Basternae.org

I have a few goals with the Basternae 3 surface map:

1. Has to be fairly small. No epic 90,000-room maps that take half an hour to get to the next zone.
2. Has to have both raidable and non-raidable sections. The raidable sections should be easy to get to for both sides. The non-raidable sections should be more-or-less “safe”.
3. Should be contiguous — no randomly-spaced islands, be they large or small.

In short — I want it to be small enough that the world doesn’t feel empty when there are only a few people on, but large enough to have room a good number of zones, and for people to chase each other around a bit.  If there is an error to be made in sizing I’d prefer to err on the side of too small.

Here’s what I’ve come up with. It’s subject to modification, of course, but it captures the general idea:

It will be a while before it’s in the game, so it may evolve. There will also be cavern (underdark) map at some point.

I’ve made a couple minor updates to the client.  First, the status window wasn’t clearing the tank and enemy condition bars when there was no tank or enemy combatant.  That’s fixed.

Next, I’ve added what appears to be working support for aliases.  They’re created accessed using the “#alias” command (#al for short).  They cannot yet be saved/loaded, but they do stay in memory as long as the client is open.  Saving/loading is probably the next thing I’ll work on.

Here’s an example:

You can download it here.

I spent some time working on the client, only to find that the Windows Presentation Foundation doesn’t support right-click events.  That’s a deal-breaker because I need right-click support.  How could a GUI toolkit not support something so basic?

So, the wxWidgets-based client is being resurrected.  That’s good, because it was further along.  The big problem was that I couldn’t easily support scrollback with the SDL integration.  Well, since then I’ve figured out how I’d make that work.

In case you’ve forgotten or are not aware, THIS was how far along the wxWidgets-based Basternae client was last time we looked at it.

Code versioning is a good thing. You can rollback changes that make things worse, compare current code to past code, keep backups, and access your code from almost anywhere. It also helps make sure that every machine being used for development is kept current and that changes aren’t easily overwritten. Any serious development should have a source code repository, especially if that development is done on more than one system or by more than one person. I’m only one person, but I used three different dev systems.

I’ve tried to set up a Subversion code repository at home twice. Both times it was on an extra laptop and both times the laptop’s hard drive died within a month of setting up the repository. I didn’t lose the code (every development machine is technically a code backup), but it was pretty frustrating.

The other day I signed up with Assembla for my audio software development (see http://zetacentauri.com) and it’s been so useful that I’ve added the Basternae code too.

I’m debating whether to start using the Trac issue tracking system with Basternae 3. It works well for the Zeta Centauri projects, but the workflow here is far more organic and to-do-list based than issue-and-ticket based. I suspect the verdict will be “no” on Trac and I’ll keep using my got-it-done.com website to track Basternae.

At one point I owned 40 domains.  I’m gradually reducing that number, selling off or otherwise parting with those that I don’t have the time/energy/resources to build properly.  One of those that may be of interest is Fantasy-RPG.com.

It’s for sale on eBay right now, and you’re likely to be able to get a pretty good deal on it.

It would be an excellent domain to use for hosting a MUD server, a MMORPG, or a related subject of interest to the loyal Basternae 3 blog readers.

Progress will have to halt for a bit — started the new job and there’s a bunch of things I don’t know as well as I’d like to, so it’s reading tech books that’ll take up the spare time for the next few weeks.

For the past two years I’ve been working for a home automation company, first as a developer and then as a development manager.  Unless you’re deaf, dumb, and blind you know that the real estate market has been far less than optimal for the past year or three.  That makes it pretty challenging to work in an industry driven primarily by new home sales and secondarily by stock and investment markets.

I’ve just been offered a development job with a glass company, one that’s not particularly affected by real estate market cycles.  I start in two weeks.  It’ll be great to have a change of technology/scenery/responsibilities.  I’ll miss the people where I am now — I worked with some pretty kickass programmers and great people — but I have hit something of a plateau by not being exposed to any new environments lately.

What’s that have to do with Basternae?  Pretty much nothing, other than the fact that your friendly neighborhood codemonkey might get smarter by being exposed to new things.

If you’ve explored this blog much in the past you would have noticed that I had a “to do list” published.  It wasn’t well-sorted, and not all that easy to edit.

Since much of what I do in life is todo-list-driven, I’ve always tended to fill post-its and notebook pages with lists of things I need to get done, lists of ideas, tasks, etc.  While I’m at work, I’ll think of things I need to do and jot them down on whatever scrap of paper is handy.  It helps me stay focused, but I tend to have quite a clutter of papers on my desk.

The perfect solution for me to get rid of some of the clutter and make these lists available to me in more places than just my desk is an online solution.  There are already a solid handful of sites you can use to do that, but I’m far too hardcore for my own good.

Instead, since I wanted to get more familiar with the Django web framework and the jQuery JavaScript library, I built my own online task management application.  It was fun, challenging, and immediately useful.  I’ve moved the Basternae to-do-list to it and make use of it for everyday organization.

It’s free to create an account, so feel free to try it if it’s something you might find useful.  Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Check it out at http://got-it-done.com.  It’s pretty beta, so feel free to offer suggestions and/or let me know if you have any errors.

I finally went and set up a Technorati profile for the first time and claimed the Basternae blog.

I’m still not quite sure what you can really accomplish with Technorati. I guess I’ll find out. In the meantime, you can “favorite” this blog if you use Technorati:

I hate software “upgrades” and updates. They invariably break something that I didn’t want to be broken. I’ve learned the hard way time and time again that switching to a newer version of something is a bad idea if the new version hasn’t added a feature I desperately need.

So the rule here is:
If it ain’t broke don’t upgrade it.

… because something important *will* break.