Dizzy
MUD Area Builder's Guide
If you are planning to build or upgrade an area for
Dizzy
MUD, this document will help you.
It includes a design method based on the advice of experienced area builders and
complete and up-to-date information on the mechanics of coding as applicable to
Dizzy MUD.
To the Faint of Heart
Building a good area is a lot of hard work requiring a cool idea, vivid
imagination, much knowledge and many, many hours of painstaking attention to
every detail.
- If you're bored and need something to do, go ride a bike or toss a Frisbee.
Both activities are healthier.
- If you want to fill an otherwise idle evening, consider spending some quality
time with your loved ones if they're around or your TV set if not.
- If you plan to be finished in a day or two, don't even bother starting.
- If you want to create an area full of impregnable armor and devastating weapons
so everybody can level really easily, go back to Dizzy and play until you understand
about game balance.
- If the main reason you want to build an area is to become famous and get your name
in an area list, go ahead. But don't count on it being implemented in Dizzy; post it
on a widely read web site instead.
Only if your main motivation is to make Dizzy MUD even more fun and challenging
to its players by adding a high-quality area or by improving one that's already there,
and only if you are willing to do the best job possible no matter how hard it is or
how long it takes, please read on and more power to you!
Disclaimer
Although this document contains all the knowledge an experienced player requires
to code an area and makes every attempt to make this knowledge clear, there can be
no guarantee that a fantastic area will result from its use.
While the general principles of design hold for area coding in almost any MUD, the
specific coding information applies to Dizzy MUD. Apply it to a different MUD at your
own risk. If you use an outdated version of this document to code for Dizzy, it is
possible that not all information will fit even there.
Opinions voiced in this Guide, especially negative remarks concerning mediocre areas,
are those of Elrac and Sharra, two Immortals active on DizzyMUD.
They are not necessarily representative of Immortals on DizzyMUD in general or
DizzyMUD's Creator, Implementor or Administration in particular. The 'I' person in
this document is Elrac.
Document Overview
How to Navigate in this Document
The HTML in this document is hand-coded for Netscape 2.0 and upward
compatible browsers.
Rather than torture your browser with features it may not have or fill your
screen with frames that you don't want to see and which will narrow your field
of vision, I have included navigational zones at the top and bottom of the main
pages of this document. Following the 'Forward ... >>' link on each page
will take you through most of the document in a reasonably logical order.
Tables and explanations found on separate pages are linked together into an
appendix after the main pages.
How to use this Document Offline
For your convenience, I have provided the complete HTML source of this document
as a ZIP file. You can download this file to your hard disk, unzip it and then
ask your browser to Open File... with a file name of ab.htm in
whatever directory you have the files in. You can then click your way from
link to link without an online connection and without online lag.
download ab.zip
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This page was last updated February 7, 1998.
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