Well..the first "must" is taken care of via Zmud. It's a front end (client) that has automapping capabilities. I have no idea how to use it, but supposedly it works, which means that you should be able to play pretty much ANY mud and be able to automap if you're playing it using zmud.

As for "some sorta RP game," there are hundreds of them. What genre do you prefer? How do you feel about permanent death? Do you want to stick with the basic skill and level-based magic-intensive D&D type game? Or do you prefer something more like a MUSH where such things don't even exist?

Or would you rather play a hybrid that encompasses some of the neater MUSH RP features combined with stats and skills and improvement in both?

Do you want a game that has a lot of IMM/GM interaction, or one that's almost exclusively player-run, or something inbetween? Pay for play, free, or "donations required for additional benefits?"

I can tell you how wonderful Armageddon is, but if you're not looking for a game that's based on Dark Sun and Dune, then my thinking it's wonderful will be useless information to you.

Zmud is the client ive used for the last year or so.. and I must say im not a huge fan of the mapping feature.  I could never get it to work right.. id always have to fill in everything manually.. and honestly that is a lot of work.  Its much easier if mud X just has the automapper snippet coded in.  

As far as RP goes I am looking for a medieval based mud.  I am not a fan of permadeath for the simple reason I dont want to spend 2000 hours in a character and loose it again.  In my opinion there are a lot of death systems out there that work better.  For example, ones you die then become a spirit.. then wonder around some ethereal plane trying to get out some how or even the ones where you become a ghost and have to find a new body somehow.  

To be honest I have never played MUSH but I am a fan of D&D games.  I have played on a leveless and a level-based system as well as a class and classless system and i liked both really.  I could put up with either JUST AS LONG AS they are well balanced.  

I am not looking to play-2-pay.  I just want to have some fun before college starts and i start working on my own mud.  I dont mind if the game has play-2-pay features like character upgrades.. just as long as any player can reach that power level even if they dont pay.  Guilds, clans, player and imm rp are total pluses to what im looking for, but not necessarily a requirement.

Achaea has some really cool features (weather, city government, etc) but during my short time there I didn't really see much RP. It's sorta a combination of level & skill based...gaining levels gets you lesson points, which you can use to train skills. You can also pay real money for lesson points, or buy them with IC money. It's also really really had to find your way around in. I happen to be one of those people who can usually get around in a mud without mapping anything, and Achaea influenced me to attempt to get my Zmud automapper to work, although I failed miserably. I only played it for like a week though, so I'm sure I don't know even half of what exists there, heh.

Yeah, Achaea lacks an auto-mapper. Are we talking about an auto-mapper in the Zmud sense where it spits out a a finished map at the end or are you talking about something where you move and see a "graphical" (in ansi text) representation of your room and the exits leading off of it?

I've been thinking of putting something like the latter in as an option for players, but I guess I question it's usefulness. What I'm thinking of would be something like this:

| /
| /
---You
/
/

To represent that there are north, northeast, southwest and west exits. Obviously we'd pretty it up but is that what people are talking about?

I don't think we'd be able to show more than the exits from the room you're in since because our main body of rooms is node-based (there is a grid-based ansi-graphical overlay of the whole continent but it's mainly a tool for us to introduce distance more easily rather than places with a lot of content). Cause we're node-based, our exits don't have to make sense in a Cartesian way. (I think I'm using Cartesian properly. I'm not much of a math guy.) For instance, there are places where we've intentionally created confusing "illogical" exits to increase the sense of what a convoluted forest really feels like: confusing to get through. You could go north and then east and end up back in the same room. Tough to map in ansi text.

The other big problem is that aside from the 8 cardinal directions you can also move up, down, in, and out. I'm curious how people map this kind of thing in ansi text.

Thanks!
--matt

I think it depends on what you see as RP. It's certainly not RP-enforced, but players get awfully caught up in the in-role fiction of the game. For instance, after an event a couple years ago in which one player managed to cause a firestorm to descend upon one of the player-cities, killing everyone and everything in it, there was a huge to-do about putting her on trial for crimes against humanity. (She didn't know exactly what her actions were going to do but she had very good reason to believe they were going to hurt SOMEONE.) There were problems with the city she was a citizen of not being as willing to put her forth for trial as the victimized city might like, etc. I forget what eventually came of it, but I believe they did have a trial, etc.

I don't know if you want to call that RP or not, but it's the kind of thing I tend to be more interested in seeing in-game than RP in the sense of talking with an 'accent', etc.

--matt

If you would like to see a pretty good overhead mapping feature, check out necromium.com port 4000.

Commands are display bigmap or display smallmap.

I have run into several automappers during my days.  

Jobo has probably modified my favorite.  He stated in Kyndig it is based on a ROM snippet by Dingo.  
Example:

Adventures Unlimited also has a nice automapper based on something Sardu did, which can be seen in help snippets.
Example:

I have seen a few on Dawn of Time Codebases
Homepage:
Example:

Basically, these show you graphical representations as you move around the mud.

I have seen automappers work in maze like areas. From the mud I came from, adventures unlimited, there was an area called Shadow Grove for instance. It could be quite confusing for beginning players, especially if they didnt have infravision. At times, you could move around in circles for 10 minutes or so and not seem to be getting anywhere and this was just a small maze and at other times it could be really simple. It was almost as if they maze changed every so often. Another example is rooms like:

O Let the X represent you
O-X Let the O represent rooms
O

You could link the same vnum in the room with the X and the room north of it so if you keep moving north it will appear as if you are moving but you really arent. If a lot of rooms are like this it can get really confusing in a good sense. Forests seem to go on forever, etc.

Well, one possibility is to do it with characters much like everything else would be, but it might just be best to have the autoexits right by the map for up and down exits.

Exits: north, south, west, up, down

As far as in and out directions go im assuming you mean something like enter and exit room/object/etc. You could just have an object in a room like:
A huge tree is here allowing access to the Forbidden Planes
You could type in tree or enter tree or something like that.

I'll check those out, thanks.

No, in and out are directions just like north, south, east, west in Achaea.
--matt

Sorry for digging up an old thread, but I noticed the mention of various mapping styles and thought I would share ours.

Here is a link to a screen shot of our local graveyard zone. Its relative simple, and should give you an idea of how we implimented the mapping.

Every room on the mud is represented by a 3x3 square of characters on the map.



When you are actually moving around in the game, you have the option of using a small map or a large map in addition to not seeing the map at all. Of course, you can always bring it up by issuing the map command.

A large percentage of our players say that our mapping system is the #1 reason they play. I personally cant imagine playing a mud that didnt have one anymore as it makes it so much easier to learn new areas and find your way around.

Someone mentione pking - the map does not show where other players (or items, mobs, etc) are. We dabbled in line of sight and couldnt get it to a place where we were satisfied with it so that isnt factored in at the moment.

Does anyone have screenshots of their map? Its interesting to see how other people impliment ideas.