view orpg/templates/nodes/Idiots_guide_to_openrpg.xml @ 109:5eac6e0308df alpha

Traipse Alpha 'OpenRPG' {091007-03} Traipse is a distribution of OpenRPG that is designed to be easy to setup and go. Traipse also makes it easy for developers to work on code without fear of sacrifice. 'Ornery-Orc' continues the trend of 'Grumpy' and adds fixes to the code. 'Ornery-Orc's main goal is to offer more advanced features and enhance the productivity of the user. Update Summary: {091006} 00: Adds Bookmarks (Alpha) with cool Smiley Star and Plus Symbol images! 03: Changes made to the map for increased portability. SnowDog has changes planned in Core, though. Added an initial push to the BCG. Not much to see, just shows off how it is re-writing Main code. {091007} 00: New images added to Plugin Control Panel for Auto Start. 01: Attempting to fix Deprecation warning from Main. 02: Second attempt, problem in gsclient with "s. 03: Fail.
author sirebral
date Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:02:28 -0500
parents 4385a7d0efd1
children
line wrap: on
line source


<nodehandler class="static_handler" module="core" name="Idiot's Guide, 0.9.4" status="useful">
  <group_atts border="1" cols="1"/>
  <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="Table of contents:">&lt;a href=&quot;#c1&quot;&gt;Chapter 1:&lt;/a&gt; Chatting up them OpenRPGers
&lt;a href=&quot;#c2&quot;&gt;Chapter 2:&lt;/a&gt; Rolling those dice and whispering those sweet nothings
&lt;a href=&quot;#c3&quot;&gt;Chapter 3:&lt;/a&gt; Creating your own Character sheet
&lt;a href=&quot;#c4&quot;&gt;Chapter 4:&lt;/a&gt; Opening your own room and sharing your character with all
&lt;a href=&quot;#c5&quot;&gt;Chapter 5:&lt;/a&gt; Advanced stuffs (like pictures)
&lt;a href=&quot;#c6&quot;&gt;Chapter 6:&lt;/a&gt; Setting up your own server</nodehandler>
  <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="Introduction">Welcome, Mateys, to the online gaming universe of the OpenRPG!  By now you have successfully downloaded and installed the program or you would not be able to read this document.  But we are not here to discuss what you already know, we are here to get around to telling you how to do those things you don't know.

&lt;b&gt;What we'll cover in this guide:&lt;/b&gt;
1)How to use the basic OpenRPG
2)How to do those really nifty advanced things in OpenRPG
3)How to get your brother to do those nifty things in OpenRPG while you beat him with a whip
4)Getting along with those others on the OpenRPG program

And, before long, before you know it, and before that chicken in the microwave is done, you will know and have mastered the art of using OpenRPG.</nodehandler>
  <nodehandler class="static_handler" module="core" name="Chapter 1:OpenRPG Basics">
    <group_atts border="1" cols="1"/>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="Chapter 1:  OpenRPG and you">&lt;a name=&quot;c1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
Alright.  Let us start at the beginning.  Many many years ago the dinosaurs roamed the planet.  But then an asteroid, now most commonly known as &quot;Bill Gates 1,&quot; crashed into the earth and wiped them all out, turning them into oil.  The basic upshot of all that is with this oil we have created electricity which is now running the program.

Before we start it is nessessary to make a name for yourself.  Why?  Well, you wouldn't like to be going around with everybody knowing only as 'blankman' would you?  To type in your name, go up to the top left window, and dragging donw the &quot;OpenRPG&quot; menu bar press &quot;settings&quot;.  in there you can alter your name and colours.  Whenever you wish to change your name, you must first disconnect from any server (We'll get to servers and conenction next paragraph)) then reconnect before the change occurs.

You can also rename yourself in a much more simple way by typing in the command &quot;/name &quot; and your name behind it in the chat window.  I just made you go into the settings so that you know where they are later.

