Create a New Room

About the easiest thing for you to do as a wizard is to create a new room. Now that you are a Wizard, you will have a new menu at the top of the screen entitled, cleverly enough. "Wizard." Pull down the menu and note that one of the choices is New Room. Try it.

When you create a new room, you will automatically go to that room where the background will be some clouds. At this point that's it for your new room. There are no doors leading to or from it, no scripts, nothing.

But you have successfully created a new room!

Change Various Room Characteristics

In any room, whether you have just created it or not, you can change a variety of characteristics. You will certainly want to do this immediately upon creating a room, although you might also do at any other time as well.

To change these characteristics, use the Wizard menu again and choose Room Info. A dialog box will appear with all the possibilities. Here are some of the things you can do:

• Change the Room ID number. Don't. Just leave it so that you know there won't be any conflicts.
• Change the Room Name. Do this. "New Room 154" is not very meaningful and sounds sort of tacky. Give it another more descriptive name. Just select and type.
• Change the background graphic for the room. Unless you REALLY like the clouds, you'll probably want to do this (even if you do really like the clouds you'll probably want to do this). It can be a little trickier.
• First, the picture that you want to display must be on the server. If you don't control the Palace server you are working on, then you will have to give the pictures (email, diskette, whatever) to whoever does have access to it. They will then put the pictures in the right place.
• Next, put those same pictures, with EXACTLY the same names in the Palace\Media\Pictures folder on your computer. This helps a lot in keeping things straight for you.
• Now, in the Room Info dialog box, click the browse button and find the right folder and picture and click OK.
• Now click OK in the big dialog box. What should happen is that the new picture will appear on your screen and also be downloaded from the server to everyone else who is in or goes to thes same room.
• An alternative is simply to type in the name of the picture as it appears on the server.
• After dealing with the background picture, everything else is pretty easy. You can type in the name of the artist and choose various things like turning off painting, or barring guests (not very hospitable, are you?).

Create and Change Doors

Creating and using doors are almost as easy as creating and modifying rooms. First, though, you must deal with the fact that you want to manipulate and modify the doors, not go through them. To do this, you must use Authoring Mode.

• Use the Wizard menu and choose Authoring Mode. Notice that any doors that already exist are outlined now and that none of them work as doors anymore. This will be true until you choose Authoring Mode again.
• Notice also that the Wizard menu now shows the New Door choice as being active. Choose it.
• A large rectangle with handles at the corners will appear at the middle of your screen. This is your new door. Click and drag anywhere inside it to move it around. Click and drag the corner handles to change its size and shape. Put it wherever makes sense on your background picture.
• While this door is still selected (the handles are showing), use the Wizard menu again and choose Door Info. You can give the door a name. You can most especially give it a destination, which is the usual function of a door. Just choose the room to connect to from the list you get when you click on the little down arrow.
• You can also specify the type of door, its default state, and various other things. For now, we will not go into those possibilities.
• You can also enter and edit a script here, which we'll get to below. For now, just learn about how to use doors to give people a way to get from one room to another.
• Note that doors are one-way. If you want passages in both directions, you must explicitly create them in each room.