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                     JOURNAL FOR FRIDAY 14TH APRIL, 2017
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Easter bunnies
   DATE: Fri 14 Apr 10:44:29 BST 2017

Easter. What better way to celebrate than with a rabbit? :)


  %%
       Ref: M1
      Name: a rabbit
     Alias: RABBIT
     Reset: AFTER→1m
   OnReset: A rabbit hops into view.
    Action: AFTER→15s JITTER→15s
  OnAction: The rabbit hops around a bit.
          : You see the rabbit twitch it's little nose, Ahh...
          : The rabbit makes a soft squeaking and chattering noise.

  It's a small white, fluffy bunny rabbit. Not a pocket watch in sight, and it
  doesn't seem to be late for anything!
  %%


At long last WolfMUD has a rabbit once again. As frequent readers may know,
the rabbit is the first mobile I create in any version of WolfMUD.

For posterity, here is the first time the rabbit is seen in action at 9:51pm
on Tuesday, 11th April:


	>w
	Quiet sheltered area
  You are in a small quiet area of the garden. Tall bushes have grown up over
  a trellis work to provide a small shaded area to come and sit in. The only
  exit from this area is eastward.

	You see a rabbit here.

	The only exit you can see from here is east.
	>
	You see the rabbit twitch it's little nose, Ahh...
	>
	The rabbit hops around a bit.
	>
	The rabbit hops around a bit.
	>
	The rabbit hops around a bit.
	>
	The rabbit makes a soft squeaking and chattering noise.
	>
	The rabbit makes a soft squeaking and chattering noise.
	>


So far the rabbit only emits random actions. Adding movement will be next so
that it can actually hop between locations.

Technically the rabbit is not actually a mobile yet. It just uses the Action
and OnAction attributes to emit random messages at random intervals so that it
appears to do things. In fact these attributes can be used to seemingly give
life to any item. I’ve added a clock to the tavern that ‘chimes’ every 15
minutes for example. The clock chimes will slowly drift due to the fact that
the events will actually be scheduled every 15 minutes plus the time it takes
to run the event.

Changes, plus a few minor fixes, are on the public dev branch for those that
are interested.

I’m now going to spend some time refactoring clean up, reset and action as
they seem to share a lot of common code. I also need to update the $cleanup,
$reset, $spawn and $action commands as currently they can only act on the item
that issues the command. That is the command always acts on the actor when you
should be able to pass an alias to them. For example ‘$action rabbit’ or more
accurately ‘$action #UID-XX’.

--
Diddymus


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