Basternae.org

I just bought a new house, so chances are I won’t be able to devote as much time to Basternae over the next two months.

Don’t get too excited, it’s not even a real area — it’s what was formerly known as “limbo.are” — the area that contains all of the objects and mobs used by spells, such as the items created with the “minor creation” spell and elementals created with the “summon elemental” spell.

Even so, this means that we have a conversion program that works well enough to convert mobs, objects, rooms and area data. It still needs some work, but is more-or-less usable. In theory we could start adding zones. If we had any.

The next thing I’ll be working on is the character creation process. Some of the changes I made during the rewrite broke it a bit, so I’ll need to spend a solid day reworking it.

I’ve written what is essentially an online help desk system for the MUD to keep track of bugs, ideas, and typos. I’m sure it’ll need to be adjusted with use, but at least now the immortals should be better able to keep track of where the problems are and what needs to be done with them.

The fraglist, crime, and corpse data files have been converted.  The crime file conversion required no effort whatsoever since justice doesn’t do anything with it.

Right now I’m working on a scheme to replace the old typo, idea, and bug file concepts, which were pretty useless.  The idea was that anytime a player typed “bug <whatever>”, it would go into a file on disk that could only be accessed from a shell account.  In most cases, the bug, idea, and typo files were completely ignored.  With this new system, immortals should be able to read, fix, and modify any of these issues online.  I’m still working out the details, but it’s looking pretty good so far.

The help entries have been converted to XML.  Instead of being embedded in the area files and potentially spread across any number of area files, they are all in a file that contains only help entries.  In practice, Basternae 2 only had two area files that contained help entries, but it’s pretty silly not to have them all in one place.  The idea was, I suppose, to be able to have area-specific help sections.  Nobody used it.

I’d like to work out a nice way to be able to switch intro screens.  For instance, if it’s October maybe we’ll want to show a Halloween-y screen and show the regular screen during the rest of the year.  As it is now, the screen file has to be hand-edited and the game restarted in order to change anything.  It would be nice to have a handful of screens that load automatically at boot time and be able to switch between them without restarting the game.  In fact, part of the goal with this incarnation of Basternae is to never actually need to reboot for any reason (providing the game is stable enough to never crash, and that’s one goal I’m aiming for).

The socials file, a text file containing 127 KB of text for the social actions in the MUD, has been converted to the new XML format. The help entry file is next.