Basternae.org

One thing that has always been a little annoying is updating/changing the about box every time the program version or date changes. Here’s a neat little way to make it pull the values from the assembly info:

private void aboutToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
AssemblyCopyrightAttribute copyright =
(AssemblyCopyrightAttribute)AssemblyCopyrightAttribute.GetCustomAttribute(
assembly, typeof( AssemblyCopyrightAttribute ) );
AssemblyTitleAttribute title =
(AssemblyTitleAttribute)AssemblyTitleAttribute.GetCustomAttribute(
assembly, typeof( AssemblyTitleAttribute ) );
System.IO.FileInfo info = new System.IO.FileInfo( assembly.Location );
DateTime date = info.LastWriteTime;

MessageBox.Show(
title.Title +
” version ” +
assembly.GetName().Version.ToString() +
” released ” +
date.ToShortDateString() +
“.\nThis application is ” +
copyright.Copyright +
“\nWritten by Jason Champion (Xangis).\nFor the latest version, visit http://www.basternae.org.”,
“About ” + title.Title );
}

With the following AssemblyInfo:

[assembly: AssemblyTitle(”Basternae Editor”)]
[assembly: AssemblyCopyright(”Copyright © 2006-2008 Zeta Centauri, Inc.”)]
[assembly: AssemblyVersion(”0.9.0.0″)]

We get the following about box:

It’s pretty easy to customize it to grab other assembly attributes once you know how to retrieve them.

I spent quite a lot of time manually converting the race files to XML.  The file format didn’t lend itself well to automatic conversion, nor was much of it an easy search-and-replace setup.  Some of the values were strings of flags, some integers, some full sentences, without much consistency.

It wasn’t fast and it wasn’t easy, but the race files are now loading in the new Basternae.

Converting area files should be a lot easier since they have a more consistent format, but we have a lot to convert before we get to that point — class files, for instance, which will be very similar to race files.

There are now no more compile errors.  It took just under 5 months to fix 75,000+ errors, giving me a fix rate of 15,000 per month (500 a day).  Not bad for something I only worked on in my spare time on a “as I feel like it” basis.

After the compile errors were squashed, there were 922 warnings.  It’s a bad idea to ignore warnings because there’s a pretty good chance they’ll just end up as runtime errors.  I went through and squished as many as I could as fast as I could, and the warning total is down to 28.  Those are (mostly) harmless.

Now begins stage 3:  Getting the game to run without errors.

This might be pretty involved, since I wasn’t able to test any of my rewritten code thanks to all those compile errors.  Right now I’m hammering out the glitches in the new network code (and I’ve already fixed a few).

Stage 4: Once I have the codebase in a runnable state I’ll have to convert over all of the area and data files.  You know how I converted everything to save and load XML files?  Well, the old areas aren’t XML yet.  I’ll have to write a converter application to do this.

Stage 5: Debug the whole thing.  Stage 3 debugging is easy since the game doesn’t *DO* anything without areas, mobs, and equipment loaded.  Stage 5 is where every command has to be tested, and it’ll be pretty involved.  This might be where it makes sense to set up a test server so other people can play around with it and help find problems.

I’ve been working on the code the whole day.  The compile error count is now down to 6.

The trouble is that each of these six remaining errors will be extremely painful to fix.

The compile error count is now 297, with gains mainly due to date and time function rewrites.

Even though there were a lot of changes involved in the conversion, dealing with a System.TimeSpan and a System.DateTime is far more pleasant than the ugly and annoying integer math involved in C-style dates.  To get the number of hours that have passed with a C date, you have to do something like:

hours = time / (60 * 60 * 24); // assuming time is an integer time value in seconds.

With a System.DateTime you just do:

hours = time.TotalHours(); // assuming time is a TimeSpan.

I’d much rather deal with a class that has built-in date and time conversion logic — I hate manually converting, even if seconds-per-minute, minutes-per-hour, and hours-per day are well-known constants.

The compile error count is now down to 358.

The compile error count is now down to 446.

The compile error count is now down to 486.

Most of the network communications code has been rewritten.  TCP/IP programming in C# is much like it is in C, but WAAAAY smoother — none of those ridiculous sizeof(sockaddr_in) parameters, etc.

The compile error count is now down to 614.

Most of today’s coding involved rewriting string functions.

The error count is now down to 834, with every gain a battle.