Basternae.org

I’m still working on converting char * strings to std::string strings. Here’s the recent progress:

Since 5/27 we’ve gone from about 5200 references down to 4000. There’s still PLENTY to do.

Because of the way strings are handled, the number of references “to const char *” will fluctuate during the conversion and probably not decrease much until we’re nearly complete.

No, I didn’t just have some rich relative kick off and leave my name in the will.  The closest I have to a rich relative is an uncle who can afford to buy a new pair of shoes every two years.

In the original MUD code and in most C-based codebases I’ve seen, mobs have one set of data and players have a similar but different set of data.  They all have things like hitpoints and movement points, but mobs have things like AI scripts and behavior flags while players have extra things like skill values and guild memberships.

There are two ways to handle this in C:  either have completely different sets of data for each, or have a core set of data and a pointer to the extended data depending on which type it is (player or mob).  The first way is sloppy and dangerous, while the second is sort of a “poor man’s inheritance”.

I’ve rewritten this to use parent and derived classes and all of a sudden some things that were very hard to do are incredibly easy.  It’s also become incredibly easy to have things work differently for mobs and players by being able to use overridden functions for the player versions of code.

For example, since mobs don’t have skill training, almost every check for something like a bash or headbutt is based on a combination of that mob’s level and racial statistics.  For players the check uses skill values modified by actual attributes like dexterity and strength.

Instead of writing a huge function riddled with lots of “if” statements, I can now just write different versions for each.  The code is cleaner, easier to write, and automatically smart enough to “do the right thing”.

I love C++.  Even though I’m getting a bit addicted to C# lately, it still rocks.

I never could have made this change without massive use search-and-replace, since the way to access most of the data members of players has changed completely.  I did not want to change 2000 data references by hand.

I’ve been using Visual Studio .Net 2003 for a long time. I’ve finally upgraded to 2005, and some of the changes are interesting.

One of the things I’ve been doing is converting a lot of the c-string functions to STL std::string. It turns out that the old string functions I’m gradually eliminating have been deprecated:

_snprintf: “This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using _snprintf_s instead.”
strncat: “This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using strncat_s instead.”
stricmp: “The POSIX name for this item is deprecated. Instead, use the ISO C++ conformant name: _stricmp”
fopen: “This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using fopen_s instead.”
strncpy: “This function or variable may be unsafe. Considre using strncpy_s instead.”

I will gladly avoid using those functions. I hate them.

It was far easier to fix than I had expected.

Here’s what I was doing:

std::list<CharData *>::iterator it;
CharData * wch;
for( it = CharList.begin(); it != CharList.end(); )
{
wch = *it;
<stuff happens to wch here, and during combat wch could potentially be killed and deleted>
}

When there was a death in combat, the iterator would get corrupted, because in the destructor for CharData an iterator would remove the CharData from the CharList, corrupting the iterator in the violence update. Due to the chain of function calls between the violence update and where the CharData was actually deleted, there was no way to update the original iterator or do any sort of “safe” removal.

After tinkering around a bit, reading some message boards, it turns out that using a second iterator saves me. One of the iterators is incremented safely, the other damaged/destroyed, and things move on happily because we’re not referencing the broken iterator.

std::list<CharData *>::iterator it;
std::list<CharData *>::iterator jt;
for( it = CharList.begin(); it != CharList.end(); )
{
jt = it++;
ch = *jt;
<dangerous deletion stuff happens here>
}

Pretty strange, but it works.

Ahh, the joy of code metrics.

Files: 132
Lines: 113,584
Statements: 58,853
% Branches: 29.2
% Comments: 8.8
Class Definitions: 52
Methods/Class: 6.86
Average Statements/Method: 14.7
Max Complexity: 477
Max Depth: 8
Average Depth: 1.86
Average Complexity: 11.47

For the first time, the number of lines of code has gone down.  This is because MobProgs were removed.  We also lost about another 400 or so lines because the change to saving objects using XML allowed us to eliminate some duplicate code (repeat after me kids: Duplicate code is BAAAD!)   The average complexity also seems to be gradually decreasing a little.  In general that’s a good thing, since maintainability of code is generally thought to be the inverse of its complexity.

It’s done - objects save and load as XML data rather than some ad-hoc text format.  I’m sure there will be a few extra details to work out, but the saving and loading of basic objects works now.  The change cleared up a bug or two that would come up once in a while due to formatting inconsistencies.

I still have to fix the violence update problem that I mentioned on the 1st.  I’ve tried a few minor changes in the hope that the problem would be resolved, but it really does look like a full combat-process rewrite is in order.  The original method is fundamentally flawed, so we need to work out a better way.

I’ve started tackling the conversion of all object saving to XML. Player saving was easy, since players tend to be pretty much the same and have all the same data fields. However, with all the different types of objects, nesting, affects, extra descriptions, etc. objects are a bit more of a project to convert. Objects are also saved in more than one type of file — corpse data file, player files, storage chests, etc.