Now that you have yourself labled, you are probably wondering &quot;where's all the chat?&quot;  Well, my friend, we are here to answer that.  As your program booted up, it should have brought up a window marked &quot;OpenRPG&quot; in the top left, a &quot;Player list&quot; in the bottom left, a map on the top right, and a chat screen on the lower right.  We will first concern outselves with getting that lower right window to do the work and play with the others later.

To get the chat window to work, first we actually need a place to chat.  To do this, we need to browse the list of rooms on what is known as the &lt;i&gt;Tracker&lt;/i&gt;.  To open the tracker window go to the &quot;OpenRPG&quot; window and under the menu &quot;Game Server&quot; click on &quot;Browse Tracker&quot;

As you can see, a new window popped up.   This is the &lt;i&gt;Tracker Window&lt;/i&gt;.  On the left you will see a list of various servers running OpenRPG online.  Click on the one at the top of the list and press &quot;Connect&quot;.

After pressing the &quot;Connect&quot; button you will join that server and be instantly dropped into it's lobby.  Welcome to your first chatroom.  Feel free to stay in this room as long as you like or move off to another room listed on the Tracker.  When you first turned on OpenRPG the chat window filled up with all the different chat commands available.  If you are like me and have forgotten them by now you can either click on the little text entry box and press &lt;i&gt;Page Up&lt;/i&gt;   or type in &lt;i&gt;/help&lt;/i&gt;.  Should you wish a way to scroll up instead of 'page up'ing you can increase the amount of lines the Chat Window stores by making the &lt;i&gt;Buffer Size&lt;/i&gt; larger.  Either do this in the settings window or in the chatwindow itself and it will be saved for the next time you use OpenRPG.

By now I'm sure you are also wondering what that &lt;i&gt;status&lt;/i&gt; thingy in the bottom left window is.  If you notice, every time you type a message in the chat window your status changes.  And when you finish your msg (or sit for 5 seconds waiting) it changes back to Idle.  What a clever invention.  Of course, if you wish to set your own status to override &quot;Idle&quot; temporarily, just type in the chat window &quot;/status My_Status&quot;; replacing &quot;My_Status&quot; for whatever msg you wish (no more than 13 letters can be seen though).

As for now, spend some time and enjoy yourself in the lobby... we can come back to the tutorial when you are ready to learn about Rolling dice, whispering, and creating and using character sheets.</nodehandler>
  </nodehandler>
  <nodehandler class="static_handler" module="core" name="Chapter 2: Dice Rolling and Whispering">
    <group_atts border="1" cols="1"/>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="Ah, you're back!">&lt;/a name=&quot;c2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
I'm astonished.  82% of all people who use this program never bother to read the tutorial, let alone come back to it.  Then again 67% of all statistics are made up on the spot so we'll leave that for now and get on with what we are doing

Now, to get back to business.  By now you've hopefully held a conversation with someone (or at least yourself) in our chatroom and now I'm sure you're wondering &quot;How can I roll some dice so I can smite those foolish mortals.&quot;  Well, don't be discouraged, because that is what I'm here for.

To roll dice you have two options.  you can simply press the button on the dice toolbar  or you can type in how many times you wish to roll.  As pressing buttons is mostly self explanitory, this part will only cover typing in dicerolls.

First we will choose how many dice we wish to roll at once.  To say how many dice you wish to roll, just type in the number ((say.. 1))... so it would look like this:

1

now tell the type of dice you wish to roll.  to do this you write a 'd' ((d for dice)) and the number of sides that dice has.  Say I want to roll a 20 sided dice that one time it would look like this:

1d20

Now put those square brackets around it.  They are the ones directly to the right of the &quot;P&quot; key.  ((for quick reference on what I mean, find chapter two in this guide, right click-edit it, and look at how I have the dice written in the text blocks))

[1d20]

hope I rolled well.  I know it looks like those round brackets above the '9' and '0' keys but to type it in you need to use square brackets between the &quot;P&quot; and &quot;\&quot; keys.  All you do is type that in the into the chat text box and it will automatically roll it for you.  You could even do combinations of dice or simple mathmatics inside the dice macro as well...

