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                     JOURNAL FOR MONDAY 10TH APRIL, 2017
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: April fool email? + OnCleanup & OnReset messages done
   DATE: Mon 10 Apr 22:32:24 BST 2017

I know I’m a bit late with this, but on the 1st of April I received a curious
email. At first I thought it was maybe an April fool:


  Hi. I just found your fascinating site about Wolfmud, and I was wondering if
  you still had any copies of the original Beeb version(s) of the game..?

  Regards,

  Lurkio @ Stardot
  https://stardot.org.uk/forums


I decided to take the email at face value and replied. In the end Lurkio and I
exchanged a few interesting emails. Somewhere in the loft I have my old BBC
model B with the drive ROMs on EEPROMS and a homebrew floppy drive in a
cardboard case[1]. Yes, I was that geeky even as a pre-teen. Somewhere around
I still have the old 5¼" floppies I was using when writing Wolf[2] on the
beeb. Maybe, possibly, even the first WolfMUD - an Econet networked version.
But, even if everything still worked would I want to trust the old floppy
drive to read the disks? In the words of Lurkio:


  “Please consider trying to recover the data off your own collection --
  particularly the Wolf(MUD) stuff. Most of the obvious commercial releases
  are already online -- see http://bbcmicro.co.uk -- but Wolf seems to be
  unique, intriguing and unarchived.”


Hrm, unique, intriguing and unarchived. First I have to find the disks. As I
said in one reply, they have been sitting around my study for years. Go to put
my hand on them and poof! — nowhere to be found...

Besides reminiscing, what else have I done recently?

I’ve just push the changes to the public dev branch for custom clean up and
reset/respawn messages.

In the end I added the two new attributes OnCleanup and OnReset. Here is an
example record for an item from the Zinara zone:


  %%
        Ref: O8
       Name: a fish of gold
      Alias: FISH GOLDFISH
      Reset: AFTER→30s JITTER→30s
    OnReset: A man enters. There is a gentle plop as he drops something
             into the pond before he walks off again.
    Cleanup: AFTER→1m JITTER→1m
  OnCleanup: Light gleams off the fish of gold before it fades away and is gone.

  This is a small, finely carved fish that appears to have been made from solid
  gold.
  %%


I’ve also updated the $cleanup and $reset/$spawn commands to display the
messages — with a few rules.

A clean up message will be displayed if the clean up is in a location and seen
by players. If an item does not have an OnCleanup attribute then a default
message will be used. If no notification should be given of the clean up then
an empty OnCleanup can be specified in which case the item will simply
disappear. Items clean ups inside containers are not seen.

A reset/respawn message will be displayed if the reset/respawn is in a
location. If the reset/respawn happens in a container the message will be
displayed in the location the container is in. For the above fish example the
fish resets in the pond which is a narrative container. The OnReset message
will be displayed to players at the pond’s location in the gardens.

If an OnReset attribute is not provided and the reset/respawn is seen then a
default message will be used. The reset/respawn message can be suppressed by
specifying an empty OnReset for an item. In which case the item just appears.

All of this is documented better in the docs/zone-files.txt file. I’ve also
added examples to the two current zone files.

As I said, all pushed to the public dev branch.

--
Diddymus

  [1] I could mess with electronics and potentially blow up the £350 BBC micro
      but mum didn’t want fingers poking into the exposed drive belts. So I
      taped an old cereal box around the drive :)

  [2] WolfMUD originally started off around 1984 as Wolf - a text based,
      single player adventure game - before networking was added.


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