Monthly Archives: August 2008

Resharper 4.0

Last year I tried the Resharper 3 plugin for Visual Studio, and posted my thoughts on it:

http://basternae.org/blog/2007/07/26/jetbrains-resharper/

It was OK, but not all that special. It had potential, but wasn’t quite “there” yet.

I just finished trying out Resharper 4.0 and you could paste the Resharper 3.0 review in its place. It’s neat, but not so neat that it’s a ‘must have’ utility. The features added in the latest version really aren’t anything I find useful — I don’t refactor Visual Basic, don’t use LINQ, etc.

It does, however, appear to run a little faster than version 3.  That might just be the system I’m using it with, but the slowness is no longer an annoyance.

I’ll keep my eye on it. Maybe they’ll add something I can’t live without in a later version.

First Zone Editor Preview Version

Here’s the first view of the Basternae Zone Editor available for download:

BasternaeEditorPreview1.zip (download removed, see the post about preview version 2)

Some warnings:

1. This is a pre-release version and it’s entirely likely that it will be unstable and lacking in features.
2. It has no help files.
3. It has no icons for the edit window buttons — just colors.  You have to guess what they do.
4. The map edit and walkthrough edit modes are not done yet (and haven’t been started yet either).
5. Save your work often and keep backup copies.

This is just to download, play around with a bit, and get a feel for.  I don’t expect that the area file format will change in a way that will break zones created with this editor, so you can actually start trying to use it to build something.

Check it out, see if it’s usable, and feel free to make requests, bug reports, or just say what would make you more likely to want to use the tool to create a zone for the new Basternae.

Rewiring The Core

In the process or getting an alpha version of the editor ready I’ve found that I had to separate the game code, a.k.a. “business logic” from the data, a.k.a. “object model”.  Otherwise I’d have to include the entire MUD engine in the editor download.  Since that’s not something I want to do I’ve had to pull them apart.  It’s a lot like pulling apart a cold grilled cheese sandwich, and as expected, the bread did tear a little.

The “core rewire” still needs some work, but I should have an “alpha”, a.k.a. “try it and see how broken it is or isn’t” version of the zone editor out sometime this month.