Monthly Archives: September 2009

Shandril’s Saga Book 1: Spellfire

I’ve been reading The Harpers series from the Forgotten Realms books. Next on my list was Crown of Fire, but it required reading the previous book, Spellfire, in order to really know what was going on. So much for an open-ended series of books. By “open-ended” they obviously didn’t mean “standalone”.

Spellfire was a very different book from the rest of the Harpers books in that the monsters were much more vicious — dracoliches, archmages, devils, beholders, and all manner of newbie-slaying critters. It was a decent book overall, but the nonchalance that the epic foes were treated with took a little away from the book. It’s obvious they expect you to have read a Monster Manual from cover to cover and don’t spend too much time on descriptions of creatures, their ferociousness, and all the horrible things they can do to a foe.

Most of the characters in this book are pretty one-dimensional, and the interactions between the main characters (especially Shandril and Narm) are pretty empty. Even so, it’s a good adventure tale and I give it a solid 3 out of 5 stars. I liked it well enough, but wouldn’t read it again. At least now I can read Crown of Fire and continue the Harpers series.

Running At Full Power Again

I like Linux and know it pretty well.  I also like Windows and I know it extremely well.  I can use either as my desktop pretty effectively, but I’m better with Windows and best when I have both available.

That’s why I’m very happy that I can finally run Windows again on my main desktop.  I tried Windows 7 for a week and it almost worked, but only supported 2 of my 3 monitors at best thanks to the drivers for the two different Nvidia cards in my system not wanting to play nice together.

Well, now that Windows 7 has been installed, the Vista install was actually able to see and use one of my drive partitions.  I’ve installed it and spent half a day loading up all of the essentials I can’t live without.  Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, WinSCP, CDBurnerXP, OneNote, CoolEdit 2000, WinMege, VLC, Word, Excel, Winamp, and Audiograbber are the “killer apps” for me on Windows.  Say what you will about Vista, for me it’s the most functional and stable OS available.  Windows 7 won’t be ready to take its place for another year or so (probably at SP1).

As much fun as it is to be able to run Windows in VirtualBox, writing code is a *LOT* better when I have three monitors to do it on.

A Solid Batch of Fixes

Thanks to reports from the pre-testing test and from actually trying to use the MUD as a player, I’ve taken care of a bunch of things.  Here’s the list:

— Fixed “look in object” command.
— Fixes to damage messages.  Sometimes they wouldn’t print thanks to a stray ‘\0’ (null) character.
— Kill message now shows properly.  Yet again, caused by a stray null character.  A remnant from the old C days.
— Improvements to name capitalization in prompts, descriptions, and room entry/exit messages.  Some things will still need adjustments, but it’s better.
— Fixed “no help on Grey Elf” during character creation.
— Fixed display of spell schools when using the “spells” command.
— Fixed a nasty bug that would cause a newly-killed player to become unplayable.
— Picking up items should work now.  Zone files weren’t synchronized with code (zone files were a version behind in the zone format).  That can cause all manner of weirdness, but the fix is simple — run the zone converter to build a new set of zones.  In this case, flags that included “takeable” settings were missing.
— Corpse creation should be less broken.  Can’t promise it’s perfect, but it’s better.  At the very least, I can kill things and loot coins from corpses.

Those are some pretty significant fixes, but I’m still no more than 45% through the things mentioned during the test.  Add to that the fact that I found a few other things that need to be looked at.  Actually PLAYING a game you’re working on does wonders for figuring out whether it works as intended.