Basternae.org

I’ve been in California for two weeks and already have two job offers, at least one of which offers a six-figure salary and is a company you’ve definitely heard of, and I’m likely to get a third offer within the next week.  I know which one I’m going to go with (hint: it isn’t the one that pays the most), but it is awesome to be in a place where my skills will be appreciated.

If I were still in Ohio I’d likely have to work somewhere that would involve cranking out WTF-worthy ASP.NET pages all day.  I’d rather live under a bridge, thanks.  Too bad Ohio doesn’t have very good bridges.

Funny thing is, I don’t really care all that much about pay and benefits at a place where I work.  I’m more interested in finding a problem that’s so hard I’ll have to throw my whole brain at it.  Not having to waste time shoveling snow and scraping ice off my car windows makes for more time to brain at hard problems.

FindMUD.com has broken the 600 MUD listing mark.  Most of the last hundred additions have been by the admins of the MUDs being listed.  Great for accuracy, but a lot slower than adding them in bunches.

When the help file entries were translated from a text file to our fancy help entry format, the line spacing in each entry was converted from single to double.  It was just a quirk of XML serialization, but it made for long, spammy entries when helps were displayed.  I had gone through and cleaned up one or two hundred of them, but there were about four or five hundred more to go.  I spent a while going through the rest and removing the extra newlines where they weren’t wanted.  It would have taken forever if not for the help editor tool, but thanks to that it only took half an afternoon to clean them up.

Another thing that was a nuisance about the help system was that it would match and display every entry that matched the entered keyword.  If you typed “help heal” you’d get the entries for the spells heal, group heal, full heal, and mass heal.  I’m not even going to say how many entries you’d see if you typed “wall” or “fire”.  While it was intentional that a general match would take place, i.e. if you did “help wall” you’d see all of the help entries for wall of fire, wall of stone, etc., the unintended consequences were that you’d see extra entries even if you had an exact title match.

That’s been changed, so now when you type “help wall of fire” or “help heal” you’ll see the exact entry you were looking for, while you’ll still see multiple entries if you were doing a general query like “help fire” or “help wall”.

Go ahead, log in and play around a bit and see what you think of the way help is organized and how it works now.  Let me know if you see anything wacky or see a way to make it more useful.

Working on a zone always results in editor improvements, so here’s what we get this release:

* Changed the error window shown for “Check Area” to a scrollable list so all errors can be seen.
* When items in the list of errors found by “Check Area” are double-clicked, the object, room, or mob will open in the edit window so you can change whatever the area check complained about.
* The map window is now refreshed when “apply” is clicked in the room editor so we see the room change color when the terrain type changes.
* The map window is now cleared if there was an area loaded when File –> New is used to create a new area.
* Added a “New” button to the exit edit dialog so new empty rooms with reciprocal exits can be created from the exit editor.  This will be easier than creating both rooms and manually creating an exit in each room pointing to the other.
* Added more content to the help file.

I have the general layout of the Grey Elf hometown finished now. There’s a lot of work still to do — room descriptions, shops, mobs, objects, etc., but the layout is done and the repopulation points have been set.

Here’s what it looks like:

I’ve escaped Ohio. Right now I’m living in San Jose, CA and it’s a vast improvement so far. Hopefully development on Basternae 3 can resume soon, work and life arrangements permitting.

I spent a little while working on the Grey Elf hometown today. That sort of thing always results in editor changes. Version 0.55 was released today with these two changes:

* Added the “Check Area” command to the tools menu. Right now it only checks for missing descriptions on rooms, objects, and mobs.
* Added instrument type selection for the edit values screen when editing instrument objects.

I made a couple minor text fixes, the most noticeable of which was a map rendering glitch that would cause mobs to show up as P’s and the map to be strangely distorted in the client.

I also released a minor update to the client (now version 0.18), with a map fix and a couple window focus improvements.

On Tiu’s recommendation I read “Gardens of the Moon” by Steven Erikson. It also didn’t hurt that it had a recommendation by Stephen Donaldson on the cover (he’s one of my favorites). I picked it up at a bookstore called “Trade-A-Book” that I found while visiting Santa Clara, CA. It was a bit different than other bookstores I’ve been in since it was all fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, horror, and romance, almost kind of a “his and hers” bookstore. Unlike other bookstores I’ve been in, it was all fiction.

Gardens of the Moon is a sword-and-sorcery book in a world of its own, which is a nice change of pace — I’m a little sick of books that rely on things fantasy readers already know about, like Dwarves, Elves, and Ogres and their racial stereotypes. Even so, many “world cut from whole cloth” books tend to be awkward, ill-explained, and not very plausible, and this wasn’t one of them. I guess anthropologists know how to create new creatures and cultures pretty well.

Erikson is a good writer, definitely better than Robert Jordan, George Martin, or any of those other long-winded get-to-the-point-already writers.

There’s really only one thing that bugs me about his style — the way he introduces characters. They tend to come up in a way that their relevance to the story is not at all apparent, and in a way that is disruptive to the flow of the tale. More than once I found myself breezing through the story and then I hit a new character and stumbled in brief disarray before getting back up to speed. Maybe that gets better in his later books.

There are 9 books in the core Malazan Book of the Fallen series, with the 10th coming out this year. I’m hooked, so there’s some work to do…

These spells were made to work today:

Cleric

* Dispel Evil
* Dispel Good
* Holy Word
* Unholy Word

Druid

* Gleam of Dawn
* Gleam of Dusk
* Negate Hex

Illusionist

* Magnetism

Anti-Paladin

* Stamina
* Greater Stamina