
                          Making Menus
                          ------------

A pretty sparse menu might look something like this:

----------------------------------------------------------------
@dir=maps\bogosity\gen
@Light Yellow
                    The World of Bogosity

@Light Blue
   Thank the gods this world doesn't exist... yet...

@Cyan
      A bogus history      @history.txt
      Important NPCs       @npcs.mnu
----------------------------------------------------------------

The first line "@dir=maps\bogosity\gen" defines the base directory
within which everything else can hopefully be found. Almost every
menu file you create will probably need a line like this.
Otherwise, the program reading the menus (sub\eg.exe) won't know
where to look for the text files and submenus it is trying to
access.

The next line "@Light Yellow" tells the program to use yellow
when displaying the title of this menu. As you can see, you can
change color numerous times within the same menu. Here is the
full list of colors at your disposal:

Black           Blue             Green           Cyan
Red             Magenta          Brown           White
Dark Grey       Light Blue       Light Green     Light Cyan
Light Red       Light Magenta    Light Yellow    Bright White

Note that you can also enable blinking on any of these colors.
"@Light Yellow Blinking" would cause the title line, "The World
of Bogosity", to blink on and off.

The second to final line, "A bogus history @history.txt", shows a
menu selection and the text file it is tied to. The final line,
"Important NPCs @npcs.mnu", shows another menu selection and the
menu file it is tied to. All text files must have the .txt
extension, and all menu files must have the .mnu extension.

You can go into a text or menu file by hitting the <enter> key
when you are on the appropriate selection. However, if you want
to actually edit a menu file rather than simply passing through
it, you must use the "<" or ">" keys. The "<" key will edit the
menu you are currently in. The ">" key will edit the menu or text
file you are currently selecting. In this way, you can literally
create a system of menued notes about your world on the fly,
without ever having to fall back to a DOS prompt.

Of course, you can also edit your menus and text files from the
DOS prompt without ever going through Mapper. Just be sure that
whatever editor or wordprocessor you use can save your files in
text format. That is the most portable format yet devised (since
it doesn't actually contain any formatting information other than
carriage returns), and it is the only format which the "eg.exe"
menuing system knows about. For complete newbies, I'd suggest
using "edit" which should have come with your system. For unix
aficionados, there's a DOS-version of "vi" available which you
might want to use. There's also a file called vi.hlp which you
may want to print out if you think you need a quick and dirty
refresher course.

If you have any questions, feel free to write.

          Jim Vassilakos        jimvassila@aol.com
                                jimv@empirenet.com

