Monthly Archives: March 2008

Not Winamp’s Fault

So, the upgrade to Vista didn’t turn out to be 100% successful.

It turns out that the Winamp crashing I experienced was caused by Vista’s epic failure in the audio realm.  Since they changed the way audio drivers run (user mode instead of kernel mode now), no driver from an earlier version of Windows will run.

I tried and failed to get the following sound cards to work:

Sound Blaster Live!
Sound Blaster Live! Value
Terratec Audiosystem EWX 24/96
M-Audio Audiophile Delta 44
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Diamond Monster Sound MX400
Yamaha YMF744B
Dynex DX-SC51

The only one that worked was the Dynex card.  It’s also the only card I paid less than $10 for new.

The moral:  Only use extra-cheap soundcards.  Hi-Fi sound is not permitted.

On an upside, all of the Basternae 3 applications and utilities run fine on Vista.

Tweaking The Zone Converter

In working on the new zone editor I noticed that a few things seemed a little off in some of the test zones I was working with.  As much as I would like to blame the editor, since it’s new and untested, it turns out that the zone converter had an issue with race conversion between Basternae 2 and 3 zones.   It was a relatively simple bug, but it was one that made all converted zones look a little stupid.  Being simple, it’s been fixed with minimal effort.

Now that the converter is working pretty well I’m pretty comfortable with accepting zones that were on Basternae 2 if anyone is willing to give permission to use them.

A Price On Your Head

One thing I’m surprised never made it into Basternae — bounties.  It’s only natural that you would be able to set a price on someone’s head in a PvP MUD.

So I implemented about 60% of a bounty system today.   There are still a few details to work out, but the core of the system is in place.

Upgrading to Vista Ultimate

I hate updating software.  Many years of painful upgrade experiences have taught me not to upgrade a piece of software unless it’s horribly broken or lacks the ability to get anything done.

That’s why I was dreadfully, terribly afraid of upgrading from Windows XP to Vista on my home desktop.  Sure I’ve been running Vista since summer 2007 at work, but I don’t do much other than software development on my work PC.

Knowing full well that a clean install is the only safe way to go and that Windows always needs more RAM, I picked up a new hard drive and an extra gigabyte of RAM (memory sure is cheap these days!)  It also doesn’t help that I was running an original Windows XP Pro install from late 2001 (which has gone through half a dozen hardware upgrades on the same install).  It was tired and in need of a clean slate.

The install was remarkably, stunningly painless.  There were all sorts of things that just worked without the installer wizard having to ask me dumb questions.  It was so smooth — even to the point that it auto-capitalized the registration key while I was typing so I didn’t have to worry about whether I had caps lock on.

I almost wish I had something bad to say, but nothing went wrong and everything worked.  This is nothing like setting up an NT 4.0 system, which had a way of running differently every time you installed it on the exact same hardware configuration.

The folks who fear Vista, think it’s broken or too evil to use:  They’re idiots.  It works, and it works better than any Microsoft OS yet.  If you have the hardware to run it you probably ought to.  Now that it’s SP1 and most software developers have worked out their compatibility glitches it’s mature enough to use regularly.

My only complaints:  Folder views defaulting to music (it’s a folder full of DLLs you idiot, show me the size, date, and version — not artist, album, and rating!); kind of annoying navigating in Windows Explorer (it’s an extra click or two to get where I’m going); the folks at Winamp still haven’t gotten their act together for Vista (crash, crash, crash!)

Taking The Visual Studio 2008 Plunge

Since VS2008 somewhat rudely decided that it would become the default application for all projects, including projects that were VS2005 projects (what exactly *is* the Visual Studio Version Selector good for, anyway?), I decided to try building Basternae with 2008.

It was actually a pretty painless process.

Something changes in every version of a compiler and 99% of the time something breaks, either due to deprecation, changes in the way warnings and errors are treated, or most often due to changes in dependencies and the way they are handled. In any project of significantly large size, you can expect errors when converting to a new version of Visual Studio.

It was no surprise when the project didn’t build. It was, however, a pleasant surprise. It found three bad cast operations that shouldn’t have been written in the first place, the sort of thing that VS2005 should have complained about but didn’t. After spending a few seconds fixing those, everything built fine with no problems.

