MUME
zone boundaries
It could be useful to see zone boundaries as it can be relevant to game-play sometimes. E.g. "where" command is zone based and certain zones do not repop while player is in.
It could be implemented as an exit flag.
I'm using the special flag to store zone boundaries on my map. I agree this is not a good way of doing it.
I wonder if we should add a zone objects to the DB? Besides displaying the zone boundaries, what other info would be attached to a zone? Weather message, good/evil, word of recalls room?
I would start simply with special direction flag for zone boundary (ideally if it would set/unset from both sides automatically when possible for neighbouring rooms when user sets/unsets it from one side). From the additional features you mentioned, weather AFAIK isn't monitored by mmapper atm, good/evil can be overridden by individual rooms both in MUME (I believe) and in mmapper (so no need), so only to answer the question "where will I word to?" would it be useful for atm.
@teoli2003 glad to see you're back! 🎉
Word of recall being in a zone can be inferred since we have room flags for it now. What do you want to track for weather? Propensity to snow/rain?
@tomaswindsor where will I word to can now be somewhat solved now by doing a shortest path search: _dirs -f whiteword
I wouldn't be so sure, that in MUME the used wordspot is always the nearest one possible...
The weather may not be the most useful for the play, but I think we have a usage for the dawn and dusk messages that are also different for most zones. See https://github.com/MUME/MMapper/blob/master/src/clock/mumeclock.cpp line 63 and following, where a tiny fraction of the messages have been listed.
We can either extend the list there or have it in the map data itself. Knowing which zone we are in and having only 2 potential messages may be (you know better than me here) than comparing with 250 messages.
I think I will start to collect these dawn/dusk messages :-) I will do a PR to mumeclock once in a while (I will start West :-) )
@teoli2003 any progress on what you mentioned above?
I'm starting to think we might need to construct zones as more of a 'group of rooms' concept. We could even then do something like a 'watchtower' group or a 'super zones' group. Basically having groupings that have various classes (or tiers?) kind of like the InfoMarks system.
XML areas (spanning multiple zones) are exposed in room: https://mume.org/help/change_xml
This could be used to speed up the search of rooms.