AREA SUBMISSION PROCESS

You should have gotten approval to make the area in the first place. Once you have gotten your area as complete as possible, to the point where it needs testing you should notify the builder's admins. You should areacheck your area (see Building Tools below) and make sure it passes. This is very important because if your area does not pass the check program, then it will crash the testport. Once your area passes area check send your area to areas@forgottenkingdoms.com. Please note that this is not the address to send questions to. Mystra is the only recipient of the areas emails and its sole purpose is to take areas and load them up into the game. If you have questions, you must send it to builders@forgottenkingdoms.com

At this point your area will be allocated vnums, put up on the testport and sent back to you. You must use that version of the area that has been sent to you. You will be given a god character on the testport to test your area with. You will then test your area, and you will find bugs. You will fix the bugs and send back the fixed version of your area to be uploaded. You will be notified by return email (unless you are on the tport at the same time as the builders admins) that your area has been updated to the testport. You will then test your area again, find new bugs and send it back in. All areas have to be sent up more than once. In fact most will get sent up many times. In order to be eligible for testing, an area must have mobiles, objects, rooms and resets completed.

Area Review Process

When you think your area has been tested fully and is ready for the real game it will undergo a review process. Your area will be first sent to Dalvyn who will go over it very carefully looking for problems with the area and making sure that the area meets the building standards. He will then send back an email with a list of changes he wants done. Often he will have suggestions on how to better do something or do something differently, and he will ask questions about what is going on in your area. You will then answer questions and edit your area file, making the changes asked for. In general these changes are not negotiable. We have a set of standards in place to try and keep the game balanced. You will then test your area file, and when you are satisfied with that version you will send it back in for the next stage of review.

Your area is then sent to Tyr, who is one of the coders. He tends to look at areas differently than Dalvyn or Mystra and give a different perspective on what is wrong in the area. He often has suggestions for streamlining your programs. He will then send an email stating the things he wants to see changed. You will make the changes, send up the area for testing, test it, and then send the area back when it is ready for the next stage of review.

The area then comes to Mystra. She will look over the area and make any changes herself, unless they are large ones that take too much time. If that is the case the area will be sent back to you asking for the changes to be made. If they are minor, which is the hope after the other two reviewers have reviewed the area, then Mystra will do all the changes herself. Sometimes Mystra will ask questions of you and suggest better ways to do things. You will recieve an email that will state the changes that were made, and a current version of your area. Mystra will then put the area up onto the real game. From this point you cannot make any changes to your area. The area may get edited over time by the admins to make it conform to new standards or new code. Players may find bugs missed by you and the review process and they may need to be fixed as well. So the version you have and the version in game will end up being different.

Please note that the review process will take time. The reviewers are all busy people and going over an area to check for problems is time consuming.

Revisiting an area

You might decide sometime later that you want to do a major revision of the area. When making your area in the first place you must do so not with the intent to add to it later, but with the intent to submit a fully completed area that you will not need to rework later. However, sometimes a quest is thought up, additions are thought up after the area has been in the game for a while. If the additions are minor, the area administrators will most likely be the ones to do the editing. If it is major, then your area will be sent to you (you must get current version from the game), the thread about it moved back to the New Areas TODO on the forums (providing there is not too much IC information in the thread), and you will be allowed to edit it. Once complete your area must go through the review process above again. This process will take time to do, just the same as a new area review.