Movement through the Tour is governed by the hyperlinks. These are initially generated by a program originally used to convert the PDP-11 game Adventure. In the initial stages of construction, it is easier to regenerate the hypertext pages from the text database when there are errors in the links, than it is to edit the links manually.
Accordingly, the initial maintainence mode is as follows:
Navigate the tour and make a note of the node number where you wish to
change the text (located in the page title).
Obtain the file ftp://sundae.triumf.ca/pub2/ctour/text.txt .
Locate the text for the node in the file, cut out the relevant piece, edit it
and mail me a copy.
The node descriptions occur twice, a short one-line
description used for the title and a multi-line description used for the
body of the page. When the HTML hypertext is generated, the leading node
number is stripped off and the remainder of the text becomes HTML.
So, HTML formatting commands such as <p> (paragraph)
or <br> (line break) may be embedded if desired.
Eg. (long descriptions)
64,Pacific Spirit Park 64,You're at the western edge of the Pacific Spirit Park, formerly 64,the University Endowment Lands of UBC. 65,Microelectronics Lab 65 65, This page under construction.(short descriptions)
64,Pacific Spirit Park 65,Microelectronics Lab 65
The movement database structure is more complex than is required by the tour.
For each node there are zero or more lines with the following format:
node,0,destination,verb,verb,verb........
The verbs are taken from the list at the end of text.txt.
Eg.
2,0,74,3,51,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 badges; stores enter 2,0,90,46,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 south, tourmeans that from node 2 (badge racks), a verb 3 (enter) or 51 (tour) will take you to node 74 (stores). A verb 46 (south) will take you to node 90 (inside the main gate). All the verbs on the same line take you to the same place. As each verb generates a separate icon, it is not a good idea to add excessive synonyms for the same direction.
When the basic geography has settled down, maintainance will be by editting the node HTML files directly. This will be the point to add hyperlinks to other documents, imagemap config files, etc.
(I'll be away till August, so don't expect much action till then, unless I can persuade someone else to look after it.)