I apologize for being less than active recently. I've been occupied with making sure that I have enough work coming in so that Triv and I don't starve. That said, here's how we plan to put this very unique grid together...
London and Environs
This is the center of our world. Although we'd love to use the simplified borough structure from 1900-1965, the old district/vestry system from 1855 contains more flavor if less organization. These regions will be individual groups of rooms, only connected with themselves. For example, Westminster will be a collection of rooms that have no exits save those shared amongst other Westminster rooms. To get to other regional groups, we'd like to implement a +travel system, with a twist.
On CC, once we set up the Sky rooms, code provided a list once someone typed in '+land' or whatever it was. That list involved the numbered ground rooms that could only be reached by that sky room in particular, flagged appropriately if I'm not mistaken. We'd like to set up a single appropriate room per regional group (probably marked with an asterisk *) that allows folks to type '+travel' and bring up a list of the other single +travellable room per region. Whether the PC gets there by foot or by hansom is up to individual RP, and since every room within a regional group will be connected by exits to one another, players need only travel perhaps a single room before hitting +travel to get from, say, Westminster to Chelsea. Then another exit to the room in that region of their choice, if desired.
As we'd love to implement a form of the subway rail map that Prospero provided, +travel would only bring up the other subway rooms on their list. The same would go for aboveground railway to other parts of the country, once those get added to the 'grid'.
The Rest of the World
These rooms will be segregated into groups much like the regions of London, save that they'll be other places of note around the world. The asterisked rooms to get around these would be the ports, the airship docks, the hidden underground tunnels that lead from Tibet to Shangri-La and so on. World travel will always be a step away from the players.
The beauty here is that every player will know that when they're in an asterisked room, they can hit +travel and it will bring up the selection of destinations, whatever the RPed variety of travel it represents. If they don't hit one of the available numbers, the code will null and kick them out of the list and back to regular MU reality. I rather doubt I've got the code available that Forge on CC used to put this together, but it seemed a relatively simple process. At least from the building side, where we just had to make sure a certain attribute was set on all of the 'reachable' rooms. So, what's the concensus?
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So long as the regionally grouped rooms are clearly laid out (with an out alias that always eventually leads to an asterisked room or something) this could work. Coding the specific +travel thing may be either really tedious or very quick, depending on if the elegant solution that suggests itself to me can function.
This would be in addition to Acierocolotl's join/travel code, which is meant to let players find other players swiftly and easily.
I've been reading a lot about the city in our period, and writer after writer observes that while in previous generations a person could know every street and lane in London (Macauley was famous for having walked every street in London), by the late Victorian period the city had grown so large, so internally complex, that it was essentially impossible to navigate if you didn't hire a cab. The neighborhoods -- the Hills, the Gates -- became islands in a sea of stones. The "lock", what we now call a traffic jam, was a common occurence.
All of this is my way of saying that a "grid" which the component parts are not necessarily connected to one another in a pedestrian way is perfectly in sympathy with the setting. It mirrors the way that people who live in Victorian London think about traveling around in it. You don't get in your car and toodle around the streets of the city. You walk around your local neighborhood, but when forced to go from your current locale to some place farther away, you don't actually know how to get from here to there. You get a cab, and its his job to know the route.
I know you're not using +hansom on the presumption that it forces the PC to actually take a cab instead of, say, walking or an omnibus or whatever. That's cool; the name of the command doesn't seem to matter much to me. I think the overall strategy supports our setting.
Baba, if Ace's +travel code is going to be an overall thing and not just a +meetme, there's really no reason for special asterisked 'travel rooms' in the first place. It'd also absolve us of having to determine where exactly 'out' is (other than the obvious few railway stations). (;
Let me know.
Well, it's essentially a +meetme as we had discussed. Additional travel commands and map widgets hadn't been worked out.
Alternately, we could just make the railways/portages/etc be the only +travel points. Since they'll always be one room away, it doesn't really matter that my character jumps into a cab, then moves through the exit to Charing Cross Station for +travel purposes despite the fact he's not literally taking the rail. It's all RP in the end.
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