Basternae.org

I spent some time on the zone editor today. Here’s a list of changes and fixes:

• Justice type is now selectable on the zone settings screen.
• In walkthrough mode, the ‘help’ and ‘commands’ commands now show a list of the available commands.
• Various minor text and appearance improvements, including adding a program icon.
• Added the ability to edit object values so you can actually set things like weapon damage amount or armor factor.
• Fixed a nasty bug in editing repops that would cause data corruption.
• Added the old Basternae 2 zone guides to the help file.
• Fixed a very nasty circular reference bug that would prevent a zone from saving in certain cases.

Repop editing is still pretty cryptic, but at least changes show up in the repop’s description in real time now.

The really confusing thing at the moment is editing object values. In DikuEdit, the values would change description when the object type changed so you could see what you were editing. The new editor does not do that yet, so you either have to already know what you’re doing or you have to guess, neither one of which could be much fun, so that’s going to be something fairly high up on the to-do list for future changes.

You can get the new version HERE.

I am not a PHP programmer. I do not know PHP. That doesn’t mean I can’t use it. Here’s a snippet I threw together to check whether the MUD process is running:


$cmd = "ps u -C 'mono Basternae.exe'";
exec($cmd, $output, $result);
if( count($output) >= 2 )
{
  Print $output[0];
  Print $output[1];
}
else
{
  print “Basternae 3 is not currently running.”;
}


You can try it here: http://basternae.org/status.php

I had a chance to tinker with the code today. I made a bunch of relatively minor fixes (code-wise). Here’s the list:

- Fixed game menu consistency so same one appears every time.
- Some minor text changes and/or typo fixes.
- Made the help editor a little easier to use and added a ‘delete entry’ button.
- Made the MUD screen editor a little easier to use.
- Fixed the immortal ’slay’ command.
- Fixed the immortal ‘load object’ command.
- Fixed the ‘history’ and ‘!’ commands, the latter of which would instantly crash the MUD when used.
- Improved the issue system and added the ability for immortals to create issues.
- Some help entry additions and improvements.

There are two major bugs right now that will take some digging to fix properly: Items can’t be picked up, and spell/skill effects never seem to wear off.

Even though there’s still quite a lot of work to do before the codebase conversion could be considered ‘complete’, it’s becoming a bit more fun to work on.

I have no clue how to build a .deb or .rpm package yet, so it’s just a .zip for now.

Though I have it working on my own Ubuntu 9 machine, I haven’t the faintest idea whether the client will run on other Linux boxen. At the very least, you’ll probably need to have the wxWidgets 2.8 libraries installed to run the client on Linux. I suppose at some point I’ll figure out how to build installer packages.

Version 0.14 of the client for Linux is now available for download. Hopefully there’s someone who can try it and let me know the result. In this case, it’ll probably be “I had to add libraries X and Y and Z before it would run”. Then again, since wxWidgets is so widely used on Linux (VLC, Audacity, etc), chances are good that most people will already have the necessary pieces installed.

I fixed the “can’t send text” problem in the client for the Mac and Linux versions.  There are still some text problems that only show up in non-Windows versions, but I was able to log in and play for a bit without much trouble.

Though I have it working on my own machine, I haven’t the faintest idea whether the client will run on other Macs.  I’ve created an application bundle and compiled it in a way that it should supposedly run on OSX 10.5 and 10.6, but I only have 10.6, so no idea whether it will work.  And, since my machine is set up as a developer machine I have no idea whether a “normal” user’s machine will have all the libraries it needs.  That’s the trouble with being a Mac “noob”.

Version 0.14 of the client for Mac is now available for download.  Hopefully there’s someone who can try it and let me know the result.

I tracked down a nasty threading problem in the status window that would explode things horribly at random intervals. Version 0.14 of the client is now available.  That’s not to say there isn’t the possibility of other horrible explosions lying around just waiting to leap out… so let me know if you find any.