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                   JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 27TH OCTOBER, 2021
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Update available with new front-end
   DATE: Wed 27 Oct 19:36:32 BST 2021

It’s been over two weeks since I last wrote anything for the journal. Was it
because I’ve been busy working on the new WolfMUD front-end? Yes, indeedy!
Could it also have something to do with trying to get said front-end ready for
a Halloween snapshot/alpha release? I think it might…

What is the front-end? The front-end basically greets a player when they
connect to the server. It then allows them to login with their account details
or create a new account and a character. To make that happen we need to have a
question and answer session with the player. This is the opposite of what
usually happens in-game where you issue a command and the server responds.

The front-end also needs a lot of other machinery to work. The server needs to
be able to save a player’s character out to a file. It also needs to be able
to load that file again and recreate the player’s character — complete with
any inventory items, some of which may be held, worn or wielded.

I have just pushed out the required changes for a working front-end to the
experiment branch. The changes include:


  • Client networking code has been cleaned up and move to own package.
  • Bug fix for unmarshaling SPAWN and WAIT attributes for a RESET field.
  • The GENDER field is not unmarshaled (although currently unused).
  • Player account details are unmarshaled into a player’s Thing.
  • A preferred field ordering when writing jars has been added to types.
  • New code implementing front-end Q/A session added.
  • The old newAcct utility has been re-added from the current WolfMUD.
  • Thing has a new Marshal method.
  • New SAVE player command added.
  • QUIT command updated to also SAVE when quitting.


Some of the code may not be up to my usual standards — Halloween looms ever
closer. It’s still a work in progress and I’ll be improving the code until the
last minute possible. Having said that, everything is working and has been
tested on Linux and Windows. Any existing player files can be copied over from
previous versions. If you have a player file that doesn’t work, please let me
know: diddymus@wolfmud.org. Likewise for any bugs you find…

From a parity point of view, I think the experiment branch nearly has all of
the current WolfMUD features[1]. One missing feature are barriers. Barriers
stop mobiles wandering out of an area and are defined using BARRIER fields. I
may see if I can get them added over the next couple of days. A more glaring
omission is the use of a configuration file. Currently all settings and paths
are hard-coded. I don’t think I’ll manage to implement that for the initial
snapshot/beta release. If they don’t make it this time around then barriers
and a configuration file will be in the next snapshot/beta.

The last missing feature is player health, and the HIT command. I’m going to
let this one slide — for now. With the new code I have new and improved ideas
to work on for implementing player statistics/resources and combat.

Before the Halloween release I plan on the experiment branch becoming the main
dev branch and the experiment branch will be no more. Continuing development
will then be done on the dev branch once again.

Only four days left until Halloween /\oo/\

--
Diddymus

  [1] I still need to go through docs/zone-files.txt and make sure everything
      has been included. I also need to double check the behaviour of all the
      player commands.


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