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JOURNAL FOR FRIDAY 7TH APRIL, 2017
______________________________________________________________________________
SUBJECT: Further cogitating required…
DATE: Fri 7 Apr 22:16:39 BST 2017
The release of v0.0.5 on Sunday seemed to go well. I haven’t heard any distant
screaming or received any angry emails about it anyway. In fact the monthly
roll up of changes for a release seems to be going quite well. It’s enough
time for me to make some meaningful changes and it’s short enough that people
do not have to wait ages for updates.
So what meaningful changes have I been making recently?
Porting of the ‘newbie zone’ from the Java version is nearly finished. I’ve
renamed the zone ‘Zinaran Caves’, made a few tweaks and changed some wording
from the original — which was written way back in 1999, possibly earlier[1].
Some things in the zone do not work yet due to missing functionality. Walking
of off the chasm will not instantly kill you — yet! The dark passages are not
dark and there are no light sources. However, all of the locations are nearly
completed.
This will make the ‘Zinaran Caves’ the 3rd zone bundled with releases.
I’m often asked if I will release more zones with WolfMUD, my response has
always been no. I don’t want dozens of clone WolfMUD servers all running my
zones. That is why I try to make it as easy as possible for people to write
their own zones and why I release so few. As new features are implemented my
zones do get updated but I rarely expand them. That way people can use the
zones I do provide as a reference and see how things are done.
However the current zones are nearly 20 years old. I’d hope that my writing
has improved during that time — and I have a spellchecker! It’s amazing how
may silly tipos there are ;) Maybe a — long overdue — review of the zones with
a more critical eye is in order…
What else have I been working on?
I’ve made the template of the READ command more generic. When porting the 3rd
zone I came across some instances where messages came out awkward. The current
template used is:
“You read the writing on <name>. It says: <writing>”
The new template is simply:
“You read <item>. <writing>”
A specific instance where this was a problem? Some runes carved into a stone
arch. Initially the message read:
“You read the writing on some runes. It says: The runes depict…”
Nonsense really. Now it reads:
“You read some runes. The runes depict…”
Not perfect but much better. It still allows you to read literal writing, as
in:
“You read a note. It says: this is a note.”
You just have to include the ‘It says:’ as part of the writing. As well as
literal writing you may read something that describes something to you. This
was actually a problem with the marker in the forest, but I didn’t notice it:
“You read the writing on a stone marker. It says: Zinara under an arrow
pointing northwards and Caves with an arrow pointing west down a small
track.”
Now we can have:
“You read a stone marker. The marker is giving directions. If they are right
then the City of Zinara is to the north and there are some caves to the
west, down the small track.”
Simple things… :)
I’ve also been implementing messages. So far I have custom clean up and reset
messages implemented. At the moment I’ve gone with a simple messages attribute
that uses a keyed string list:
Name: a small mushroom
Alias: MUSHROOM
Reset: AFTER→10m JITTER→10m SPAWN→TRUE
Cleanup: AFTER→10m JITTER→10m
Messages: OnCleanup→A gentle cloud of spoors leaves the mushroom before it
blackens, shrivels up and turns to dust.
: OnReset→A small mushroom blooms.
It’s a work in progress. I don’t really like the general messages attribute
and I’d much rather have:
Name: a small mushroom
Alias: MUSHROOM
Reset: AFTER→10m JITTER→10m SPAWN→TRUE
OnReset: A small mushroom blooms.
Cleanup: AFTER→10m JITTER→10m
OnCleanup: A gentle cloud of spoors leaves the mushroom before it blackens,
shrivels up and turns to dust.
However, short of adding an attribute for every message I haven’t come up with
a workable solution yet :(
Hrm, how many different messages are there likely to be? OnReset, OnCleanup,
OnEnter, OnExit — can’t think of any others just now. Maybe an attribute per
message wouldn’t be so bad? Further cogitating required…
As a lot of this work is incomplete or being rethought I’ve not updated the
public dev branch yet. Maybe I’ll do that over the weekend?
--
Diddymus
[1] Eep! Is that really eighteen years ago? There were earlier versions of
the zones, or at least ideas that were used in them. I have a partial
printout dated 17th March 1990 from Wolf (pre WolfMUD) that mentions the
gardener, the rabbit, a fountain and a shady garden - all of which made
it into the Java version and will be in this latest version.
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