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SharpMUSH

Attributes

IMAGE

Section titled “IMAGE”

SharpMUSH seeds four standard attributes that name a picture for an object. The engine never reads them; the web portal and the bundled softcode do — a player’s portrait on look, a room’s banner on the Play page, the preview of where an exit leads, a thing’s thumbnail — and any game that wants a picture somewhere reads the same four names rather than inventing its own.

  • IMAGE A URL. Character portrait, room banner, exit-destination preview, thing thumbnail.
  • IMAGE`BANNER A URL for wide art: a character’s profile banner, a room’s Play-page banner. A room without one falls back to IMAGE; a character’s profile does not, since its IMAGE is the avatar drawn beside the banner.
  • IMAGE`ALT The alternative text a screen reader or a text client gets. Softcode falls back to the object’s name.
  • IMAGE`FOCAL x y, each 0 to 1, the point that stays in view when the picture is cropped (0.5 0.5 is the centre). Optional.

All four are seeded no_command, visual, prefixmatch and public, so the owner sets them with & and anyone may get() them:

> &IMAGE me=/assets/chars/tomas.jpg
> &IMAGE`ALT me=Tomas Reyes, at the harbour rail
> &IMAGE`BANNER here=/assets/rooms/lower-docks-wide.jpg
> &IMAGE`FOCAL here=0.5 0.6

There are no width or height attributes: every portal surface that shows a picture is a fixed-size box the picture is cropped into, so dimensions never affect layout. Only site-relative (/...) and https: URLs are rendered; anything else falls back to the no-image tile.

For players the portal’s gallery will keep IMAGE, IMAGE`BANNER and IMAGE`ALT in step with its avatar and banner entries (set from the gallery, or with Change avatar and Change banner on the profile page), so a hand-set value on a player will be overwritten by the next gallery change. Rooms, things and exits are only ever set by hand.

The default flags apply when an attribute is created. An IMAGE a game set before these entries existed keeps the flags it was created with — clear it and set it again to pick up visual and public. The bundled room-contents and profile-handler packages publish an image attribute only while it is visual, so clearing that flag (@set me/IMAGE=!visual) keeps a picture off the portal.

::: seealso