So far I have them saving to XML the way I want them to. The next step is loading, which will take a good solid afternoon or evening of codework.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of moving data files over to an SQL database rather than XML, since XML is DREADFULLY SLOW. It’s not dreadfully slow on this fast machine, nor will it be on any server that I use, but it could become an issue at some point.

SQL would be a good thing and a bad thing. I’d get the automatic field matching and data integrity at the expense of greater complexity. Although there are tools to edit SQL databases directly, it’s not as easy as editing a text file if I needed to change a value in a file. Backups would also be a bit more complicated.

One thing at a time — I need to finish this first.

Mobprogs - a neat idea, but mostly useless.

The idea was to have a scripting language that could be used to write actions and triggers for mobs and objects that would give them a little more life.  They weren’t ever used much, and I think I may have been the only one to write one.  At least, I only see the ones I wrote on the old backups I have.

The code, unused as it is, has been lying around and hindering development efforts because it’s not much but more files that have to be modified every time a major change is made.

Today I’ve finally dropped them.

I’m pondering the idea of setting up Python scripting, even though I know it’ll likely not be used by anyone except maybe me.  It wouldn’t be for anything other than to figure out how to do it, but it would probably be fun.

I’ve ran some testing of this new rewrite-in-progress.

As expected, there were a few problems with some of the string functions. Those were easy enough to fix.

But, it’s now time to break out valgrind, because there are a few things that need some re-engineering and I need to see exactly how they’re broken. One thing that might take some work is a problem that happens if a character gets deleted in combat.

The violence updates iterate through a std::list. Each character in that list gets to take their swings at another character. If that target character dies, but is due to take some swings later in the list, the list gets borked because it has no way of knowing that that character was actually killed, deleted, and removed from the list (because that happens elsewhere in the program).

Since this is a combat-based game, fixing that is not optional.

I’m not sure whether it’ll take returning “hey that guy’s dead” info, or whether it’ll be a complete rewrite of combat updates, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out. I recall dealing with deaths at odd points in the code was always a hassle with Basternae 2, so rather than put a band-aid on it, I’d like to come up with a universal solution that works everywhere in the code.

I know it’s a little premature at this point, but I’ve started to think a bit about server options. There are a lot of different things I could do, with various cost/reliability/control considerations.

The primary decision is broken into one of four options:

1. Host it from home.
This would require configuring dynamic DNS and would probably be a slow connection. I have 512Kbps upstream, so that wouldn’t be too slow unless a significant number of players connected. What it would save in hosting costs it would certainly eat up in electricity costs. I’m not sure the exact amount, but leaving a computer on 24 hours a day costs me somewhere betwen 25 and 40 dollars per month in electricity. All in all a generally bad idea.

2. Sign up for co-location or a dedicated server.
An expensive route, but there is no shortage of control. At somewhere like aplus.com I could get a nice dedicated server for $99/month and a passable (celeron 1.7GHz w/512MB) server for $49 per month. I would be able to host all of my other domains and webspace all in one place. Other services offer similar packages, but pretty much none start under $50. This would probably be overkill for the web presence I have.

3. Try to get “free” hosting.
I might be able to find someone I know with server space available or find someone willing to host the MUD. This would be a good idea right until the point where whoever was hosting got sick of doing so. Too dangerous considering you get what you pay for.

4. Sign up for shared MUD hosting. This is probably the most sensible route for now. Here’s a comparison of what can be had at the various hosting services for $20 per month:

MudMagic: 300MB disk, 50MB RAM, 4% CPU, unlimited connections.
GenesisMUDs: 400MB disk, 55MB RAM, 15% CPU, unlimited connections. [actually $19.50/month]
Silverden: 100MBdisk, 20MB RAM, (CPU not listed), unlimited connections.
MUDDrake: 500MB disk, 48MB RAM, (CPU not listed), unlimited connections.
Dune Internet: 500MB disk, 60MB RAM, (CPU not listed), unlimited connections. [actually $16.00/month]
InfoLaunch: 600MB disk, 45MB RAM, 10% CPU, unlimited connections.
Mu-Host.com: 500MB disk, 75MB RAM, (CPU not listed), connections not listed.

Silverden is offering the most ridiculous of packages, woefully inadequate to any sort of task, and since they are offering a Pentium 200 dedicated server I’ll have to assume that they’ve gone out of business and just hadn’t bothered to take their site down.

Dune internet and Mu-Host look the best, especially since the major consideration has always been RAM more than processor in any MUD I’ve worked on. Right now, with only a couple zones connected, the server uses 18 megabytes of RAM. This is the debugger-profiler version, so it’s a bit more bloated, but it’s not unrealistic to expect to be using about 40-48 megs when fully assembled.

The irritating thing, though, is that most of the companies that list CPU percentage don’t bother to list the TYPE of CPU you’re getting a percentage of. For all I know MUDMagic could be offering 4% of a Pentium 200 while GenesisMUDs is offering 15% of Pentium Core Duo e6700. All CPUs are not the same.

If I were to pick a service I would probably go with Dune.