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                    JOURNAL FOR FRIDAY 31ST DECEMBER, 2021
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Another year of WolfMUD development
   DATE: Fri 31 Dec 18:06:00 GMT 2021

Another year of WolfMUD development has been and gone. A strange year with
coronavirus dominating people’s lives. The new job I started at the beginning
of the year, during the pandemic, has been going really well.

This year saw four WolfMUD releases: v0.0.18, v0.0.19-beta.1, v0.0.19-beta.2
and v0.0.19-beta.3. The journal saw 48 posts, one more than last year! :)

The code has seen 334 individual commits. A lot of the changes this year have
been “The Experiment” that started around May and ended up being a rewrite of
WolfMUD. The rewrite is still not quite on par with the v0.0.18 functionality
but it’s not far off.

I know some people were unhappy when I announced the experiment and subsequent
rewrite. Although everyone now seems happy with the results :) I did manage to
keep compatibility with everybody’s zone and player files, which helped a lot,
as did the progress which is now moving along at a fair clip.

All things considered, I think WolfMUD is in pretty good shape now.

The WolfMUD site and repositories are still hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4 (4Gb)
with Mythic Beasts. I’ve been quite happy with how that has turned out.

My 2022 plans include bringing the rewrite up to par with the v0.0.18 release,
with a v0.0.19 release in early 2022. The next big feature to be added will be
combat — which everyone has been waiting patiently for. After that I need to
start cleaning up the new code and looking at some optimisations. Then it will
be time to start adding new features. Some big ticket items, in no particular
order: skills, shops and traders, monetary currency, crafting, player housing
and quests — all the fun stuff :)

I’m also considering getting a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for WolfMUD testing. It
has a quad core ARM Cortex A53, as used in the Raspberry Pi 3, running at 1GHz
and it has 512Mb RAM. Currently it’s reselling[1] for less than £15 which is a
real bargain and means it’s also accessible to a lot of people. The one thing
I’m not too keen on is the higher power requirements of the Zero 2 W. With the
original Zero W I can run it from a single USB A port and use it as a portable
full Linux and Go development and testing environment. Usually one of my Zeros
can be found dangling from my Chromebook while I work :)

Happy new year everyone!

--
Diddymus

  [1] Although at the moment all Raspberry Pi are out of stock everywhere :(


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