Monthly Archives: July 2010

Silicon Valley Is The Best Place In The Universe

I’ve been in California for two weeks and already have two job offers, at least one of which offers a six-figure salary and is a company you’ve definitely heard of, and I’m likely to get a third offer within the next week.  I know which one I’m going to go with (hint: it isn’t the one that pays the most), but it is awesome to be in a place where my skills will be appreciated.

If I were still in Ohio I’d likely have to work somewhere that would involve cranking out WTF-worthy ASP.NET pages all day.  I’d rather live under a bridge, thanks.  Too bad Ohio doesn’t have very good bridges.

Funny thing is, I don’t really care all that much about pay and benefits at a place where I work.  I’m more interested in finding a problem that’s so hard I’ll have to throw my whole brain at it.  Not having to waste time shoveling snow and scraping ice off my car windows makes for more time to brain at hard problems.

Help Entries Improved

When the help file entries were translated from a text file to our fancy help entry format, the line spacing in each entry was converted from single to double.  It was just a quirk of XML serialization, but it made for long, spammy entries when helps were displayed.  I had gone through and cleaned up one or two hundred of them, but there were about four or five hundred more to go.  I spent a while going through the rest and removing the extra newlines where they weren’t wanted.  It would have taken forever if not for the help editor tool, but thanks to that it only took half an afternoon to clean them up.

Another thing that was a nuisance about the help system was that it would match and display every entry that matched the entered keyword.  If you typed “help heal” you’d get the entries for the spells heal, group heal, full heal, and mass heal.  I’m not even going to say how many entries you’d see if you typed “wall” or “fire”.  While it was intentional that a general match would take place, i.e. if you did “help wall” you’d see all of the help entries for wall of fire, wall of stone, etc., the unintended consequences were that you’d see extra entries even if you had an exact title match.

That’s been changed, so now when you type “help wall of fire” or “help heal” you’ll see the exact entry you were looking for, while you’ll still see multiple entries if you were doing a general query like “help fire” or “help wall”.

Go ahead, log in and play around a bit and see what you think of the way help is organized and how it works now.  Let me know if you see anything wacky or see a way to make it more useful.

Editor Version 0.56 Update

Working on a zone always results in editor improvements, so here’s what we get this release:

* Changed the error window shown for “Check Area” to a scrollable list so all errors can be seen.
* When items in the list of errors found by “Check Area” are double-clicked, the object, room, or mob will open in the edit window so you can change whatever the area check complained about.
* The map window is now refreshed when “apply” is clicked in the room editor so we see the room change color when the terrain type changes.
* The map window is now cleared if there was an area loaded when File –> New is used to create a new area.
* Added a “New” button to the exit edit dialog so new empty rooms with reciprocal exits can be created from the exit editor.  This will be easier than creating both rooms and manually creating an exit in each room pointing to the other.
* Added more content to the help file.

Grey Elf Hometown Layout Finished

I have the general layout of the Grey Elf hometown finished now. There’s a lot of work still to do — room descriptions, shops, mobs, objects, etc., but the layout is done and the repopulation points have been set.

Here’s what it looks like:

Now In California

I’ve escaped Ohio. Right now I’m living in San Jose, CA and it’s a vast improvement so far. Hopefully development on Basternae 3 can resume soon, work and life arrangements permitting.