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                    JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 18TH DECEMBER, 2016
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SUBJECT: Christmas project planning
   DATE: Sun 18 Dec 23:22:19 GMT 2016

This journal has been a little quiet recently due to the fact I’ve either been
up to my eyeballs with work or busy with family matters - especially with the
run up to Christmas.

Having said that, I have managed a little work on WolfMUD. Currently I’m bug
hunting and writing tests for the recordjar package. Hopefully I can sort out
the known bug which is causing odd blank lines to be output in the greeting
when players connect. I’m also trying to clean up some of the convoluted logic
in the Read method.

More exciting, I’ve been thinking about what to work on over the Christmas
break. As long time readers of this journal may remember, each Christmas I try
to pick a project to work on — a busman’s holiday if you will. The last few
years it’s just been WolfMUD with the aim of doing a coding blitz. WolfMUD is
now at the stage where I feel I can work on specific areas and features rather
than just work on WolfMUD as a whole.

So what’s it going to be?

I’m thinking it’s about time WolfMUD came alive again. At the moment nothing
happens in WolfMUD unless a player does something. There are no mobiles
wandering around, no object resets, no ambient messages and time does not
pass. If all players log out everything just stops.

So my — very ambitious — project for the Christmas break this year is to
breathe life back into WolfMUD.

As usual the rabbit and gardener will be the first mobiles introduced. I have
no idea why it’s always the rabbit and gardener first. It’s just been that way
with every rewrite of WolfMUD over the last 30 odd years and I’m not about to
change it :)

I’ll also have to go digging into the old Java code to refresh my memory on
how I implemented item resets. I know there was a reset frequency and a ‘reset
on pick up’ flag. So if you picked up an item and ‘reset on pick up’ was set
you would get a new item sprout after the reset frequency. If ‘reset on pick
up’ was not set a new item would sprout after the reset frequency when the
item is junked or otherwise disposed of. If the reset frequency was zero the
item was just disposed of and not reset. I’m sure there was some special
handling for unique items as well, but I can’t remember what it was.

I’ve also switched to the Go 1.8 beta 2 now while doing development work.

--
Diddymus


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