[4d20+1d10]

[1d8-4]

[6d4+3]

[1d10*10]

[(1d10+5)+(6d4-3)-12]

Now that you have gotten the basics of the dice roll down, let us move on to some more advanced stuff.  What I'm talking about is mainly for Whitewolf players, but good to know anyway.

let's take a dice roll, shall we.  Let's roll 5d10:

[5d10]

as you can see, I used a lowercase &quot;d&quot; and it came up with each dice roll and the sum of all of them.  Let's change that by capitalising the &quot;D&quot; shall we:

[5D10]

As you can see, instead of giving us a sum of all the dice, it instead told us what each dice had rolled.  This is useful if you want individual dice rolls shown rather than a final result.

Now that we have that basis down, we are going to set up the dice macro so that it compares how many dice have gotten over a number you tell it.  you'll see what I mean in this demonstration:

[5D10 vs 7]

All that was added was the capital &quot;D&quot; and add the words &quot;vs 7&quot;.  Of course, you can change the number to whatever you wish.  You will also notice, when you use it, that it will automatically detract the result for every '1' you roll on the dice.  So if you rolled 5D10 and got a 7, an 8, a 9, and two '1's with a &quot;vs 7&quot; you would only have one success.

Now for those of you who play AEG's Legend of the 5 Rings RPG (and possibly their other games), your probably wondering how do I handle rolling for L5R. No worries there, we've got you covered. The syntax is the same as in the rule book. Say we want to roll 5 dice and keep only 2, we type that in as:

[5k2]

This will roll 5d10 and keep the highest 2 dice, and will handle the re-rolling of any 10's. But what about all those unskilled and similar skill rolls you need to make, where you can't re-roll the 10's. It only takes a small change to the previous roll. We just tack on a 'u' to the end, like so:

[5k2u]


</nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;Need to tell that special someone that you like them but don't want the room to hear?&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt;">Well, the designer of OpenRPG thought of such eventualities, and has provided us with the ability to whisper at will to whoever is in the room.  Doing so is quite easy in it's own way, and we'll show you here.

All that is required is for you to type in a &lt;i&gt;/w&lt;/i&gt; then the person's name ((Caps are important!!!)), an equals sign (( = )) and then your message... so it would probably look something like this:

&lt;i&gt;/w Monkeyman=&lt;/i&gt;I think that Woody person that is usually in the Lobby is soo cute

&lt;i&gt;/w Susan=&lt;/i&gt;yeah, but I hear he likes bananas so I won't go near him

And there we go.  But I can hear your cries &quot;What about those people that have extrodinarily annoying names?&quot;  Well, do not fret... just go over to your player list in the lower lefthand corner and right click on the little heads next to their name.  Magically, one of those menu bars will appear and give you the option to whisper to them.  Press it and watch as the '/w' command comes up in the chat text box.  How nice!

And should you wish to whisper to more than one person, just add each name after the initial '/w' and put commas between them, like so:

&lt;i&gt;/w Susan, Monkeyman, Thatotherguy=&lt;/i&gt;Vote Woody for Overlord 2001!!!

simple as that. You could even whisper dice the exact same way.

Stay tuned for the next chapter where we get into how to create, use, and abuse your own character sheets.</nodehandler>
  </nodehandler>
  <nodehandler class="static_handler" module="core" name="Chapter 3: Nodes and Character Sheets">
    <group_atts border="1" cols="1"/>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;The Basics&lt;/b&gt;">&lt;a name=&quot;c3&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
alright.. by now you have grasped the basics on how to chat, so we will move on to the next phase: character sheets.  This part of the tutorial will cover how to make a full usable document from the nodes.

