I did a little bit of work on FindMUD.com today. I added a page that shows the top-ranked MUDs (as rated by users) on the site. Since the site is still fairly new there haven’t been very many ratings yet, so feel free to go on over and rate the MUDs you’ve played.
So, the upgrade to Vista didn’t turn out to be 100% successful.
It turns out that the Winamp crashing I experienced was caused by Vista’s epic failure in the audio realm. Since they changed the way audio drivers run (user mode instead of kernel mode now), no driver from an earlier version of Windows will run.
I tried and failed to get the following sound cards to work:
Sound Blaster Live!
Sound Blaster Live! Value
Terratec Audiosystem EWX 24/96
M-Audio Audiophile Delta 44
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Diamond Monster Sound MX400
Yamaha YMF744B
Dynex DX-SC51
The only one that worked was the Dynex card. It’s also the only card I paid less than $10 for new.
The moral: Only use extra-cheap soundcards. Hi-Fi sound is not permitted.
On an upside, all of the Basternae 3 applications and utilities run fine on Vista.
In working on the new zone editor I noticed that a few things seemed a little off in some of the test zones I was working with. As much as I would like to blame the editor, since it’s new and untested, it turns out that the zone converter had an issue with race conversion between Basternae 2 and 3 zones. It was a relatively simple bug, but it was one that made all converted zones look a little stupid. Being simple, it’s been fixed with minimal effort.
Now that the converter is working pretty well I’m pretty comfortable with accepting zones that were on Basternae 2 if anyone is willing to give permission to use them.
One thing I’m surprised never made it into Basternae — bounties. It’s only natural that you would be able to set a price on someone’s head in a PvP MUD.
So I implemented about 60% of a bounty system today. There are still a few details to work out, but the core of the system is in place.
I hate updating software. Many years of painful upgrade experiences have taught me not to upgrade a piece of software unless it’s horribly broken or lacks the ability to get anything done.
That’s why I was dreadfully, terribly afraid of upgrading from Windows XP to Vista on my home desktop. Sure I’ve been running Vista since summer 2007 at work, but I don’t do much other than software development on my work PC.
Knowing full well that a clean install is the only safe way to go and that Windows always needs more RAM, I picked up a new hard drive and an extra gigabyte of RAM (memory sure is cheap these days!) It also doesn’t help that I was running an original Windows XP Pro install from late 2001 (which has gone through half a dozen hardware upgrades on the same install). It was tired and in need of a clean slate.
The install was remarkably, stunningly painless. There were all sorts of things that just worked without the installer wizard having to ask me dumb questions. It was so smooth — even to the point that it auto-capitalized the registration key while I was typing so I didn’t have to worry about whether I had caps lock on.
I almost wish I had something bad to say, but nothing went wrong and everything worked. This is nothing like setting up an NT 4.0 system, which had a way of running differently every time you installed it on the exact same hardware configuration.
The folks who fear Vista, think it’s broken or too evil to use: They’re idiots. It works, and it works better than any Microsoft OS yet. If you have the hardware to run it you probably ought to. Now that it’s SP1 and most software developers have worked out their compatibility glitches it’s mature enough to use regularly.
My only complaints: Folder views defaulting to music (it’s a folder full of DLLs you idiot, show me the size, date, and version — not artist, album, and rating!); kind of annoying navigating in Windows Explorer (it’s an extra click or two to get where I’m going); the folks at Winamp still haven’t gotten their act together for Vista (crash, crash, crash!)
Since VS2008 somewhat rudely decided that it would become the default application for all projects, including projects that were VS2005 projects (what exactly *is* the Visual Studio Version Selector good for, anyway?), I decided to try building Basternae with 2008.
It was actually a pretty painless process.
Something changes in every version of a compiler and 99% of the time something breaks, either due to deprecation, changes in the way warnings and errors are treated, or most often due to changes in dependencies and the way they are handled. In any project of significantly large size, you can expect errors when converting to a new version of Visual Studio.
It was no surprise when the project didn’t build. It was, however, a pleasant surprise. It found three bad cast operations that shouldn’t have been written in the first place, the sort of thing that VS2005 should have complained about but didn’t. After spending a few seconds fixing those, everything built fine with no problems.
