Up to Main Index Up to Journal for October, 2017 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 Up to Main Index Up to Journal for October, 2017