When writing a zone, it can be tough to know where to end your lines of text.
While a standard terminal has 80 characters, some telnet programs start to look weird with any line that is more than 77 characters, and some terminals have 130 or more characters per line (usually depends on screen resolution).
With different zone writers writing descriptions with varying line lengths it can make the MUD look pretty inconsistent from zone to zone.
That’s why I wrote an auto-wrapping function that takes care of all of that. It will take a description and insert line breaks as necessary. Right now it just defaults to a 78-character terminal width, but it will be user-configurable when I’m done with it.
This means that zone writers don’t have to worry about line breaks anymore. They can just type out their descriptions and it’ll be handled by the MUD.
Word wrapping still isn’t perfect, so I’ll need to work on that a little, but it’s pretty neat to have autowrapping in place now.
OMG – awesome. It was so annoying trying to figure out the line breaks. I’m not sure if it was fixed in later versions of DE – but another pain in the ass was forgetting the “&n” at the end of the word/sentence that you changed color thus having it bleed across until the next color change. I think this was only an issue using TE – DE fixed it? I cant remember.
I intend to make the ‘&n’ thing a non-issue — as in handle it in-code. There are a lot of places where that’ll have to be taken care of, but zone editors shouldn’t have to worry about all those nitpicky little things that code should be able to handle. Thanks for the reminder on that though.