Let us first start by describing what the different nodes are and where we can find them:</nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="static_handler" module="core" name="The Nodes">
      <group_atts border="1" cols="4"/>
      <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;the Group Node&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt;">as we look at the various nodes they all appear to be stored in a blue bottled icon called &quot;Wizards&quot;.  Wizards itself is a group node and it shows the function of the 'group': to store and combine all the nodes which would otherwise just float randomly on the Gametree.

When we make a group, we do so so that we can store our information into one well organized array rather than a collection of scattered files.</nodehandler>
      <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;Text Block&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt;">The text block is where we will be storing most of our text information.  It allows you to type in words, paragraphs, or entire pages of information you want to keep on your character sheet without the needless bother of grids.  If you look carefully you will notice that the Dice Macro box is also just another Text Box but with some dice in it.  You are fully able to put any dice on here in any place in the Text Body and when the character sheet is opened you will see that the dice has been rolled.</nodehandler>
      <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;The Grid&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt;">Now, text boxes are all well and good for storing words and paragraphs, but for easy storage of numbers that we use for reference there is nothing better than a Grid.  The grid allows us to set up any manner of chart or graph to for quick reference and study.</nodehandler>
      <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;The Macro Node&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt;">The Macro Node works just like a normal text box node, but instead of seeing it in it's own window, everything that is typed into it is broadcast directly into the chat window as if you were saying it.  This includes actions, whispers, status changes, etc.  Good if you want to change names or perform series of speeches and actions in order just by doubleclicking on a node.  We won't be getting to know them in this, but they are pretty self explanitory.  Just doubleclick to use them and right click to edit.</nodehandler>
    </nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;Pick your Nodes and Eat It Too&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt;">Now that you know what the various nodes are, I'm sure you're asking &quot;how do I use then then?&quot;  Well, let us start with the main node, the Group.

To create a group doubleclick on the &quot;New Group&quot; Node in the Wizards tree.  you will see that a new &quot;Group&quot; has appeared at the top in the main Gametree.  Open the new group by doubleclicking on it.

.........

Oh my... all rather empty, isn't it?  maybe we should fill it up with something.  Let's make a text box to put in that void, shall we?  Alright.   Go into the Wizards directory again and doubleclick on the &quot;New Text Block&quot;.  Again you will see a Text Block has appeared at the top in the gametree.  Doubleclick on it to see what's inside.

.........

again it all seems very flat.  I don't like that text in there so let's change it.  this time rightclick on the Text Block and press &quot;Edit&quot;.  Voila!!  You will see an 'edit' box where you can change the title and the text body, with lots of little extras down below.  Go ahead and type in a new title and message for yourself.

Now that you have added your personal message to the world it is time to add it to your group.  Close down the Text Box Editor (it automatically saves, so just hit the 'x' button) and look up to your gametree again.  Once you see it, grab your new edited Text Box and drag it into the group that you created earlier.  Now doubleclick on the group and marvel at your creation.  Congratulations on making your first character sheet.

**Note.  To edit everything in a group at once just right click on the group and press Edit.**</nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;That's It?!?&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt;">&quot;That's it?!  I want my money back!  In fact, since it was free, I want you to give me money to compensate for having to read this long tutorial just for that!!!&quot;  Is what I'm sure you're thinking right now.  But don't worry, our character sheets will be getting much more complex and much better looking from this point out.

Turning back to our creation, we have a Group with a single Text box inside it.  Now, I like that message you have typed in there, so let's double it's voice across the program.  Right click on the text box inside the group you created, and press &quot;clone&quot;.  Voila again!!!  You'll see an exact copy of your message has appeared at the top of the Gametree.  Grab that Text box and Drag it onto the Group as well.  Now open up your group by doubleclicking on it and take a look again at what you have created.

.....

