Basternae.org

In  the old days of Basternae 2, there were really only two area reset (repopulation) modes — either an area would repop at a fixed interval, or the area wouldn’t reset until all players had left.

In the process of rewriting the way areas reset themselves for the new game engine, I’ve added a few more reset types that might make for some fun zones:

• Empty of Mobiles:  The zone won’t reset until every monster in the zone has been killed.
• Empty of Objects:  The zone won’t reset until every takeable object has been removed from the zone.
• All Quests Completed:  The zone won’t reset until all quests inside the zone have been completed.

The way things are done it’ll be pretty easy to add new conditions if the theme of the zone requires it.

Now that I’ve started trying to use the zone editor I’m finding all sorts of things to fix and/or improve.  I’m not sure how long it’ll be before I can get a small zone put together using it, but it’s getting quite close to usable.  Far from pretty, but usable.

Anyone who has wondered why the help systems in Windows applications are typically so abysmal has to look no further than Microsoft’s HTML Help Workshop. Not only is rotting tripe more pleasant to deal with, it’s more likely to help you get the job done.

You’d think that maybe an application designed for editing help files would have a decent help system. Not so.

After trying to figure out the interface to HTML Help Workshop and failing (after getting screens full of incomprehensible errors) I went in search of an application with a less counterintuitive interface. I found HelpNDoc. It looks a lot prettier, but it’s also completely incomprehensible. It might not be all that bad, but after my HHW-induced brain meltdown I just didn’t have the patience to decrypt the interface.

I guess if you were meant to be able to get useful information out of the help files for an application they would have made it easy. Failures like Microsoft HHW are why the software training industry is a massive cash cow.

I ended up falling back on the manual method — creating the index, table of contents, and individual topic files by hand. This is the same method I used when creating the help files for PixelSwapper. To put it in perspective, having to do so is just as retarded as writing a letter to your congresscritter using a hex editor because your word processing program is too terrible to use.

Luckily the file formats are well-documented. Not so much by Microsoft, but by the folks who made the Win32 API usable — wxWidgets. I’ve used wxWidgets extensively, and if you’re going to write an app for Windows without using .NET it’s the only sane way to go. Down the path of pure Win32 lies madness. Yes, the Windows API was designed by Cthulhu. Luckily he has since moved on to the world of embedded design and development (cellphones mostly), so post-Win32 Windows programming is no longer painful.

The text visualizer in Visual Studio 2005 isn’t very good. When you’re looking at a string in the debugger, you won’t see what you’re looking for if there are any null characters in the string. As far as I can tell this is a holdover from the bad old days when null-terminated C strings were the norm.

This is a pain in the butt if you are dealing with data stored in a System.String. I regularly work with data that needs to be viewed in hexadecimal format. That’s why I created the hex string visualizer, thanks to THIS POST by 4 Guys From Rolla, which is a mighty fine tutorial on creating visualizer plugins.

Here’s what the not-so-informative text visualizer looks like:

Here’s what my hex string visualizer looks like:

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one gives better debugging info.

This is more useful in my day job as a home automation programmer, but it will also come in handy when it comes to debugging low-level communications in the MUD.

It’s available HERE if you want a copy. Just drop it in your My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Visualizers directory and it’ll be available in the list of string visualizers next time you run Visual Studio 2005.

Editing help file entries has always been a pain, mainly because it’s always been a huge unorganized text file that has to be edited by hand.

I spent about an hour and a half building a simple help file editing application today. It will load/save help files, allow searching and browsing of entries, and of course, editing.

It’s nothing fancy, but it does make the task of editing help entries a little easier. It doesn’t have visualization for colorized help screens, but that would be easy enough to add.

Here’s a looksee:

(Click the image for a full view).

Over the past couple days I’ve done quite a bit of work on the mob and object editing screens in the editor.  I also found and fixed a few problems with the area converter.

The hard part of building the zone editor is going to be adding the map-based and walkthrough visualization modes.  They aren’t needed for building an area, but they will help quite a bit with visualization and layout.  I haven’t put much thought into how I’m going to go about implementing those features, but it’s something I can worry about a bit later, once I have the zone editor fully functional (which shouldn’t be too much longer).