Basternae.org

OK, so maybe I didn’t announce the vacation in the first place, but I took some time off from working on Bast to enjoy the summer.

I’ve been working on the client a bit, and I had almost forgotten how much I dislike C++.  It’s just so messy and inefficient to work with.  You have to spend about 30% more time to get anything done and then once you’re done you have a pretty good chance of having to do some memory-based debugging.

Enough of the whining (because that’s what it is).  Just posting a note to let folks know work is continuing.

Most of the development for the past few days has been on the client application.

Here’s a screenshot giving an idea of what it looks like so far. It’s quite a bit different from what it looked like a few months ago:

Click on the image for a larger version. It obviously needs more work, but I’m liking it so far.

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it here yet, but around 2005-2007 wrote a custom MUD client using wxWidgets and SDL. It runs fairly well on Windows and tolerably on Linux (there are one or two glitches). I designed it to work with Duris and its prompt system. It shows maps for a zone if they’re available and keeps track of hits, mana, and moves via a meter system. The graphics are pretty simple, although I had planned to improve them a bit. This program was written from scratch and could form the basis for a custom hybrid 2-d/text-based Basternae client at some point.

Here’s a screenshot (while playing Duris):

(Click to enlarge)