Just out of curiosity, why do the overland "normal rooms" (such as room 50,000) have n,s,e,w loops? From what I can see it doesnt really matter.. or am I wrong again?
The reason I want to know is I'm trying to get the overland to overlay a city, then edit that overland map to match the "normal rooms" so that the immortals can see a where every mobile is located in said city (and restrict the mere mortals to "text" view).

From what I understand, the 'overland' areas are just for overland things. You shouldn't write a city into the vnum ranges for the overland. You should instead write an area seperate, and then link it to the overland.

The thing to think about here is how the overland works. The loops are probably because the player is always in room 50000. Moving only changes the player's coord while they're in that room and flagged as ONMAP.

This is also why there are a few skills (such as track) that do not work on the overland. Track fails regardless of where the player is on the Overland because it checks for the character being in the same room, which would be the same room you're in as well. This is also true for object update messages and pretty much anything that should be heard by only people local to the room.

Hope this helps... If you need more help with the Overland, I'd be more than happy to teach a bit more. It's just getting time.

Also note, I'm completely self-taught with the Overland. I poked the code until it yelped

- X

I had a quick few seconds to pull up this information:



You can get help on those other topics, but this next one is what you should look at as far as linking areas go:



Also for the heck of it:



I think the watchtowers one was included in HELP ROOMFLAGS, but I moved it to its own help file to clean up a bit.

This should give you enough information to go on.

- X

A tangental side issue, is this, but oh well.



Yes and no. The overland room itself is pretty much a sacred cow. Don't touch it.

OTOH, the overland zones are 500 rooms for a reason. One of those is to add small stuff - the odd room here and there that would be inconvenient to make a whole area out of, frex. Another thing is that the overland zones, coming early as they do in area.lst, make good spots to stick items that load in multiple areas - All of the Graecian soldier equipment that loads on soldiers in GR, Venetorium, and all of the forts is actually a series of items in alatia.are.

Which doesn't really address Somnio's issue, but.

..But is still a good tip. Thanks

Well, perhaps another way to put what I'm searching for..
I'm trying to have an overland map over a room, say 40,000.. and instead of having loops in the room 40,000, have it display a city (in text) vnums 40xxx-40xxx. Hrm. Okay, a simpler way:
"A watchtower, in reverse"
So far I've not found a way, but I'm stubborn

Well you've lost me on this one...



A city in text? You mean what areas always have been? Then why bother with the Overland?



Again, huh? A watchtower in reverse would be a room where a player goes from Overland to regular area. You can make these via setexit... The difference with a Watchtower presay is that they're not really 'exits' as much as they're 'windows'. You're not moving into the Overland map, you're just moving to a point where you can see part of it, you can't move around on it, you can just go back where you came from.

If you wanted to do this 'in reverse', simply set an exit on the map to a room that had only an exit back to the overland...

If you wanted to make it so that if a player went 'up' at any point from within the city, and moved to a point on the overland relative to their spot in the city, you'd need to pretty much 'map out' your entire city on the overland too, and keep track of the coords, then make exits in the rooms to those coords.

This is rather silly though, in my honest opinion... since you can simply create a shape that represents a city, and mark exits so players can go through it.

-- X

Actually, I wanted sort of a tracking system for the immortals, where THEY can go to a city in overland, and see the representation of players (whereas the players are limited to text).

At the risk of confusing things even more, I think what he's getting at is something along the lines of having a minimap accompany the display in normal zones. Something I've been trying to work out with several of the asciimapper snippets out there, but thus far none have been able to do as I like, and I've not had much luck in trying to force them to.

Garil has such a thing on his site, Xerves has it in the Fear codebase, and by God, one day I'd like to as well, but neither version has done what I'd like it to.

For the sake of sanity, I'd have to agree that this is what I am attempting to do (although I'm not.. but I am.. kinda
Oh well, back to the compiling..

I see, and it would take a bit of coding to do it right.

For now, I'd try the WHERE command

-- X