2^nd MOOing Tutorial Sheet

What you'll accomplish!--Creating your own ROOM; Creating a Note and dropping it into your room

Ok, so you learned some of the basics of MOOing in the last tutorial.  You can talk in the MOO, look at objects and see how they work, and you can travel around in the MOO. Great!

Now we are going to explore creating our own space and stuff in the MOO.  This space will be an expression of you and your own creativity and personality.  It will also be a place for you to populate with your own writings.  Before we begin, we should check out the Builder’s Bible. [LINK] Read through it.

Ready to begin?  Can we build it? Yes, we can!

Let’s begin with creating and describing your room. 

To create your own room:

1: Start by clicking on the OBJECTS button inside AlaMOO (at the top of the screen).  Then click CREATE OBJECT.  When you click it you will see a menu of objects you can create listed on the left side of the screen. 

Click on the Generic Room option.

2:  You will next see a place to name your room (please select a name that is appropriate for our context).  Fill in the name and hit the CREATE button on the bottom.

**It will next acknowledge that you have created a room and tell you the #number of the object you have created.  Write these down.

3:  You should see a number of links associated with your new room.  Go ahead and click the QUICK EDIT link.

4:  Here you can describe your room in the most eloquent terms you can muster. Look for the DESCRIPTION text box. For now, just describe the room textually. Our next tutorial will go into how to add graphics (and even multimedia) to your room.

Be sure to click the SAVE button at the end of the Quick Edit window (or none of your changes will be saved).

5:  At this point, since this is the first object you have created in the MOO, your new room lives in a nether realm called Limbo—it is not connected to any other places in the MOO.  In order to connect your room to the rest of the MOO, you need to email the MOO administrator (me... at Lirvin@accd.edu) and tell me to connect your room to the rest of the MOO. Please let me know the name and/or object number# of your room.   The room should be connected within 24 hours.  In the meantime, you can always access the room by using its object number: @go #object  .

Good.  So you have created your own room. Cool.  This is your space to play with.  Let’s start the adventure of populating your room with stuff you create.

Creating a NOTE in your room

One of the easiest things to do is to create a message (note) to post into your room.  You will be populating your space with a lot of your writing, so this next part of the tutorial is something you will be doing a lot of.

1:  First, create your note in a word processor and save it to your diskette/computer.  It is always better to copy and paste the text into a note than compose it within the MOO (plus it gives you the extra backup).  Select ALL of the text and COPY it.
**Note: Since you may be composing a number of writings that will be graphical and hypertextual, you may find it just as easy to do ALL your writing with Netscape Composer as your word processor. See Creating Web Notes.**

2: Now we are ready to create the Note.  Go to OBJECTS in the button bar and click CREATE OBJECT again.  From the menu of selections on the left, pick GENERIC NOTE from the list of objects to create.  Click CREATE. The MOO should confirm the creation of the Note Object and tell you the object number # of the new object (you might want to write it down).

3:  With the Object Editor still open, click on the QUICK EDIT option for your new object. 

4:  In the NOTE TEXT text box (scroll past the DESCRIPTION textbox), PASTE the text you copied from the NOTE you wrote originally in a word processor. (If it is a web note, you would paste in the HTML code at this point... .)

Click SAVE  inside the Xpress Object Editor window to be sure to save any options you  changed.

5:  Lastly, we need to place this object (Note) inside YOUR room (and not in someone else's).  Enter your room (you may need to use the object number#).  At this point right after creating an object, you are “holding” this object.  No one else can see or interact with the object because you are holding it in your possession (it's like it is in your pocket). 

In order to make your object public, you must drop it into the room where you want it to live. 

Type: drop <objectname>
--you could also use the object #

6:  To see if your Note lives inside your room,

type:  look   <enter>

You should see your new Note listed in the objects inside your room, as is listed on the bottom left side of the graphical side of the MOO. 

Type: look <notename> to read the contents of the Note you just created.

7:  If you want to get fancy, and create a hypertextual Note, see my help with creating a Web Note and information on adding graphical content to your MOO creations.

For more on creating rooms and objects, I urge you to look at or print the AlaMOO User Guides pages on Creating Objects and Rooms also.

You will also find the AlaMOO Guide Help Files for Creating and Using Objects and Rooms very helpful.

Congratulations!  You did it!  You have your own room within this virtual world with your own stuff in it!

****next time, we'll learn how to put graphics with your stuff!***