Tutorial
2 | Getting Started
Before you begin the tutorial, there are 2 things you will need to do:
1. Download and install the Flatland Rover software
2. Download and install the tutorial files.
If you haven’t downloaded your free Flatland Rover software, download Rover now!
There are also a few files you will need in order to follow along with the tutorial. You can get the tutorial files here. This download will unzip to a folder called Flatland Tutorial. Save your 3DML files that you create during the tutorial in this folder.
Open a new file in your text editor. You’ll want to use software that displays all ASCII characters in the same amount of space. This is also called monospacing, meaning that an “i” takes up just as much space on the screen as a “M”. Monospacing is very important for creating spots, because your maps will appear as easily readable grids. The Windows accessory program Notepad works well. Do not use a fancier word processor, such as Microsoft Word, which does not display characters with monospacing; your maps will not appear as easily readable grids.
Everything in a 3DML file must be bounded by the < spot > and < /spot > tags. The < spot > tag has one parameter: version. The version parameter specifies what version of Rover the spot was designed for. If someone visits your spot with a version of Rover that is older than the version specified in the version tag, then they will be prompted to upgrade Rover before visiting your spot (the current version of Rover is 3.5).
Start a 3DML file
Go ahead and type the following lines of code to get started. Do not use spaces before and after the enclosing brackets. They are just used here for page display:
< spot version="3.3" >
< head >
< /head >
< body >
< /body >
< /spot >
When you have finished typing this, save your 3DML file with .3dml as the file extension (i.e., firstspot.3dml).
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