Hhhmmm.... It's all very well and dandy, but it's going to get a little long, isn't it.  If each item we put in there is going to be lined up straight down this thing is going to be pages in length.  Well, luckily for you, we have a way around that.  closing down your group window let us look up to the Gametree again.  This time, instead of doubleclicking on the Group, right click on it.  You'll see it brings up the same menubar as what the textbox had.  Don't worry, we'll get to play with all the nifty features later.  Go down and press edit.

A little edit box should have popped up with Three Options.  The first is to rename the Group, the second dictates how many columns we can have (1-4), and the third just asks if we want borders.  Lets first change the name of our group to &quot;Lagmonkey's Group&quot;.  Then, lets change the 'Columns&quot; from one to two then close down the edit box.  Open up the Group again and look now as it appears the two text messages are side by side.  How convenient!  In fact, as you saw you can have up to four things side by side at the same time.  Any further Nodes inside the group ((the 5th one and beyond)) will just get put in one of the columns under the first four, in order.</nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;Ah, but will she swallow it, Stevie Wonder?&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt;">Now that we have our simple group with it's two columns and it's text boxes, it's time to add a Grid, I think.  create a grid the same way as we did the Text Box and the group, then go in and edit it.  What we want is a Grid that looks exactly like this:</nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="rpg_grid_handler" icon="grid" module="rpg_grid" name="Grid">
      <grid border="1">
        <row>
          <cell>I</cell>
          <cell>Really</cell>
          <cell>Love</cell>
          <cell>Bananas</cell>
          <cell>Matey!</cell>
        </row>
      </grid>
      <macros>
        <macro name=""/>
      </macros>
    </nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name=" ">Be sure to add three extra columns for the words by pressing the &quot;Add Columns&quot; button.  Oh, and get rid of that bottom row, we don't need it right now (though, if you wish, you are welcome to put numbers in the bottom row instead of removing it for practice if you like.)

Now that we have our grid, let's drag it onto our group and open up our group, shall we?  Oh my.. the Bananas are overlapping, aren't they?  It appears the column isn't wide enough to support a grid so wide.  But I like bananas, so we are going to have to keep the grid.  What we need would be a nice large column to hold it though, so let's make one.

Go into the Wizards again and create another new group.  Now drag the Grid over onto the new group, then picku p and drag &quot;Lagmonkey's Group' onto the new group.  yes, matey, a group within a group.  Open it up and see what the result is.  Interesting.  It appears that the grid and the two columns are all inside the new group's main column.  We could continue to stack columns into each other into infinity, though it would get increasingly hard to read.

Getting back, you can now see the grid is on top and Lagmonkey's group is on the bottom.  I don't like that arrangement so let's change it.  Close down the New Group box then on the gametree grab the grid and drag it onto the new group's icon once again.  You'll see that that had the effect of re-adding the grid to the new group, this time placing it at the bottom.  Whenever you add something to a group, it always appears at the bottom.</nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;That's it!&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt;">That's basically it for making character sheets.  Feel free to experiment with various combinations of items and settings.. add and remove borders to see what you like.. create grids of varous sizes and shapes and stick them into your columns...perhaps put some dice in those text boxes of yours ((with the appropriate &quot;[3d6]&quot;  around them))... but most of all: Have fun!

**Note: Be sure to save your character sheet if you want to.  To do so, right click on it and press &quot;Save Node&quot;**</nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="Moving Characters from almost ANY Character Generator to here.">The following are stpes on how to move your character sheets from your favorite Character Generation program into OpenRPG.  It's very quick and clean cut.

1) first, using your character generator, you convert your character to either txt format, or, preferably (if you have the ability) HTML format.

