TINYTIM HELP TOPIC:
CONCEPT: XANADU, OR WHY PEOPLE GENERALLY DON'T VISIT YOUR LAUNDRY ROOM

"In Xanadu did Khubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.."

The poem "Xanadu" is incomplete, because the author, in a opium-filled
haze, was interrupted by an insurance salesman at his door. This
salesman kept talking long enough to completely fratz that precious
state of mind required to maintain an epic poem. As a result, the
poem "Xanadu" stands at a mere couple of stanzas and is forever
incomplete.

In TIM, the open building system allows you to create some real
humdinger places, IN THEORY. Ideally, you can have a stately manor that
will stretch from here to the hills, filled with TIMsters oohing and
aahing at the splendor of your creations. In theory, anyway.

The general reality is that TinyTIM has a lot of homes and places
built that start out strong, trail off quickly, and eventually fall
apart into a pile of text dung.

Now, this may sound like a harsh and cruel condensation of the place,
but unfortunately it's very true. More often than not, it's because
the Player/Builders didn't spend a few minutes to work out their own
motivations for building a place. There are some questions you want
to ask yourself, and here they are in a handy checklist form.

___ AM I BUILDING THIS JUST FOR ME, OR FOR OTHER PEOPLE TO SEE?

TinyTIM is, after all, a MULTI-USER Shared Hallucination, which
means that other people will be visiting your place. If you
fill rooms with shorthand descriptions that invoke NO image in
your guests' minds, then you're wasting their time and if you
have something you wanted them to think or feel, you might not
succeed if people turn away after the first couple of Rooms.
Build a place you want to share, not a place you want to hoard.

___ IS EVERY ROOM IN MY PLACE A PART OF THE WHOLE, OR IS IT USELESS?

If you're building a house, you want each and every Room to be
an IMPORTANT contribution to the feel of the place, and not just
a creme filling in the twinkie of your Mansion. Do you NEED a
Laundry Room, if all it is is a description and some more exits?
You want what Rooms you DO choose to put in your home to be
either wonderful places in themselves, or vital links in the
chain.

___ DOES ALL MY STUFF HAVE A DESCRIPTION, A USE, AND A PART TO PLAY?

By this, it means that you should be adding Objects in your
Rooms ONLY when the Description of the Room doesn't say enough.
If the Description says there is a Waterfall that goes down
to a stream with rocks in it, THERE'S NO NEED TO MAKE THE ROCKS
unless you're going to make them really special and purposeful
for people visiting. (Maybe they could sit on them, or touch
them, or the like). This holds especially true indoors, where
there's no need to build Furniture Objects if the furniture is
mentioned in the Description. Making an Object indicates that
that Object is to be Interacted with, and that means having a
Description (HELP @DESC), Senses if you can, (HELP SENSES),
shouldn't be able to be picked up unless you intended them to
(HELP @LOCK), and maybe even could have a special command or
use that you programmed in. (HELP @USE, HELP $ COMMANDS).
Just remember.... If you make an object that doesn't DO
anything near another Object that you spent a lot of time
programming, people might never check out your work on the
second object. Players learn fast, and if you show a certain
style of carelessness, they adapt to it quickly.

___ DO ALL OF MY EXITS FUNCTION CORRECTLY, LIKE OTHERS WILL EXPECT?

This means that when you @OPEN Exits between your Rooms, you
should make sure that others will see you pass through the
portal (HELP @OSUCC) and that others in the destination Room
will see you come in (HELP @ODROP). Otherwise, people will just
see "<Yourname> has arrived." and not have any idea where you
came from or where you're going off to, breaking up parties of
TIMsters like nobody's business. It would probably help a lot
if you set the @DESC of the Exit as well, so people who type
LOOK NORTH will get some idea of where the path leads.

___ DO I THINK TOPOLOGY IS SOMETHING OTHER THAN THE STUDY OF TOPS?

Topology, or the layout of the land, is something that is
up to you. If people go NORTH into a Room, they kind of expect
that they could go SOUTH and end up in the Room they came from.
If this ISN'T the case, you should have a very good reason why,
like a locked door or a steel slide leading down, or maybe a
programmed object that pushes the Players along to the next
Location. You should NOT have the exits just link to each of
the Rooms willy-nilly unless this is SPECIFICALLY the effect
you wish to have. Also, you can define multiple names in an
Exit, like NORTH;N;NO;AHEAD;FORWARD... You should use this
feature to anticipate what Players might type to go into that
direction.

___ AM I LEAVING A LOT OF MY PLACE UNDONE AND UNFINISHED?

The cardinal sin in building on TIM is to build a lot of empty
Rooms with the intention of filling them "later". Some Players
who do this do so because they want to keep the layout fresh
in their minds. Our advice is to use a piece of paper and draw
little squares with lines between them. This saves everyone
time in the long run; players who stumble into your house by
mistake won't get drawn in and misled by the empty rooms, and
you'll have a way to work on your TIM project while riding
around in a bus. The Wizards of TIM can't guarantee that your
many multiple empty Rooms will be waiting for you the next
time you log in.

___ HAVE I BUILT A PLACE I'M PROUD TO PUT MY NAME ON?

The last thing to keep in mind is: You're Never Really Done. A
place on TIM, like a garden or living space in real life,
should be given attention every once in a while, with changes
in spelling or grammar, or the addition of features as you
become more proficient in programming, and the like. It should
be a LIVING PLACE, a place that grows and changes with you.
Very little on TinyTIM is truly static.

With this checklist, you could be on your way to building a place
that will knock the socks off your visitors, although ideally they'll
be unable to find a "Laundry Room" to put them in.