Visual C++ projects are a different story. You see, I’m convinced that Microsoft hates Visual C++ and just wants it to shrivel up and die. As long as Visual Basic and Visual C# projects are healthy, it’s safe to release a new version of Visual Studio. This time it was a bit of DLL hell along the lines of missing MSVCP90D.DLL and MSVCP90.DLL errors when trying to run a newly-built executable. WTF? Weren’t those installed with Visual Studio? You mean we can build C++ projects but aren’t allowed to run them?
OK, OK, so maybe it was a missing runtime redistributable. That’s fair enough and something I could live with since that’s the way .NET works. So I download the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable and install it. Fail. Epic fail.
After an unsuccessful Google search (plenty of people with the problem but no clear solution) I went playing with some of the project settings. The final fix was setting “Generate Manifest” to “Yes” instead of “No” in the Linker->Manifest File section.
Today was the Microsoft “launch event” for Visual Studio and Server 2008. I attended the local presentation and walked away with a free copy of Vista Ultimate and Visual Studio 2008. It was free to attend and I got $600 worth of software out of the deal. How can you beat that? Sure the presentations weren’t very relevant to the types of development I do (all they talked about were database-driven development, MS Office add-in development, and ASP.NET web development, all of which I don’t have any involvement in.)
I may or may not switch development of Basternae 3 to VS2008 right away and probably won’t start using Vista until my next PC upgrade, but it still feels nice to get free stuff.
Lately it’s just been a bit more work on the editor (which is now at version 0.25). Here’s an updated line count:
Main Codebase:
99,360 lines total
77,693 lines of code (78%)
8,417 lines of comments (8%)
1,258 mixed (code + comment) lines (1%)
11,987 blank lines (12%)
Editor:
9,597 lines total
7,491 lines of code (78%)
1,654 lines of comments (17%)
9 mixed (code + comment) lines (0%)
443 blank lines (4%)
MUD Screen Editor:
1,147 Lines Total
887 Lines of code (77%)
184 lines of comments (16%)
0 mixed (code + comment) lines (0%)
76 blank lines (6%)
Help Editor:
696 Lines Total
512 Lines of code (73%)
142 lines of comments (20%)
0 mixed (code + comment) lines (0%)
42 blank lines (6%)
Client:
5,312 Lines Total
3,940 Lines of code (74%)
781 lines of comments (14%)
29 mixed (code + comment) lines (0%)
562 blank lines (10%)
Since we last checked in, the editor has added about 1100 lines of code, the engine has added about 450, and the help editor and client are new to the list. It’s not that the client is new, this is just the first time we’ve counted it.
This really is a fairly large project.
When booting up the MUD engine with only my two zones (the Thri-Kreen hometown and the Kobold Village), Basternae 3 takes up 22,256 kilobytes of RAM.
That somehow manages to drop to 20,096 kilobytes of RAM when I connect with a single player. I think it was probably just timed to coincide with a garbage collection. Moving around for a while brings it back up to 20,500.
A boot up with no zones loaded starts at 22,116 kilobytes of RAM.
So, at this point the MUD engine takes about 22 megabytes of RAM plus however many zones are loaded. I can’t imagine players taking more than 8 kilobytes, and with zones taking up about 1 megabyte per 3000 rooms, we’ve got plenty of room to grow.
With 32 megabytes available, we could support:
27,000 rooms
128 simultaneous players
No problem.
The entry-level VPN servers I’ve been looking at start at 256, but that’s for OS plus applications. It’ll be running Linux so I’ll have about 128 megs for OS and 128 for apps. We could run 300,000 rooms and nearly 800 players before needing to upgrade.
I definitely don’t miss the “bad old days”. When I first started writing MUD code it was normal to only have 32 MB in an entire system.
Over the past few weeks I’ve steadily been adding more MUD listings to FindMUD. It has now has over 200 MUD listings. That’s not super-impressive, but it does have more than MudBytes and Betterbox and is quickly gaining on some of the older sites (many of which are rather neglected these days).