Up to Main Index Up to Journal for May, 2017 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. Up to Main Index Up to Journal for May, 2017