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Object Details

Ah, object details, the season when a young man's fancy turns to love. No, wait, that's spring, and it's the season when the road to his house turns to mud. Well, close enough.

Object details replace the now-obsolete NoDesc Scenery Objects. The idea is that if an object can be referred to, but it's not something you can pick up and move around, then it's probably a detail of the room it's in. For instance a lamp-post, grass, the sparkle of sun on water, and the wall of a building are all essentially integral parts of the room they're in -- they're not something the player can pick up and move around, though they might be things he can look at, put things into, or otherwise manipulate.

An object detail can't be picked up. That's a part of what it is. An object detail can be a container, though -- think of a hole in the trunk of a tree, for instance. An object detail is part of some other object, and can't be moved to other objects (except by builders, who can do whatever they please to a detail, including turning it into a non-detail, if they know how). An object detail may be openable or lockable, just like any other container. When you look in your inventory or around the room, open object details will be searched through just like other open containers, and sometimes even more aggressively than other kinds of containers.

Currently details can't be detached (by a player, not a builder) or broken off of their location object (also called their detail-of object), but scripts will eventually allow this. So they're part of the object they're part of, and they can't be removed. Phantasmal chooses to consider this a good thing.

So how do you make one? The easiest way is to say "@make_detail", pretty much like how you make a room. You'll need to tell the detail what object it's a detail of, unlike with a room, so you'll need that object's number. And you'll need to answer a lot of the same kinds of questions you would for any other object. Give it a try.

You'll definitely want your detail to have a noun and probably some adjectives -- you want to be able to look at it, for starters. So if you make a "grass" detail, you can "look grass", and if the grass is a detail of your current room, you should see its description. You can also "glance grass" to see its glance description. Pretty cool, no?

At the moment, details are mostly used the same way Phantasmal used to use NoDesc objects, and the way many MUDs use "keyword" objects -- things that can be looked at but not picked up. And since Phantasmal makes them first-class objects, some of the usual problems ("get grass" -- "You don't see that here!") are less severe. Details also have the excellent property that they can be inherited. You'll find out about that in another tutorial.

If you want to change a detail's location after creating it, you'll need to use the @set_obj_detail function. To set object number #112 (a detail) to be a detail of base object #37, you'd say "@set_obj_detail #37 #112". To make a detail stop being a detail and start just being an object, set its base object to #-1 that way -- "@set_obj_detail #-1 #112".

Speaking of which, go read more OLC tutorials. It's good for you!