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                     JOURNAL FOR THURSDAY 14TH MAY, 2017
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Some peace and quiet
   DATE: Sun 14 May 23:29:09 BST 2017

A little peace and quiet at last. Time for WolfMUD has been a rare commodity
of late. Take for example this journal entry. Started writing it Monday and have
had at least three attempts at getting it finished. Looks like I’m going to be
buried in work for at least another two weeks as well :(

I did manage to reimplement the #DEBUG command last weekend. The #DEBUG code
is now cleaner, easier to extend and reports more errors to the user — or logs
errors and points the user to the log. Changes were pushed to the public dev
branch on Tuesday but I’m only getting five minutes now to mention it. The
#DEBUG command by itself will now list the status of memory, CPU and blocking
profiles. Using #DEBUG with just MEMPROF, CPUPROF or BLOCKPROF will show just
the status of that profile. In either case status is shown as running or
stopped.

Since updating the site a while ago some pages are causing alignment issues
due to lines over 80 characters long. I’ve been going through the site tidying
things up as and when I get time.

I did find a copy of a short article I wrote for the magazine NEWS/400[1].
It’s about WolfMUD on IBM’s AS/400 way back in 1999. It was somewhat of a big
deal back then as IBM was pushing Java, WolfMUD was pushing the AS/400’s
performance and I was finding bugs in IBM’s Java implementation and working
with the IBM labs to help fix them. Hope to get the article online at some
point, more for historical interest than anything practical. Not sure where to
put it, maybe in the Java archive.

Now I’m wondering what to work on next for WolfMUD.

I really want to get mobiles wandering around. I have several approaches I’m
mulling over at the moment. One is to just hack up a Move attribute along the
lines of Reset, Cleanup and Action attributes. Another approach would be to
implement a Behaviour attribute with an expandable number of behaviours such
as Move, Defend and Attack. Each behaviour could be weighted so that a thing
can move more than it attacks for example. It would also be possible to make
the Action attribute a behaviour instead so that how often an Action is
performed is weighted. As I said, still mulling things over.

I also know that the WolfMUD code is severely lacking tests. The tests I have
written I don’t like, they need revisiting and rewriting. What with the recent
security bug I’ve been thinking about testing a lot recently. Testing may be
an unglamorous and thankless task, but someone has to do it.

--
Diddymus

  [1] NEWS/400 seems to be called iProDeveloper now.


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