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                   JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 11TH OCTOBER, 2017
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: New zone preview, minor updates and lighting
   DATE: Wed 11 Oct 20:44:06 BST 2017

A few more changes have just landed on the public dev branch, mostly small
fixes and tidying up. The Reset attribute now has an Abort method. The JUNK
command now cancels any outstanding cleanup events. When items are reset the
Reset event is cleaned up.

One larger change, which was suggested by Mikołaj Horłysz, is the reworking of
the recordjar decoder and encoder. Previously using the decoder and encoder
were quite verbose:


  recordjar.Decode.Duration(data)
  recordjar.Encode.Duration(data)


The decoder and encoder have now moved into their own sub packages under the
recordjar package and the methods turned in functions. So the above example
simply becomes:


  decode.Duration(data)
  encode.Duration(data)


All of the functions for the decoder and encoder are also visible in the
generated go doc as well. Thanks for the suggestion Mikołaj :)

In other news, I wanted to add something to the Halloween release for players
as well as other programmers. To that end I’ve been working on the port of
what was the ‘Newbie zone’ in the Java version — renamed the ‘Zinara Caves’
zone. Some features are not quite working due to missing functionality — there
are no dark areas that require a light source and no working light sources.
Both of those I’m working on now, but I don’t know if they will be ready by
Halloween. If you want to see a preview of the new zone that has also just
been pushed out to the public dev branch :)

I’m actually thinking of implementing lighting differently in this version of
WolfMUD. Previously a location was either light or dark and light sources made
a dark location light. This time I’m pondering the possibility of adding
visibility on a scale of 0% to 100% — totally dark to blindingly bright. The
idea being that depending on the light sources available — candle, lamp,
daylight, moonlight — depends on whether you can read, see objects, see exits
etc. It will also allow for some interesting things such as night vision,
smoke, fog and new light/darkness based skills. Maybe even lighting
transitions from day to night — with moon phases! I’m getting way ahead of
myself here, still I can dream…

Only 20 days left till Halloween... /\oo/\

--
Diddymus


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