Up to Main Index Up to Journal for April, 2021 JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 11TH APRIL, 2021 ______________________________________________________________________________ SUBJECT: WolfMUD v0.0.18 released DATE: Sun 11 Apr 19:55:19 BST 2021 The next release of WolfMUD, v0.0.18, is now available for download[1]. This is the eighteenth official release of WolfMUD, the last release being Halloween 2020. A lot of the work and effort for this release has been happening behind the curtain, making WolfMUD work smoothly with Go’s module mode. The official documentation says you can just drop in a go.mod file and you’re good to go. Pfffft! Not so. Aside from updating documentation and tooling there is all the testing that has to be done. If it was so simple there wouldn’t be pages and pages of documentation just for module mode[2]. As well as support for module mode, this release includes support for @refs in zone files. An @ref lets authors refer to fields defined elsewhere in a zone file, see docs/zone-files.txt for all the details. The supplied zone files have been overhauled, cleaned up and use @refs — providing examples authors can look at and crib from. The player experience has been improved with asynchronous communications — the handling of commands is no longer delayed by other players with a slower network connection. A number of bugs have been fixed in the record jar package. The documentation in running-the-server.txt and compiling-from-source.txt has been rewritten, be sure to check them out. Of course no release would be complete without numerous other minor additions, bug fixes and assorted tweaks… Main highlights from the release notes: Module Mode - WolfMUD now uses Go's module mode instead of the older GOPATH mode. As a result the use of 'go get' to obtain WolfMUD is considered deprecated. The preferred method of obtaining WolfMUD is Git and cloning the repository. Alternatively the binary and source archives are provided for each release. Added - Zone files can use @refs to reference fields defined at another reference. - Fields in a record jar can have an optional preferred ordering applied when the record jar is written. The default preferred ordering for WolfMUD is specified in the attr/ordering package and can be changed to suit. - The preferred ordering of fields in a zone file is now documented and is intended as a guide to ease collaboration between authors. Details can be found in docs/zone-files.txt. - New wrjfmt tool for formatting record jar files. See Known bugs / Issues. - An optional Makefile is provided for building, testing and running WolfMUD on Linux during development. - An optional Makefile is provided for building WolfMUD releases on Linux. - A new botrunner tool has been added to simulate players on the server for load testing. Changed - The supplied zone files have been cleaned up and make use of the new @refs. - Player files are now written out with the preferred field ordering. - Minor performance improvement inlining state.CanLock check in state.AddLock - Network writes to clients are now asynchronous. This improves performance when handling player commands. Clients on a slow connection are handled better and no longer hold up other players. - All commands and tools should now be placed in the bin directory. - Default data directory for binary, source and Git clones is ../data - Default root directory for binary, source and Git clones is WolfMUD. The instructions for Git clone on the website and in documentation is now: git clone https://code.wolfmud.org/WolfMUD - Most documentation in the docs directory has been rewritten/ improved. Deleted - The documentation in getting-started.txt has been incorporated into the running-the-server.txt and compiling-from-source.txt guides. Fixed - Fixed an issue in record jars where the name of the free text field was included at the beginning of the text if a named free text field was used as opposed to an unnamed free text section. - Fixed a formatting issue when writing out free text sections. Free text sections are now unfolded and refolded when being written out. - Fixed a comment in the text package which was causing the copyright notice to appear as a package comment. Known Bugs / Issues - The new wrjfmt tool is a work in progress and has several limitations, however it has been made available 'as is' due to the benefits provided when used to clean up the zone files. - Comments will be stripped from the record jar - String lists will be compacted - Camel cased field names will be title cased - Named free text fields will become free text sections Despite these limitations, it is very useful when formatting a zone file and comparing the output with the original zone file, using a text diff program, and manually applying changes. - The new Makefiles for WolfMUD and building releases are currently only for Linux and rely on Bash. -- Diddymus [1] Download area: ../../../downloads/ [2] Developing modules: https://golang.org/doc/#developing-modules Up to Main Index Up to Journal for April, 2021