2) Then, you go to wizards.put a text block into the gametree

3) if you are using txt, select all, and copy.  if you are using HTML format, edit it using notepad, but don't change any of the HTML Program. then select all and copy

4) now, going back into OpenRPG, right click on the text block you created and push 'edit'

5) clear the text block of the few words of text that appear there then paste the copied info into by either rightclicking-paste or pressing 'ctrl v'

6) then name your character in the Title then close the text block.  Finished

no more need to create character sheets!  That simple and any time you want to see it, just doubleclick on the text node.</nodehandler>
  </nodehandler>
  <nodehandler class="static_handler" module="core" name="Chapter 4: Setting up rooms/games and Ignore">
    <group_atts border="1" cols="1"/>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="There's a party going on down my street tonight...">&lt;a name=&quot;c4&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
now that you have your custom built char sheet and you have talked enough players into starting a game, it's time to set up your own room.  Let's bring up that Tracker window again ((under the Game Server menu)).  Looking to the bottom left of it, you'll see a little box that allows you to type in your own room name and add a password if you like.  Let's start a room called &quot;Working on that darned fun tutorial&quot; and not put a password up.

as you see the room you create will be exactly the same as the lobby, so there is nothing to worry about.  Lets load up our character sheet by right clicking on the &quot;Game Tree&quot; and pressing Insert file&quot;

Now that we have our little char sheet we might as well show the world.  This can be done in one of three ways.  The first way is to right click on it and send it to other players (provided there are any).  This is how other players can get your sheet as they can't see it until you send it to them.

The second way is to send it directly to the chat and let everyone see it there.  go ahead and do that by right clicking on the char sheet and pressing &quot;Send to Chat&quot;.  Now everyone gets to see it as it appears on their text chat window.

the third option, Whisper to Player, is much the same as &quot;Send to chat&quot; only it sends it to a specific person or persons to see in their chat instead.

Of course, there sometimes comes a day when there is a little spammonkey running about.  You know the type.  Just keeps askin pointless questions, hitting you with the same text, and generally making himself a nuesance.  Well fear not!  We have added in a brand new feature that allows you to ignore those unscrupulous people.  In the chat entry box just enter the command &quot;/i player_ID#&quot; and that will put a person on ignore (or toggle them back to un-ignore).  To get a list of ID's who are on your ignore list, just type &quot;/i&quot; alone, with nothing else.  You can even ignore/un-ignore multiple people at once, just put commas (( , )) between the names.  And that's it.  Ignore at your leasure.</nodehandler>
  </nodehandler>
  <nodehandler class="static_handler" module="core" name="Chapter 5: Maps and Minis">
    <group_atts border="1" cols="1"/>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="So you had to ask...">&lt;a name=&quot;c5&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
Now comes the hardest part of the tutorial.. describing how to use minis and pictures.  Well, the first step is to bring up the map.  With any luck it is still open so let's find it.  It'll be the big green one that was in the top right of the screen.  If it's not there, click on the &quot;Windows&quot; menu under the OpenRPG main window and press &quot;Map Window&quot;.

&lt;/center&gt;**note!** If you are in the lobby, the changes you make to the map will not be seen by other players.  You will need to create another room to have a shared map.&lt;/center&gt;

In this map window you'll see all of the basic operations needed to load an image and edit the map.  Let us attempt to load our first picture.  At the bottom of the map window you'll see a large box where you can type in text.  This is where you put  the Webpage Address for the image you wish.  Let's type in this addy.

http://www.openrpg.com/images/mins/amazon.gif

after you have typed it in press the &quot;add minature&quot; button, sit back, and watch as it loads the beautiful amazonian woman (well, almost) into the map folder

&lt;center&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;OpenRPG tip:&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt; All images need to be on webpages... you cannot load directly from your hard drive.  The reason being this is actually one giant web browser.&lt;/center&gt;

Feel free to move it about, get a feel for how it works.  You'll see at the moment that the amazon seems to hop from grid square to grid square.  Well... if you're like me, you don't like being confined to grids or rules.  So let's get rid of that grid, shall we?

