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                  JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 25TH NOVEMBER, 2020
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: New job! & Zone file changes
   DATE: Wed 25 Nov 19:06:50 GMT 2020

No updates recently, but I have a very good excuse! For a while I’ve been
hunting around for a new job, not only that but I wanted to take my career in
a new direction. Now seemed as good a time as any to go out and find myself a
good technical challenge. Said hunt has been keeping me busy with interviews
and technical assessments, hence no updates.

My hunt was successful. I have a new job as principal consultant heading up
the Go practice at AI4Process, where I can put nearly a decade of programming
in Go, and a lot of my other skills, to good use :)

I have been working on WolfMUD — I still need to crash and relax a bit. Over
the past week or two I’ve been busy plugging @refs into the Zinara zone file.
I’m not sure I’m happy with the results. It’s all working really well, but…

This is the definition of a pair breeches from before my changes:


  %%
       Ref: L73O1
      Name: some leather breeches
   Aliases: +LEATHER:BREECHES CLOTHING CLOTHES
  Wearable: UPPER_LEG→2 LOWER_LEG→2
     Reset: AFTER→1m JITTER→5m SPAWN
   Cleanup: AFTER→10m JITTER→5m
  Location: L73

  These are a pair of soft leather breeches.
  %%


This is the same pair of breeches after I’ve updated them:


  %%
       Ref: L73O1
      Name: some leather breeches
   Aliases: +LEATHER:BREECHES CLOTHING CLOTHES
  Location: @M18
  Wearable: @TROUSERS
   Cleanup: @ITEM
     Reset: @SPAWN

  These are a pair of soft leather breeches.
  %%


All of the details for the item are now ‘hidden’ behind @refs. To fully know
what is going on you also need the definitions for @TROUSERS, @M18, @ITEM and
@SPAWN. I’m not sure that is a good thing — or maybe it is? I guess time will
tell. I’d be very interested in what other people think, diddymus@wolfmud.org
please…

As I’ve been trawling through the whole zone file making changes I’ve taken
the opportunity to clean up a few things, fix a few mistakes, make a few tiny
additions and add some sensible ordering to fields.

That last one has bugged me for ages. What order should the fields be in? The
server doesn’t care about the order of the fields. However, from an authoring
point of view consistency can make the job of maintenance easier. At the
moment my list for ordering fields is:


  [Zone record]
    Ref
    Zone
    Author
    Disabled
    Description <------ Free text block (always last)

  [Item, Mobile and location records]
    Ref            <--.
    Name              | Identification info
    Alias/Aliases  <--'
    Start       <-----.
    Exits             |
    ZoneLinks         | location info
    Barrier           |
    Door              |
    Location    <-----'
    Body        <-----.
    Inventory         |
    Holding           | Body related info
    Wearing           |
    Wielding    <-----'
    Narrative   <-----.
    Holdable          |
    Wearable          | What can be done with/to it
    Wieldable         |
    Writing           |
    Veto/Vetoes <-----'
    Action      <-----.
    OnAction          |
    Cleanup           | Event info
    OnCleanup         |
    Reset             |
    OnReset     <-----'
    Description <------ Free text block (always last)


I’m not quite finished and still tweaking away, so changes are not on the
public dev branch yet — but should be soon[1]. Then I’ll start on the other
two zones. I might even add in the imps and giant fungus slugs that inhabit
the caves south of Zinara. They have obviously been absent for far too long!

--
Diddymus

  [1] Maybe a few days or it may have to wait until the weekend, although I am
      still trying to keep WolfMUD Wednesdays free just for development.


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