Up to Main Index                          Up to Journal for December, 2019

                    JOURNAL FOR MONDAY 23RD DECEMBER, 2019
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Feeling healthy?
   DATE: Mon 23 Dec 18:54:53 GMT 2019

I've started work on all of the things needed to introduce combat to WolfMUD.
Well sort of. I've had to do some work cleaning up the prompt handling for
players first so that I can add some basic stats to the prompt. Examples of a
brief (current default), short and long prompt:


  >/prompt short
  Prompt set to short.
  H:25/30>/prompt long
  Prompt set to long.
  Health: 25/30 >


I've used the backslash '/' prefix for out of band player commands. The hash
'#' prefix is reserved for admin commands and the dollar sign '$' prefix is
reserved for scripting commands.

For testing I've edited my player file directly to add a health attribute,
which looks like this:


  Health: MAX=30 CURRENT=25


I'll need to fix up existing player files to add the new attribute to all
players. Do I inspect the player file when it is loaded or introduce a
separate 'upgrade' command that processes all files up front?

I've modified the recordjar decoder and encoder so that they understand signed
integer values. This is so that we can have stat modifiers. For example a ring
of health that increases the wearer's maximum health by 5 points and a potion
of healing that increases the drinker's current health (up to the maximum) by
15 points:


         Name: a ring
        Alias: +COPPER:RING
       Health: MAX=+5
  Description: This is a small finger ring made of copper.
  %%
         Name: a glass vial
        Alias: +GLASS:VIAL
       Health: CURRENT=+15
  Description: This is a small glass vial filled with a faintly pink liquid.


Of course I can't test the items as players can't wear items or drink yet :(

I'm not sure yet how I want to implement stat regeneration. My first thought
was to add a player pulse Go routine that fired every so often. This was how
it was implemented in the Java version using a pulse thread per player and
mobile. I'd rather not add another Go routine per player if I can help it.
Although using the current events package would make handling health, mana,
hunger, thirst, spell durations and the like very, very simple.

I could hook into the existing player Go routine for network communication. It
already has a timeout for detecting idle connections. I could shorten the
timeout then if we have x consecutive timeouts (based on the configuration
setting Server.IdleTimeout still) the connection is idle, but now after each
timeout we could trigger the player's pulse handling code…

As everything is up in the air and a bit broken at the moment I've not
committed any changes to the public dev branch yet :(

--
Diddymus


  Up to Main Index                          Up to Journal for December, 2019