Sluis storage and retrieval service for that dock.
• A lab by the HM home. (for scientists and assassins)
• Bank services from within your home.
• A game room equipped with a sabacc table.
• A dartboard for any room in your home.

You must pay for the additions before they are added to your home. Also, the layout/exit requirements mentioned in the previous section apply to additions to an already existing home.

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Room Descriptions
There is a short description, and a long description. The short description should be just a few words. It will be displayed when someone uses lpeer or brief mode. The long description will be shown with peer and when someone enters or looks at the room.

For the short description, simply label it like so:

Short:
"This is the short description"

For the long description, remember to follow the basic rules above like so:

Long:
"This is an example of a long description that will have quotation "
"marks around each line. The lines will also never go beyond 79 "
"characters including the quotes at the beginning and end of each "
"line. Another thing to remember is that if a description requires "
"more than one line of text, you should insert a space at the end "
"of the line before the quotation marks at the end of the lines. "
"\n"

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Item Descriptions
If there are items in your room description that you would like individual descriptions for, this is where you will want to include them. In order to include a description for the items, you will need to provide two things: a list of the items, and a list of descriptions in the same respective order. Each item in both lists is to be in quotes, and separated by a comma. For longer item descriptions, remember to follow the same guidelines mentioned for long room descriptions.

Here is an example of what a list of item descriptions should look like:

Items: "item1","item2","item3"

Item descriptions:
"This is a description of the first item.",
"This is a description of the second item.",
"This is a description of the third item, but this description is "
  "quite long and needs to adhere to the same basic rules described "
  "in the first section. "

Now, what if you wanted the first two items to have the same description? An example would be if you wanted the words 'chair' and 'chairs' to both give the same description about the chairs. Instead of duplicating the description in the second list, we can combine the two items in the first list by 'tagging' them to be one item. This is accomplished by surrounding the two chair items with ({ and }).

Here's another example that includes two items with the same description:

Items:
({"chair","chairs"}),"table"

Item descriptions:
"The chairs are all pushed in under the table. They look very sturdy.",
"The wooden table is very large. There are chairs pushed under it."

So you can see that there are actually now three items to look at, but only two descriptions necessary because the same description will work for the first two items in the list.

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Senses
The senses that can be added to each room description are sounds, smells, and those detected with the Force. The sounds and smells will show up in the room description as well as when the 'smell' and 'listen' commands are used. What you put in the Force description will only be shown when one uses the Jedi 'sense' skill.

Please remember to follow the basic guidelines for longer descriptions.

Here are some examples:

Smell:
"You smell something coming from the lab, but you can't quite make "
"out what it is.\n"

Listen:
"It's so quiet in here, it's scary.\n"

Force:
"You sense something dreadful about this room. You are chilled to "
"the bone.\n"

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Full Room Examples
Here are two examples of what we would like from you. They are probably the closest to a 'template' as you will see. The first one is a basic example with the minimum required for your home. The second example makes use of the optional item description and senses, and additional features.

** Example One **

My home will be on [planet], [number] of rooms to the [direction] of
[landmark].

The second room will be to the north of the main room. I have no
other additions planned.

MAIN ROOM

Short description:
"SoNSo's Home"

Long description:
"You are standing in what looks like someone's home, but you "
"really can't tell for sure. There is just random equipment of "
"all kinds just laying all over the place. Feel free to relax "
"and take a load off, but don't expect to be able to find your "
"stuff when you're ready to leave. "
"\n"

SECOND ROOM

Short description:
"SoNSo's Bedroom"

Long description:
"You are standing in a bedroom. It has a bed. It is not exciting "
"at all, so you probably should just go hang out in the other room. "
"\n"

** Example Two **

My home will be on [planet], [number] of rooms to the [direction] of
[landmark].

The second room will be to the north of the main room, the lab will
be to the east of the main room, and the dock will be to the west of
the main room. My dock will have the Sluissi storage/retrieval made
available.

MAIN ROOM

Short description:
"SoNSo's Home"

Long description:
"You are standing in what looks like someone's home, but you "
"really can't tell for sure. There is just random equipment of "
"all kinds just laying all over the place. Feel free to relax "
"and take a load off, but don't expect to be able to find your "
"stuff when you're ready to leave. "
"\n"

Items:
({"eq","equipment"}),"mess"

Item descriptions:
"It's just equipment. None of it looks useful to you. ",
"You can't believe how messy this place is. There's just stuff "
  "everywhere! If the person-that-lives-here's mother ever saw "
  "this place, she would probably faint. "

Smell:
"You smell something coming from the lab, but you can't quite "
"make out what it is.\n"

Listen:
"It's so quiet in here it's scary.\n"

Force:
"You sense something dreadful about this room. You are chilled "
"to the bone.\n"

SECOND ROOM

Short description:
"SoNSo's Bedroom"

Long description:
"You are standing in a bedroom. It has a bed. It is not exciting "
"at all, so you probably should just go hang out in the other room. "
"\n"

Items:
"bed"

Item descriptions:
"It's a bed. It looks uncomfortable. "

LAB

Short description:
"SoNSo's Lab"

Long description:
"You are standing in a lab. It has a worktable. It is not exciting "
"at all, so you probably should just go hang out in the other room. "
"\n"

Items:
"worktable"

Item descriptions:
"It's a worktable. You could probably work at it, but you decide "
"not to. "

DOCK

Short description:
"SoNSo's Dock"

Long description:
"You are standing on a dock. It has a place to land ships. "
"\n"