Phantasmal Site > Phantasmal Tutorials > OLC > Zones

Dealing with Zones

There's a pretty arcane set of commands in Phantasmal that alluded to earlier. You don't need to use them at all most of the time, but to be a good implementor on your Phantasmal-based MUD you're going to need to figure them out. Well, that or hand-edit the data files. But if you want to understand the commands, this tutorial is here for ya, man.

That's right. Zones. Segments. And all those commands that play with them. Pretty ugly and scary, huh? Let's hit the basic concepts first, shall we?

Phantasmal divides all possible object numbers into groups of a hundred. In theory the numbers go up to over two billion but most MUDs shouldn't need to come anywhere near that. You can tell what segment an object number is in by cutting off the last two digits. For instance, object #374 is in segment 3. Object #3479234 is in segment 34792 and on a very large or very fragmented MUD. Object #2147 is in segment 21. No problem.

You can see what segments are sitting around by type @segmap. The output might look like this:

Segments:
0      /usr/common/sys/mapd           0
1      /usr/common/sys/exitd          0
2      /usr/common/sys/mapd           0
3      /usr/common/sys/mapd           1
4      /usr/common/sys/mapd           1
5      /usr/common/sys/mobiled        0
--------
    

The numbers on the left are the segment numbers, the filename in the middle is the segment owner, and the number on the right tells you what zone number that segment is in. Every segment is in one zone or another, though the zone might be zero, which means it's not in any interesting zone at all.

So what's in any specific zone? To find out a little, type @zonemap by itself on the command line. Your output might look like this:

Zones:
  0: Unzoned
  1: Miskatonic University
  2: Innsmouth
-----
    

If so, then zone #1 is Miskatonic University and zone #2 is Innsmouth. This zonemap probably belongs to a very small Lovecraft-themed MUD.

Looking at the @segmap above, we see that zone #1 consists of segments #3 and #4, or objects #300-#499, inclusive. To find out what's there, you can type "@list_room world" if you're patient and page through 'til you get to the zone you care about. Or you can type "@stat #300" -- if there's a room number 300, you can then say "@goto #300" to get there. If there isn't, you can make a room #300 (with @make_room or "@new_room #300") and then go there. Either way, once you're in a room in that zone, one with an object number between #300 and #499, you can just type "@list_room" and get a list of just the objects in that zone.

What if you want to make a new zone, one nobody's ever dealt with before? You can use the @new_zone command to make it if you like. You'll first need to decide on a zone name. To call it Bob's Big Basement, you'd say "@new_zone Bob's Big Basement". Type @zonemap to make sure you did it right. Now type %datadump, because you really don't want to create a bunch of stuff and then maybe lose it. Save, save, save. Incidentally, I'm going to pretend for the rest of this example that Bob's Big Basement was zone #4. If it came out as a different one (check @zonemap to find out) then use that number instead.

Now you want to put something into your new zone. How? First, decide what segments you want it to occupy. In this case, you want all new segments. There wasn't any owner for segment 6, so first of all you can claim segment 6 -- object #600 through #699, for those of you keeping count.

To do that, first create a new object #600. You can use @make_room, @make_portable, @new_room, @new_portable, or probably other commands as well. No matter how you do it, make an object #600. Do it. Note that it has to be a room, portable or detail -- not an exit or a mobile, for instance.

That means there's now a segment 6. Type @segmap and you'll probably notice that it's in zone 0, and thus unzoned. To change that, you'll use a new nifty command you haven't seen before. Go ahead and type "@set_seg_zone #6 #4". That should assign segment #6 to zone #4 (Bob's Big Basement). Now you've got a new zone, and it's got its own segment. Do you utterly win or what?

At the moment segments are just a good way to organize object numbers so everybody's stuff doesn't get all mixed up together. In the future there'll be a way to set security on zones so that only specific builders can mess with a given zone, thus keeping other people out of your stuff.

You'll notice that mobiles and exits just allocate numbers any way they please rather than paying proper attention to zones. While some of that will eventually change, overall mobiles and exits are both harder to corral into specific zones than objects are. We'll figure more of this out when we've got permissions, we promise. For the moment just create exits and mobiles as though zones didn't exist and you'll find that everything works just fine.

What next? More tutorials, right? It beats looking through the online help over and over and over, and we know you have no social life, you MUD programmer, you.