Posted by Smacky on April 6, 2000 at 12:34:00:
In Reply to: M.Z.F. posted by WALSH on April 6, 2000 at 10:17:35:
I used MZF for my first area, and kind of regretted it later.
The area editors, SPAM like Montolio said and MZF, are really good tools, no doubt, they make writing your first area purely a creative matter and are much more fun and faster to work with than staring at a blank DOS edit screen... but they're also crutches that'll trip you up if it ever comes to mod'ing the area for use on another mud. First time I opened up my monster 180 room area to make the slight alterations for another mud, I think I wept. It was just a huge scrawl of meaningless text at first.
If you learn and memorize the hard way, it'll pay off and make editing easier... giving you more power, since you'll better adapt to any new code changes and be able to make use of them intelligently.
Also, as Montolio said, CF and any mud worth its salt will tend to be too heavily changed to make most editors useful, since you'd have to go through and alter every object, mob, or room by hand anyhow.