Basternae.org

Yesterday I said the area format wasn’t likely to change. That was before I finished the code-data separation.

BasternaeEditorPreview2.zip

The same warnings from preview version 1 still applies.

Here’s the first view of the Basternae Zone Editor available for download:

BasternaeEditorPreview1.zip (download removed, see the post about preview version 2)

Some warnings:

1. This is a pre-release version and it’s entirely likely that it will be unstable and lacking in features.
2. It has no help files.
3. It has no icons for the edit window buttons — just colors.  You have to guess what they do.
4. The map edit and walkthrough edit modes are not done yet (and haven’t been started yet either).
5. Save your work often and keep backup copies.

This is just to download, play around with a bit, and get a feel for.  I don’t expect that the area file format will change in a way that will break zones created with this editor, so you can actually start trying to use it to build something.

Check it out, see if it’s usable, and feel free to make requests, bug reports, or just say what would make you more likely to want to use the tool to create a zone for the new Basternae.

In the process or getting an alpha version of the editor ready I’ve found that I had to separate the game code, a.k.a. “business logic” from the data, a.k.a. “object model”.  Otherwise I’d have to include the entire MUD engine in the editor download.  Since that’s not something I want to do I’ve had to pull them apart.  It’s a lot like pulling apart a cold grilled cheese sandwich, and as expected, the bread did tear a little.

The “core rewire” still needs some work, but I should have an “alpha”, a.k.a. “try it and see how broken it is or isn’t” version of the zone editor out sometime this month.

Lortar has been kind enough to grant permission to use his zones from Basternae 2:

Fairlocke
The Elemental Plane of Air
Tower of Darkness

I’ve put together a simple “zone permission contract” here:
http://www.basternae.org/BasternaeZoneContract.pdf

It’s probably not necessary, but while I was publishing my science fiction magazine I found it to be a good idea to get everything in “official” writing.

If you have written any zones you’d like to let us use or know someone who has, this can be sent either to my xangis at yahoo mail account or to the following mailing address:

Jason Champion
Zeta Centauri, Inc.
1388 Clydesdale Ave.
Columbus, OH 43229

It’s been a busy week at work — just got myself a promotion and haven’t had a chance to work on the MUD as much as I’d like (more tired in the evenings than out of time, really). Most of this week’s effort has been directed toward the editor.

I’m wondering whether it would be a better idea to release a prototype of the editor to get ideas and suggestions or wait until it’s pretty much useable before releasing it.  It’s probably a difference of about 4 weeks in time/effort.

When writing a zone, it can be tough to know where to end your lines of text.

While a standard terminal has 80 characters, some telnet programs start to look weird with any line that is more than 77 characters, and some terminals have 130 or more characters per line (usually depends on screen resolution).

With different zone writers writing descriptions with varying line lengths it can make the MUD look pretty inconsistent from zone to zone.

That’s why I wrote an auto-wrapping function that takes care of all of that.  It will take a description and insert line breaks as necessary.  Right now it just defaults to a 78-character terminal width, but it will be user-configurable when I’m done with it.

This means that zone writers don’t have to worry about line breaks anymore.  They can just type out their descriptions and it’ll be handled by the MUD.

Word wrapping still isn’t perfect, so I’ll need to work on that a little, but it’s pretty neat to have autowrapping in place now.

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.

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.