Visual C++ projects are a different story. You see, I’m convinced that Microsoft hates Visual C++ and just wants it to shrivel up and die. As long as Visual Basic and Visual C# projects are healthy, it’s safe to release a new version of Visual Studio. This time it was a bit of DLL hell along the lines of missing MSVCP90D.DLL and MSVCP90.DLL errors when trying to run a newly-built executable. WTF? Weren’t those installed with Visual Studio? You mean we can build C++ projects but aren’t allowed to run them?

OK, OK, so maybe it was a missing runtime redistributable. That’s fair enough and something I could live with since that’s the way .NET works. So I download the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable and install it. Fail. Epic fail.

After an unsuccessful Google search (plenty of people with the problem but no clear solution) I went playing with some of the project settings. The final fix was setting “Generate Manifest” to “Yes” instead of “No” in the Linker->Manifest File section.

Free Copy of Vista Ultimate and Visual Studio 2008

Today was the Microsoft “launch event” for Visual Studio and Server 2008. I attended the local presentation and walked away with a free copy of Vista Ultimate and Visual Studio 2008. It was free to attend and I got $600 worth of software out of the deal. How can you beat that? Sure the presentations weren’t very relevant to the types of development I do (all they talked about were database-driven development, MS Office add-in development, and ASP.NET web development, all of which I don’t have any involvement in.)

I may or may not switch development of Basternae 3 to VS2008 right away and probably won’t start using Vista until my next PC upgrade, but it still feels nice to get free stuff.

Current Line Counts

Lately it’s just been a bit more work on the editor (which is now at version 0.25). Here’s an updated line count:

Main Codebase:
99,360 lines total
77,693 lines of code (78%)
8,417 lines of comments (8%)
1,258 mixed (code + comment) lines (1%)
11,987 blank lines (12%)

Editor:
9,597 lines total
7,491 lines of code (78%)
1,654 lines of comments (17%)
9 mixed (code + comment) lines (0%)
443 blank lines (4%)

MUD Screen Editor:
1,147 Lines Total
887 Lines of code (77%)
184 lines of comments (16%)
0 mixed (code + comment) lines (0%)
76 blank lines (6%)

Help Editor:
696 Lines Total
512 Lines of code (73%)
142 lines of comments (20%)
0 mixed (code + comment) lines (0%)
42 blank lines (6%)

Client:
5,312 Lines Total
3,940 Lines of code (74%)
781 lines of comments (14%)
29 mixed (code + comment) lines (0%)
562 blank lines (10%)

Since we last checked in, the editor has added about 1100 lines of code, the engine has added about 450, and the help editor and client are new to the list. It’s not that the client is new, this is just the first time we’ve counted it.

This really is a fairly large project.

Memory Usage

When booting up the MUD engine with only my two zones (the Thri-Kreen hometown and the Kobold Village), Basternae 3 takes up 22,256 kilobytes of RAM.

That somehow manages to drop to 20,096 kilobytes of RAM when I connect with a single player.  I think it was probably just timed to coincide with a garbage collection.  Moving around for a while brings it back up to 20,500.

A boot up with no zones loaded starts at 22,116 kilobytes of RAM.

So, at this point the MUD engine takes about 22 megabytes of RAM plus however many zones are loaded.  I can’t imagine players taking more than 8 kilobytes, and with zones taking up about 1 megabyte per 3000 rooms, we’ve got plenty of room to grow.

With 32 megabytes available, we could support:

27,000 rooms
128 simultaneous players

No problem.

The entry-level VPN servers I’ve been looking at start at 256, but that’s for OS plus applications.  It’ll be running Linux so I’ll have about 128 megs for OS and 128 for apps.  We could run 300,000 rooms and nearly 800 players before needing to upgrade.

I definitely don’t miss the “bad old days”.  When I first started writing MUD code it was normal to only have 32 MB in an entire system.

200 Listings on FindMUD

Over the past few weeks I’ve steadily been adding more MUD listings to FindMUD.  It has now has over 200 MUD listings.  That’s not super-impressive, but it does have more than MudBytes and Betterbox and is quickly gaining on some of the older sites (many of which are rather neglected these days).

Zone Reset Modes

In  the old days of Basternae 2, there were really only two area reset (repopulation) modes — either an area would repop at a fixed interval, or the area wouldn’t reset until all players had left.

