Setting up hometown repop points for the various races and classes in Basternae 2 was a real pain.

We had, in code, a two-dimensional array that would be referenced to get the room number for each particular race/class combination. Any special cases where someone had a choice or more than one hometown had to be hand-coded. If an area was added or removed, the code would have to be touched. This invariably resulted either in zone admins editing code (a bad idea), or in zone admins waiting for a coder to add their changes (better idea, but slower).

I’ve created a way to automatically generate hometown lookups based on areas loaded and give a new player a choice of which hometown to take when they create a character. It’s simple enough in theory: each zone can list the races that can choose it as a hometown and lists the room numbers where the various classes respawn. When the zones load, the MUD builds a list and everything is spiffy, no code editing involved.

Behind the scenes it’s a little complex. I’m using a two-dimensional vector of lists that point to integers ( std::vector< std::vector< std::list<int *> * > * > ). The standard library is awesome and makes life much easier, but it can result in excessive punctiation, as seen in the previous sentence.

I really prefer moving as much as possible out of code and into configuration files. I mean, isn’t it silly to have to recompile to, say, make a troll mercenary spawn one room to the left?