Basternae.org

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.

I spent pretty much the whole day working on the codebase.  Every error clobbered is becoming a pretty hard-fought battle.  Even so, I seem to be winning.  Of course, after the errors are done, that doesn’t mean the work is over — far from it.

The error count is now down to 949.

Most of the saving and loading of MUD data in Basterne 2 was handled by low-level C functions that used a custom text file format for each data type. That is just a bad idea.

Save and load functions were typically dozens or hundreds of lines of code with lots of room for error and data loss. If a word was off by one space or a character was miscapitalized, a file load would fail and nothing could be done. Players of Basternae 2 probably remember pfile corruption issues with anything but fondness.

Every time we changed a file format by adding another value to an object, we had to build a translator that would convert the old file to the new version. Usually this wasn’t too hard, but it did result in a LOT of extra code lying around where it didn’t belong.

.Net makes this a lot better by giving us XML serialization.

With XML serialization, data is dumped out in a neat little XML file that can be read not only by our MUD server, but by just about anything that can read XML, which these days is just about every application in existence. Gone are the days of low-level custom file formats and painful data corruption issues (I hope).

So, how do we do it?

For example, I just rewrote the saving and loading of fraglists to use XML serialization. The code started as 174 lines of custom textfile saving and loading with lots of recursive looping to save and read the arrays containing numbers on the frag list by race and class.

Now the code looks like:

public void Load()
{
XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer( this.GetType() );
Stream stream = new FileStream( Database.SYSTEM_DIR + Database.FRAG_FILE, FileMode.Open,
FileAccess.Read, FileShare.None );
fraglist = (frag_data)serializer.Deserialize(stream);
stream.Close();
}

public void Save()
{
XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer( this.GetType() );
Stream stream = new FileStream( Database.SYSTEM_DIR + Database.FRAG_FILE, FileMode.Create,
FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None );
serializer.Serialize( stream, this );
stream.Close();
}

Cleaner and better, just the way we like it. I still hate the way Wordpress formats source code.

The compile error count is now down to 1,649.

The compile error count is now down to 1,900. It feels like there will be a running codebase relatively soon.

Today I replaced the old-school C-style logging routines with new C# code based on the System.Diagnostics.TraceListener class.  That may not mean much to you, but trust me — logging is way better now.

The compile error count is now down to 2,205.