Most of the work done over the past few days has been boring, grueling engine rewrite stuff. There’s not much exciting that can be said about reorganizing variables, changing the way that lists are processed, and cleaning up object reference handling. It’s a lot of code rewriting that will have little or no visible effect on the way the game is played. It will, however, make it far easier to add to and update the code with our planned changes.
It seems that the domain Basternae.com recently became available. I bought it, so both basternae.org and basternae.com point here. Yippee!
Over the past month I’ve been playing around with the Magma 3.02 code a bit more. I found a few crash-bugs and fixed them, mostly caused by references to rooms and objects from Basternae 2 that no longer exist.
The big change is that 58 of the 63 original Envy 2.2 zones will load in the engine. This means you can actually run a MUD with the codebase. Nobody wants to play a stock MUD, but at least you can have a functioning game world while all of your new areas are being built.
I’m sure there are still some bugs and/or stability issues, but this release is a big step forward.
Let me reiterate what I said when releasing 3.02: This is _NOT_ the code I’ve been working on for Basternae 3. This is the codebase from early Basternae 2.
It’s posted on FindMUD if you would like to download it. Runs on Linux (tested on Ubuntu) and Windows (tested on XP).
Today I added the framework to support the Mud Sound Protocol (MSP). I don’t have any sounds and haven’t added support to the client yet, but when it comes time to add sound it’ll be very easy. I figure I’ll do the sound design myself and/or enlist help from some of my friends over at Darksonus and it’ll turn out quite nicely.
This post on The Daily WTF reminds me of the startup script we had for Basternae 2 in the early days:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/ITAPPMONROBOT.aspx
Since the codebase would tend to hang or crash, we would have to watch for the process and restart it if it was missing. If the CPU usage was above a certain amount for more than about a minute it also told us that the code was in and endless loop, so the process would have to be killed and restarted. It wasn’t not quite as intricate as the WTF setup, but it was still pretty kludged.
I have the client and server running well enough that I’m able to create a character and log in to test all of the available commands. In the first pass, just logging in and typing the command name to see what happens, I’ve found a fixed quite a few glitches. I haven’t fixed all that I’ve found yet, but at least it’s progress.
It finally feels like this is turning into a game again.
Most of the development for the past few days has been on the client application.
Here’s a screenshot giving an idea of what it looks like so far. It’s quite a bit different from what it looked like a few months ago:
Click on the image for a larger version. It obviously needs more work, but I’m liking it so far.
I’ve been gradually building up FindMUD.com. Today I broke the 3-digit mark on listings.
I had to spend a while improving the Basternae 2 to 3 zone converter, but it’s a LOT better now. The Thri-Kreen hometown and Kobold hometown are now converted and loading. There’s still more framework stuff to do, but I should be ready to start acquiring and attaching zones before too much longer.
More or less. The color screens have not yet been reimplemented, so it ain’t pretty yet.