Up to Main Index Up to Journal for October, 2021 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. Up to Main Index Up to Journal for October, 2021