Looking at the map window again, you will see a little red diamond thing.  They say it is a compass but it just looks like a flying fish to me.  Anyway.. click on that and it will bring up all the map settings.  In there you can change the size of the map, what colour it is, or even load up a background on which all the mini's sit ((say, a dungeon map you drew or perhaps that picture of Britney Spears I know you have lying around)).  The thing we are interested the most, though, will be the grid settings at the bottom.  As you can see, you can change the size of the grid and switch the grid from square(4 sided) to hex (6 sided).  You'll also be able to let mini's either abide by the grid, or become free from the black lined prison.  Let us turn off the grid snap and press &quot;apply.&quot;

Now, go back into the map window and try moving your mini again.  You'll see that it now moves freely, and ignores those lines.  But ignoring them is not enough, did I hear you say?  You want them gone?  Ok.  Let's go back into the settings (the red star button) and this time change the grid size to zero.  Pressing 'apply' you will see that the grid has disappeared entirely from map.  Course, if you want it back, just go put in the size again (50 is default).

There are other options (like direction pointing for your mini's) so feel free to play around a bit.

&lt;center&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;u&gt;Note:&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/b&gt; you can find many great mini's on the OpenRPG webpage.&lt;/center&gt;</nodehandler>
    <nodehandler class="link_handler" icon="html" module="core" name="&lt;center&gt;www.OpenRPG.com&lt;/center&gt;">
      <link href="http://www.OpenRPG.com"/>
    </nodehandler>
  </nodehandler>
  <nodehandler class="static_handler" module="core" name="Chapter 6: Make your fortune in Server Control!">
    <group_atts border="1" cols="1"/>
    <nodehandler class="text_handler" icon="note" module="core" name="&lt;b&gt;Well, maybe not any money...&lt;/b&gt;">&lt;a name=&quot;c6&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
Well, maybe not any money in creating a server on this program, but there are definately perks to running one.  But to run one we must first understand what they do.

A server is the mother for all of us on OpenRPG.  It runs all of our major commmands, keeps us all talking together, and hosts all the games on OpenRPG.  When you first connected to OpenRPG you had to choose a server from a list in the tracker, on the left.  Now let us put your name (or at least your computer's) out there so others can flock to you.

For this we must return to your OS.  Go into your computer, into the OpenRPG folder.  In there, you will see a file marked:

mplay_server.py

You can also find it in your start menu, right next to the OpenRPG program itself.  Once you find it, (double)click on it.  The first thing that will come up is a python MSDOS window... It will first prompt on if you wish for your server to bee seen by the OpenRPG tracker list.  Press &quot;Y&quot; and hit enter (won't get anyone if we don't know it exists).  Next, it will prompt you for a name for your Server.  Write in &quot;Temporary Server&quot; and press enter.

Now the window will start running the various server-y looking bits of code.  as soon as it is up and going, you will told the various commands that are available to the server.  The first one will be &quot;kill&quot;.  this is what you type into the MSDOS window to shut the server down.  &lt;b&gt;**IMPORTANT**&lt;/b&gt; if you shut down the server all rooms on it will close.  You don't want to shut it down if others are using it.

The second command is the &quot;dump&quot; command.  This will list all the people on your server, as well as their ID number.  It really isn't important at this time but it will come in handy later.

Broadcast is self explanitory.  The 'Announce' and 'Remove' features allow you to choose later on if your server can be seen on the tracker, or not.  Dump Groups gets the same info as Dump but does Groups instead of people.  And finally you can bring up this little list of commands at any time by typing 'help' or '?'.

You can type these commands in any time in the python server window.  Go ahead and try 'help' or 'dump' and see what comes up.

Alright!  That's it.  to access your server, run you OpenRPG program as normal (with the server MSDOS window in the background) and log onto your server as we had shown you in chapter 1.  This will come in handy if there are no Servers running and you wish to use OpenRPG with, perhaps your gaming buddies or maybe some underworld kingpins you need to 'have a talk' with.

And From All of us at OpenRPG HQ, we wish you good gaming!</nodehandler>
  </nodehandler>
</nodehandler>