Room Building Tutorial

• Main Options - Primary Room Settings are here (and explained below)
• Extended Options - Use these to set additional options for roleplay rooms
  • While limited to 512 characters, they allow for dynamic room descriptions
  • This includes 9 time-of-day descriptions: midnight, late night, dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, twilight, and night
  • The times are based on Pacific Standard
  • Also includes 4 seasonal descriptions: winter, spring, summer, and autumn
  • Filling these is not mandatory
  • Trick: The same description in multiple slots to create a sense of timelessness or perhaps emulate a shorter day or night
• View Log - Allows owner and moderators to download or delete room logs
  • If "Log posts in this room" is checked, each post will be saved for owners and mods to view anytime
  • Recommendation: Save log onto your computer occasionally and clear the log to save space and bandwidth, especially if your room gets a lot of traffic

You may recognize these color attributes from HTML code, but if not, this enables you to set a look quickly:

• Background - Dropdown list with all the default backgrounds already on the Shards server
  • Select "Custom" from the dropdown to use your own background
  • You may also use dropdown selection "None" to have no background
  • Keep in mind, players can turn off backgrounds to reduce visual clutter
• URL - Use your own background, hosted elsewhere on the Internet
• bgcolor - Set default background if background image does not load for the player
  • Important! Make sure the text and bgcolors have sufficient contrast so your players can read!
    Go through your rooms with backgrounds off at least once to ensure that this is the case.
  • bgcolor will also be the background color of the form inputs (message box and suck) for people using HTML 4.0 mode.
• text - Default room font color
• link - Color of links posted in the chat
• alink - Active link color (when highlighted)
• vlink - Visited Link (link has been clicked in the past)

The link address is an optional address to a page you want linked from your room
For example, if you use off-Shards forums or Setting information, link it here and it will appear in the chat room

• Link Address - Insert URL to off-site
• Link Text - Insert name of URL

Ordered from most lenient and forgiving to least:

• Freeplay Zone - Rules here, if any, may be very lax, where frequent OOC chatter, pseudo-RP, and wackiness are acceptable
• Roleplay Zone - Posts are expected to be IC unless players clearly mark OOC posts with .ooc or (()) tags
  • Rules usually offer a basic set of guidelines for play
  • Individual rooms may be vastly different from one another in terms of genre, power level and rules
  • Short post, or "One-Liner RP" is acceptable here unless rules stipulate otherwise
• Para-RP Zone - Paragraph Roleplay tells players that the room owner expects a certain level of responsibility and quality of roleplay
  • Such rooms will have a stricter set of rules, and may be more heavily monitored than normal Roleplay rooms
  • As the name implies, these rooms require paragraph-length posts at minimum, often verging to "novella" style RP
  • One-liners will generally not be tolerated by the players in these rooms

Being in the RP Zone has several benefits:

• Anyone been barred from RP Zones (damned to Limbo) won't be allowed into your room
• Automagically generated system posts are turned off in the RP Zone
  You will not see "User left for x" or entrance posts when people login
• System-wide broadcasts will not be posted in the RP Zones

Next, you can enter extra genre information that'll give users a quick idea of what your room's "feel" is supposed to be. This space is also useful to let others know if your room belongs to a specific hub (explained in the RP Introduction Guide).

The box next to the space for Genre sets the system to record (log) each post in the room, when selected. Even posts that are removed by a user in the chat or erased using the .clear command will appear in the log. For more details on the room log see below.

Setting Room Entry Permissions:

• Allow - Players are allowed to enter from from any room
• Deny - if you only want them to be able to get in from rooms you put on the entry list.
• Exit - Determines whether players can leave to a room

The Room Entrance and Room Exit lists work similarly:

Use commas to separate room names to allow Entry and Exit from your rooms:

• A basic list might read "Portals, The Void, Limbo"
• Hide an exit or entrance by prefixing a room name with a '*': *Portals or *The Void
  • People can still enter/exit from these rooms, but they will not appear on the drop down
• Deny an entrance or exit by prefixing a room name with a '!': !The Void)
  • This will always deny entrance from or exit to that room, regardless of how you've set the room entry/exit permissions
  • Exception: users can always exit back to The Void, or use .escape to leave any room
• You can create regions within a hub with sections that are offset with dashes: ----City Map----
  • Consider this Baltimore example, where the Room Exit uses the following code for the dropdown:
    Example: "----Ghetto Sectors----, Berea, Sandtown, Ellwood Park, ----Locations----, Bunker Row, Blue Moon," ...etc.

    Results in this dropdown list:
    

The user list is a comma-separated list of character names:

• The user list's default effects are specific to room type
• If you put a character’s name in this list, it will only affect the specific character
• Conversely, if you put someone’s master account handle on the list, it will have a blanket effect on all of that person’s characters

Owner Pemissions on User Lists

• You cannot be banned from your own rooms
• You always have permission to be in the room, whether or not you are on the user list
• You always have permission to post publicly in any Arena rooms you've created
• All your characters/subhandles will have permission to be in rooms you created, or post publicly in your Arena rooms

Modifiers are entries that are globally effective:

Serparate names with commas:

The Intro Blurb is the text that appears when someone first enters your room. It is limited to the length of a post (2048 characters).

Room Description is longer description text that will appear when someone uses .scope in your room. This text is of virtually unlimited length so you can put things here that you couldn't put in the intro, including HTML and CSS code. Please note, however, that use of java is blocked by the system.

Why do we ban javascript in character profiles and room descriptions? It can be used maliciously against other users, so this is good security practices that ensures Shards users are not abused.

Room Rules is a space to allow you to specify your own set of rules for the room. Again, this is of virtually unlimited length, you can use HTML and CSS, and it will appear when someone uses the .rules command in your room.

You are requested to post rules in your room if you have specific expectations for how the room is to be used. If you do not post room rules, nothing bad will happen, but people will be understandably irked if they're banned from your room without explanation.