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                   JOURNAL FOR THURSDAY 23RD NOVEMBER, 2017
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SUBJECT: A quick update…
   DATE: Thu 23 Nov 23:08:58 GMT 2017

Life has been busy again, hence no recent updates. With Christmas approaching
I guess I’ll have even less time on my hands for a while.

Work on properly saving and loading players for WolfMUD continues. However,
there are more pieces of the puzzle missing than I first thought. I also seem
to be fighting with my own code again in places, which isn’t helping.

It seems my record jar marshal and unmarshal APIs are quite broken and lack
symmetry with each other. I’ve been working on sorting that out as I work with
the APIs more. I also seem to be forever converting between strings and byte
slices. That is a bigger issue that I need to address at some point.

The saving and loading of players also requires that the marshaling be
recursive, so that containers work and are saved and restored properly.
Loading has already been implemented in the zone loaders. However, they are
pretty specialised at the moment and can only deal with zones. What I need to
do is generalise the loader so it works with any .wrj record jar file. Then
implement it’s inverse for saving any .wrj record jar file.

All in all, a lot of work pulling things apart and putting them back together
again. Actually the reality is more pulling things apart, then trying various
ways of putting them back together again, rewriting code after each attempt.
This is how I like to code, iterating over something until it feels right.
It’s not always possible to code like that. Sometimes you just need something
that works while working on some other piece of code. Other times you just
need something that works and you don’t have time to iterate over several
versions. Here I’m thinking about work, where clients pay barely enough to get
the job done, yet expect every feature, every bell and every whistle going.

At least with WolfMUD I can work at my own pace, which admittedly is slow and
methodical.

In other news, as soon as I asked for help and input on the subject of genders
in WolfMUD everyone went quiet. For now at least no changes are planned for
genders.

I’ve also spent some time giving my Raspberry Pi some much needed attention.
At some point I should really upgrade to a Raspberry Pi 3 — yup, I know I
always say that don’t I? Still, WolfMUD runs just fine on it. Being a slower
and rather cramped little beastie[1] it makes performance tuning and memory
optimisations easier and more fun.

--
Diddymus

  [1] Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, 512MB RAM, single core @ 700-900MHz.


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