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                   JOURNAL FOR SATURDAY 31ST DECEMBER, 2016
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Another year of WolfMUD development
   DATE: Sat 31 Dec 23:50:52 GMT 2016

As 2016 draws to a close I thought I’d do a look back and see what I had
managed to achieve over the year.

First of all the journal. This year I managed to nearly double the number of
entries I made — 59 entries compared to 34 entries last year. Some months were
a little sparse but recent months have seen a flurry of activity.

Over the last year 361 commits over 94 files have been made to the public git
repository. There have been a lot more commits that for one reason or another
didn't make it — usually I find myself heading down a blind alley or change
how I’m implementing something. But to give interested people an idea of what
is going on in my head I try to keep as many commits as possible.

The biggest achievement this year has been the official release of WolfMUD
released on Halloween. Since then there have been two more releases bringing
us to v0.0.3 at the end of the year.

When you take into consideration that WolfMUD — the re-rewrite — didn't have
any networking code until the beginning of the year I don’t think I've done
too bad :) One area that seemed to take ages to develop and required several
iterations was the frontend for logging in and creating accounts and players.
Reimplementing the buffers also took a long time, but now it’s done I’m quite
happy with the results.

This year has also seen a number of releases from the Go Team including 1.5.3,
1.5.4, 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.2, 1.6.3, 1.6.4, 1.7, 1.7.1, 1.7.3, 1.7.4. Currently
1.8 Beta 2 is out with 1.8 due in the new year. Yeah, they have been a lot
busier than me ;)

What next for WolfMUD?

As I mentioned in a previous journal entry I think the next step is to bring
WolfMUD to life again. This will mean the introduction of mobiles — creatures
and characters — object resets, ambient messages and time.

Object resets will enable objects to be collectable. This will also mean I
will have to sort out saving of player data properly so that their gear is
saved between game sessions.

Mobiles are a fun part of MUDs. They can wander around and act autonomously.
They also provide an opportunity for combat — besides other players of course.
Combat is quite a ways off yet but adding mobiles is the first step.

There are other simple things that need to be added as well. For example the
tavern entrance should have a door that can be opened and closed. If the door
is left opened for a period of time it should reset in the sense that it
automatically swings closed.

Players also need a lot of work. They should get hungry and thirsty and be
able to eat and drink. They can also be injured and require healing.

All of these things will require tickers so that things happen at specific
intervals. Players heal a set number health every game hour, get hungrier or
thirstier the longer they go with food or drink.

Objects reset after a period when they are first picked up or when they are
disposed of. The book-keeping for this can get quite complicated especially
when there are containers involved as you not only have to reset the container
but the content as well — in which case you are waiting for multiple items to
be disposed of. If you have a pouch with a key in it can there be more than
one pouch? more than one key? Do we wait for the key to be disposed of and
create another pouch for it even if there is already one still in the game? Do
we wait for both the pouch and key to be disposed of and only reset them
together?

I think 2017 will be a fun year for WolfMUD.

--
Diddymus


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