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Height, Weight and Volume

Height, Weight and Volume are the new black jeans -- everybody's wearing them casually. Or maybe they're the new black. Or the new HTTP. Nah, never mind, I'm just lost with all these trends. They're certainly the old height, weight and volume, whatever else they may be.

Weight and volume are pretty easy, and their capacities make sense. If a bag (or even a room) has a certain weight capacity, you can only put that much weight in. Beyond that, Phantasmal will tell you that there's too much an no more will go in. The same applies to volume -- a given container will only hold so much, and no more.

Height is a little funky. Height doesn't add up in the same way, so if a quiver is marked as having a height capacity of 1 meter and you put in an arrow that's half a meter, you can put in two -- and then as many more as you have weight or volume for. So if the quiver holds fifteen pounds and each arrow weighs a half-pound, you can put in thirty arrows, even though the quiver only has a height capacity of a single meter and each arrow is a half-meter. However, the quiver won't hold even one single 1.5-meter javelin. The javelin is over the height limit, so it won't fit, arrows or no.

You may have noticed me combining American and metric units in that last paragraph. The OLC system tries to accept all kinds of units, but everything gets converted internally to centimeters (for length), liters (for volume) and kilograms (for weight). Yes, we know that kilograms are actually a unit of mass, and we simply pretend that all mass is converted to weight as it would be at sea level on earth. That means gravity, for these conversions, is 1 G, or 9.8 meters per second per second, just like on Earth at sea level. Yes, even if the local gravity may be different in some specific area of the MUD. Are you happy, all you physics buffs out in the audience?

You've been making objects for awhile here, at least if you're reading and doing the tutorials in order. So you've seen where height, weight and volume get set when you're making an object, and where their capacities get set if you're making a container. Feel free to make some containers with specific heights and weights and play with putting stuff into them and taking it out. I expect that'll keep you entertained for at least a couple of minutes :-)

Height, weight and volume can also be inherited. So if you make an object and you assign it a parent, you'll have the option in creating it of just defaulting its height, weight and volume to that of the parent. This may or may not be of any use to you.

So how do you check this stuff? The stat command will tell you an object's height, weight and volume, and will show you the capacities for same if the object is a container.

The other thing you may want to do is edit the values. There's a small family of commands for exactly that purpose that you'll want to become acquainted with. They have names like @set_obj_height, @set_obj_length, and for capacities, things like @set_obj_weight_cap and @set_obj_height_capacity. They work pretty much exactly as you'd expect, but you can check the online help if you need more instruction in their use.