In the process of rewriting the way areas reset themselves for the new game engine, I’ve added a few more reset types that might make for some fun zones:

  • Empty of Mobiles:  The zone won’t reset until every monster in the zone has been killed.
  • Empty of Objects:  The zone won’t reset until every takeable object has been removed from the zone.
  • All Quests Completed:  The zone won’t reset until all quests inside the zone have been completed.

The way things are done it’ll be pretty easy to add new conditions if the theme of the zone requires it.

Real Progress on the Editor

Now that I’ve started trying to use the zone editor I’m finding all sorts of things to fix and/or improve.  I’m not sure how long it’ll be before I can get a small zone put together using it, but it’s getting quite close to usable.  Far from pretty, but usable.

HTML Help Workshop = Epic Fail.

Anyone who has wondered why the help systems in Windows applications are typically so abysmal has to look no further than Microsoft’s HTML Help Workshop. Not only is rotting tripe more pleasant to deal with, it’s more likely to help you get the job done.

You’d think that maybe an application designed for editing help files would have a decent help system. Not so.

After trying to figure out the interface to HTML Help Workshop and failing (after getting screens full of incomprehensible errors) I went in search of an application with a less counterintuitive interface. I found HelpNDoc. It looks a lot prettier, but it’s also completely incomprehensible. It might not be all that bad, but after my HHW-induced brain meltdown I just didn’t have the patience to decrypt the interface.

I guess if you were meant to be able to get useful information out of the help files for an application they would have made it easy. Failures like Microsoft HHW are why the software training industry is a massive cash cow.

I ended up falling back on the manual method — creating the index, table of contents, and individual topic files by hand. This is the same method I used when creating the help files for PixelSwapper. To put it in perspective, having to do so is just as retarded as writing a letter to your congresscritter using a hex editor because your word processing program is too terrible to use.

Luckily the file formats are well-documented. Not so much by Microsoft, but by the folks who made the Win32 API usable — wxWidgets. I’ve used wxWidgets extensively, and if you’re going to write an app for Windows without using .NET it’s the only sane way to go. Down the path of pure Win32 lies madness. Yes, the Windows API was designed by Cthulhu. Luckily he has since moved on to the world of embedded design and development (cellphones mostly), so post-Win32 Windows programming is no longer painful.

Better String Visualization in VS2005

The text visualizer in Visual Studio 2005 isn’t very good. When you’re looking at a string in the debugger, you won’t see what you’re looking for if there are any null characters in the string. As far as I can tell this is a holdover from the bad old days when null-terminated C strings were the norm.

This is a pain in the butt if you are dealing with data stored in a System.String. I regularly work with data that needs to be viewed in hexadecimal format. That’s why I created the hex string visualizer, thanks to THIS POST by 4 Guys From Rolla, which is a mighty fine tutorial on creating visualizer plugins.

Here’s what the not-so-informative text visualizer looks like:

Here’s what my hex string visualizer looks like:

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one gives better debugging info.

This is more useful in my day job as a home automation programmer, but it will also come in handy when it comes to debugging low-level communications in the MUD.

It’s available HERE if you want a copy. Just drop it in your My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Visualizers directory and it’ll be available in the list of string visualizers next time you run Visual Studio 2005.

A Help Entry Editor

Editing help file entries has always been a pain, mainly because it’s always been a huge unorganized text file that has to be edited by hand.

I spent about an hour and a half building a simple help file editing application today. It will load/save help files, allow searching and browsing of entries, and of course, editing.

It’s nothing fancy, but it does make the task of editing help entries a little easier. It doesn’t have visualization for colorized help screens, but that would be easy enough to add.

Here’s a looksee:

Help Editor Screenshot

(Click the image for a full view).

Improving The Zone Editor

Over the past couple days I’ve done quite a bit of work on the mob and object editing screens in the editor.  I also found and fixed a few problems with the area converter.

The hard part of building the zone editor is going to be adding the map-based and walkthrough visualization modes.  They aren’t needed for building an area, but they will help quite a bit with visualization and layout.  I haven’t put much thought into how I’m going to go about implementing those features, but it’s something I can worry about a bit later, once I have the zone editor fully functional (which shouldn’t be too much longer).