announce #7

Title: Help Entry Structure
Author: Pallas
Date: June 26, 2025, 3:57 a.m.

I spent most of the day experimenting with help entries and how to structure them for Broodwood. It's pretty shocking how much of a time suck this was, because there's a lot of options in Evennia to consider with varying levels of coding required to get help entries working consistently between the web client and the web portal. In the end, I'm going with documenting everything within the player commands themselves. This has implications for how commands need to be organized so that it makes sense within the flow of the help index. For example, "everything" having to do with rooms would be under the room command, but this doesn't actually mean the command needs to start with "room" - since I can add an alias. I like having this structure a lot as it helps be organize the code in general.

This link will surely be invalid in a week or two, but here's an example of the current structure: https://www.broodwood.com/help/1-dreams/room/. The index on the web portal needs to change so that instead of room, it's 1.2 room and sorted accordingly (all of these indexing numbers will change).

I added the "echo" command, which isn't implemented, but dream echoes will be similar to journals or little vignettes you can share with other players. Optionally, they can be public and appear on the web portal (I haven't implemented that yet). I think it's a fun flavor feature. https://www.broodwood.com/help/1-dreams/echo/

I've started cleaning up unused commands and restructuring old commands to be in the new format. I'll probably continue doing this tomorrow.