Yearly Archives: 2012

Heading North

I live in Mountain View, CA in the heart of Silicon Valley right now.  I’m moving 700 miles north to Beaverton, OR in the heart of the Silicon Forest over the next few days.  I’m looking forward to not being around California drivers anymore.

Server Updated

Over the course of a lunch hour yesterday I updated the operating system on the Basternae box.  It was running Ubuntu 10.04.  It’s now on Ubuntu 12.04.  It took about 45 minutes to finish the whole process including testing and fixes.  Only one thing broke in the process.  The Django web framework, which runs about half of my websites, was uninstalled by the upgrade process.  I had to manually reinstall it, which took about 10 minutes.

I remember upgrading a Red Hat 5 box to Red Hat 9 many years back.  The process took about 10 hours to finish and get everything working again.  Easy upgrades are a good thing.

Client Version 0.24 Released

I’ve released version 0.24 of the Basternae Client.  Use the download link on the right side of the blog or on the basternae.org front page to get it.

This release mainly has cosmetic changes:

  • Changed the font for most things from Segoe UI to Verdana.  It just looks better.
  • Added “show group” and “show equipment” settings to the settings dialog so you can have those always show up when you start the client if you like.
  • Improved the look of the menu bar a little.
  • Reworked the settings dialog so it looks a little more organized.
  • Fixed a crash that would happen if you open and close the about box twice in a row.
  • Improved the layout of the status window.

There’s nothing groundbreaking or particularly complex about this release, it’s mainly just a small update to get me used to the code again, since I’ve been away from it for a while.

ANSI drawing and parsing glitches remain, and that’s the main thing that needs work right now.

Goodbye FindMUD

For a few years I ran findmud.com. It was mainly an exercise in customizing Drupal, but there was no real need for it. The Mud Connector filled the mud listing and community need quite nicely.

FindMUD is gone now. It was time that it was put out to pasture. It was fun while it lasted.

New Client Artwork From John Baker

John Baker, a friend of mine for a long while, did some work creating graphics tiles for me. It was intended for use in two old-style RPG projects I’m gradually working on. I’m sure you’ll hear about them later as they develop. Neat thing is, they were designed with both those projects and the Basternae client in mind.

Expect to see them in future posts and/or releases of the client. Stay tuned.

For now, check out his site:

argofjohnbaker.com

Multiverse MMO Engine

There’s a game engine designed for building massively multiplayer online games.  It’s called Multiverse.  It was originally a proprietary engine, but it went open source at the beginning of the year when the company that created it went out of business.

I played with it a bit back in 2010 before I left Ohio.  When I moved to California in the second half of 2010 I ended up working in the same building as Multiverse, Inc.  They were winding down the company when I arrived and I ended up buying one of their old computers, a monitor, and an office chair.  I met the founder, Bill Turpin, who also happened to work with the database admin where I was working when they were both at Netscape.

A while later they open sourced the project.  I didn’t have the spare attention cycles to dig into it for the first few months, but started tinkering with it again in April.  It’s a lot of fun to play with, but needs a lot of work, especially in the ease-of-use area.

I joined the development team and have been contributing the occasional bugfix.  To find out more visit this website:

www.multiversemmo.com

Back Online

The Basternae site is back online after being gone for six months.   The MUD is also back online at basternae.org port 4502.