Up to Main Index Up to Journal for December, 2016 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 Up to Main Index Up to Journal for December, 2016