Just a glimpse into what I do to go about making those fancy @desc's that people seem to give a second or third look at on the various text-based role-playing games I frequent. Meadows Muck, Taps, After, and a few others to name a few.

Was recently going over with Silver how I go about making them - just need a good text-editing program. Windows XP and below had the old DOS 'edit' app in the command line that was perfect for this. Now I use Edit Pad Lite since it uses fonts that are evenly spaced and sized.

First thing I do is turn on the row numbering. This won't show up when I copy and paste. Then I put on the first line 123456789x ... and I do that 8 times. 80 columns is the general standard for terminal width in most MUCKS. Each 'x' represents that 10 characters have gone by for spacking measurement. (Yes I know this can be changed peeps, but most people and MUCK admins don't bother. Ergo, you create these for the lowest common denominator.)

Then after deciding on a border or theme, you start messing with the shapes and characters of all the keys on the keyboard. The space bar and the insert key /ARE/ your best friends! :D There are some characters which won't translate well or have alternate meanings on some MU*s, but you'll learn how to do them eventually.

After doing the border, you can then add in the desc text. This is the easy part. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

Then do an list and save it as your desc.

And there we have it - a quick and dirty tutorial on fancy desc creation processes.

(And for those whom noticed - yes. Line 2 is screwed up. I fixed the spacing error after taking this screen-shot.)

~Friti / Maiza / Luuko