Basternae.org

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.

The connection state management code in the socket layer of Basternae has always been what I call “spaghetti code”.  It was a single method containing a huge switch statement with pretty sizable blocks of code for each case.  Tracing program flow for characters that were not actively playing was always difficult due to the complexity and verbosity of this 1600-line function.

Today I refactored it into a bunch of more sensible pieces that go together a lot more smoothly.  The 1600-line function is now 80 lines, I can actually tell what’s going on during program execution, and a handful of confusing and unused variables have been eliminated.  Huzzah!

It wouldn’t have been unrealistic for the designers of .NET to find a way to make this work:

foreach( Item i in ItemList )
{
  if( i.ShouldBeRemoved )
  {
    ItemList.Remove(i);
  }
}

What happens is you get a ‘collection modified’ exception and you’re hosed. You can’t move to the next item in the list because removing the item broke the list. It wouldn’t have been that hard for the design of IEnumerable (the thingy that makes foreach possible) to keep track of where the next item was even after a removal.

Instead of being able to use the above code, something like this clunky bit is required:

for( int i = (ItemList.Count - 1); i >= 0; i– )
{
  if( i.ShouldBeRemoved )
  {
    ItemList.Remove(i);
  }
}

It’s like telling someone they can avoid head-on car collisions by always driving in reverse.

Anyhow, there was a bit of a problem with the Select() command and socket management, and this was the solution. The socket code is now functional and stable enough that I can log in and run around trying to play the game. It’s not terribly playable yet — I have a *LOT* more work to do, but it’s still theoretically possible that a development server could go up i mid-but-more-likely-late May.

I completed the last of the code for the command processing engine today. Not much detail to report — it’s done and seems to work well enough.

Command processing in the old Basternae was pretty klunky. The command interpreter would just pass on any text that was entered and each command function would have to do a lot of parsing to split up the command strings and figure out what the user actually intended. About half of each command would be devoted just to breaking up strings in some cases.

Luckily with .Net we have all these nice string functions — Split, Join, Substring, IndexOf, Remove, and many more.

With the new command processing engine I’ve just written the command functions are a lot easier to read, maintain, and create more of.

Of course, I’ve had to redo every command in the process and that’s only 80% done so far, but it’s a far better system overall.

And, of course, I still have to finish the replacement spell system.

I came across this article on Scripting with C#.

Quick summary: It tells how to load and compile C# code from within a running application so that you can dynamically load scripts.

This is something I’ve been meaning to find out how to do for a while. I’ve always wanted to create a file-based spell system that loads and compiles all spells at boot time so that they aren’t so tightly integrated into the engine. As it was historically, if you removed a single hardcoded spell, such as “armor”, the entire mud would crash or at least be very unhappy.

Well, what good are 400+ hardcoded spells going to do you when you use the mud engine for a sci-fi, historical fiction, or contemporary post-apocalyptic setting? None at all. That’s why getting them once-removed from the core is something I wanted to do. Super-long-term there’s not just one MUD coming out of all this effort.

Seriously.

I don’t mean just writing a basic telnet chat server with a few objects and commands you can interact with.  Any amateur programmer can do that.

No, I mean writing a full-featured MUD engine that supports all of the features MUDders have come to expect from a game like Basternae 3.  It’s really dang hard.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours working on this rewrite and it’s still pretty far from done.  The area format is still changing quickly enough that I don’t have a working zone editor I can pass out, and I still have a whole spawn engine to write (for those of you who know MUD internals, it’s more-or-less the Basternae equivalent of “resets”.)  I also have to write some sort of mob-action-scripting engine.

It’ll be worth it when I’m done because I’ll have an engine that has been completely written by me and nobody will be able to say what I can and can’t do with it, but it sure is arduous — it takes a damn long time to write 100,000+ lines of code (as you can see by noting that the B3 blog posts beginning about a year ago).  And I’m no newbie coder — I’ve been writing code for more than 20 years, MUDs for 6-8 years depending on how you count the gaps, and commercial code for 3 years now.

That’s why Basternae 3 isn’t open yet.  I could easily have taken the old zones and code up and just went with that, but that’s not something that supports my long-term plan.  Maybe I’ll mention more about that plan at some point.

A little less than a week ago I mentioned that I had broken the heck out of the codebase.

Well, it’s all back together again.  The MUD engine and the zone converter are as healthy or healthier than they were before, the weather’s nice, and all is well with the world.

In the interest of making sure the MUD can be modified easily well into the future I’ve broken the heck out of the codebase.

Yep.

I’ve been refactoring, rearranging, renaming, and restructuring things so they make a lot more sense. That has inevitably broken a few things, but it will be far easier to add new types, flags, and enumerations in the future — things like adding a new terrain type without breaking existing terrain types or having to recompile the editor and re-convert all of the zones.

Believe me, we had quite a headache with zone file format changes on Basternae 2 and I don’t want to repeat it.

This means that it’ll take a few days before the codebase will build again and I’ll have some work to do on the converter and the editor, but it’ll be worth it.

I’m still looking at putting up a test server in May and so far Slicehost is the most likely candidate. Feel free to offer suggestions. Since it’s out-of-pocket and non-income-producing, my budget isn’t any more than $20 per month (should I be accepting donations for this?)

Now that the communication routines are a lot smoother I’ve been able to test and debug more of the rewritten code.  I fixed a bug in the new command interpreter and one in the string builder today.  I also came up with a better way of handling per-area repop points so it’ll be a lot easier to set up new hometowns with race/class spawn points, especially since I’ve added repop point editing to the zone editor.