Guide to Mapping - Warpers

Warpers are invisible tiles which cause a player to be transported from one location to another. The most obvious example of this would be a door on the overworld which takes the player to the interior of a building once it is stepped on. For newcomers to the mapping process these can seem rather intimidating to implement as they do require the mapper to actually write code, but the code in question is actually very simple and easily learned.

The code for warpers is located in trace-alter-map/assets/code/objects/warpers/, wherein it is split across a number of different folders and files related to different areas. For the majority of projects, the relevant warper code is located within the /districts/ folder separated into different files for each district (e.g: the warper code for any caves and buildings located in District 12 is located within the file district_12_warpers.dm). Some districts may be referred to via older development titles (e.g: The Historic District is reffered to as “City”, Downtown is “Inner City/Skyscrapers”, and the Outskirts are “Country”) but by taking a glance at the code within and reading the names of certain warpers or by comparing them to the names of warpers placed in the world via the map tool you can deduce what the name of any location you're uncertain about it called.

These files can be edited with BYOND DreamMaker which will likely be the default program set by Windows, however the use of a text editor designed for programming such as Notepad++ is often preferable for readability and ease of use. It is important you do not use a word processor such as Microsoft Office or LibreOffice when editing code as these programs insert a large amount of invisible special characters for their formatting which will break the code entirely.

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