Version 0.13 of the client is now available. Cleaned up one or two things with text processing and added command scrollback (where you can push the up arrow to retrieve previous commands). As always, let me know of any glitches you find.
Author Archives: xangis
Zone Permissions Received From Gharl
Gharl was nice enough to grant permission to use his zones on Basternae 3. This includes “The Church of Eternal Dusk”, “The Motte and Bailey of Duke Delwyn”, and “Zalkapfaan, City of the Headless”. Thank you, sir. Forward progress!
It Runs On MacOS
I recently acquired a MacBook to expand the multi-platform development repertoire. One thing that surprised me is that the Basternae server executable runs unmodified on OSX (Snow Leopard) with Mono installed. This shouldn’t have been too surprising since the server currently runs on Ubuntu Linux, but it was still pretty cool to just type ‘mono Basternae.exe’ and have it run without errors. There’s quite close to zero chance that it’ll ever be set up on a Mac server, so this was just an interesting experiment more than anything.
You’ll probably notice that there hasn’t been much development on Basternae in the past month or so. I’m spending the vast majority of time working on software for Zeta Centauri, so until that is a definite success or failure (I think June 2010 will be when I know), B3 will be fairly low-priority. I doubt work will stop, but time available will be at a minimum.
Generating Maps
Generating maps on Basternae 2 was a bit of a pain. It was done with about 1000 lines of hacked-together C code that I wrote that read in an ASCII file, asked you the dimensions and map type (surface, underdark, etc), and then brute-forced it into a simple zone file. It was not elegant, but it worked, usually. Unless, of course, you entered a wrong number, had an extra character on one line, or anything like that.
The surface map I showed yesterday is just an enlarged 120 x 50 bitmap. I only used 9 colors when creating it — one for each terrain type. There is no accompanying ASCII text file.
It’s entirely possible with a lot of grunting and swearing that I could convert it into an ASCII file which I could then import into that old C program. Why bother? There has to be a better way. Turns out there is.
Last night I created a small application that does one thing and only one thing — generates maps for Basternae.
Here’s how it works:
1. Load in a bitmap of any size.
2. Select a menu item and the program analyzes the bitmap and generates a list of all the different colors used in it.
3. Use that list to generate a room template for each color — title, description, and terrain type.
4. Let the user edit the list of templates so you can say light green is “The Forest of Evil” and dark green is “Drachenwald Forest”.
5. Select another menu item to have the program use the template file as it goes through the image pixel by pixel and generates a room for each pixel.
The obligatory screenshot:
I’m a bit surprised that it only took a couple hours to write. It’s the sort of thing that the serialization, bitmap, list, and datagrid classes built into .NET make very easy to do.
It is missing one major thing — it doesn’t connect the rooms together via exits yet. That will be easy enough to add (probably about an hour to do). It does, however, generate a zone that loads into the editor and can be tweaked and refined further.
There’s also one neat thing about the design — the room templates can be saved off to a file and loaded again, so you don’t have to edit it all in one sitting, risk losing your work if the power goes out, and can use the same room definitions with different image variations (provided you used the same colors).
Basternae 3 Surface Map
I have a few goals with the Basternae 3 surface map:
1. Has to be fairly small. No epic 90,000-room maps that take half an hour to get to the next zone.
2. Has to have both raidable and non-raidable sections. The raidable sections should be easy to get to for both sides. The non-raidable sections should be more-or-less “safe”.
3. Should be contiguous — no randomly-spaced islands, be they large or small.
In short — I want it to be small enough that the world doesn’t feel empty when there are only a few people on, but large enough to have room a good number of zones, and for people to chase each other around a bit. If there is an error to be made in sizing I’d prefer to err on the side of too small.
Here’s what I’ve come up with. It’s subject to modification, of course, but it captures the general idea:
It will be a while before it’s in the game, so it may evolve. There will also be cavern (underdark) map at some point.
Small Client Update
I’ve made a couple minor updates to the client. First, the status window wasn’t clearing the tank and enemy condition bars when there was no tank or enemy combatant. That’s fixed.
Next, I’ve added what appears to be working support for aliases. They’re created accessed using the “#alias” command (#al for short). They cannot yet be saved/loaded, but they do stay in memory as long as the client is open. Saving/loading is probably the next thing I’ll work on.
Here’s an example:
You can download it here.
Yurgoth’s Estate and Defense of Longhollow Added
I’ve finished converting two zones and attached them to the MUD:
Yurgoth’s Estate by Sarlac
The Defense of Longhollow by Drevarr and Ilshad
For now they’ve been attached where the Gypsy Encampment meets the Kobold pond. Things will of course move when we get world maps in place.
Terry Pratchett’s Latest Books
I just finished reading Thud!
Thud! is about a racewar brewing between Trolls and Dwarves and the cops who are trying to prevent it. Making Money is the story of an ex-crook who is put in charge of a bank via inheriting the dog that owns it. They both have plenty of comedy-meets-fantasy-parodies-reality to them. All on a world riding on the back of a giant turtle, of course.
You could always start with The Colour of Magic
His books make good gifts for mudders and friends of mudders, so it’s something to keep in mind if you’re getting kind of last-minute on your holiday shopping. They’re always in stock at pretty much every bookstore.
Building The Client On Linux
It’s been 3 years since I’ve tried to build the client on Linux. I started building the client long before there ever was a Basternae 3 project, and since then plenty of files have been added and removed — for instance, we no longer use Xerces-C or SDL in the project. I was using Ubuntu 6.06 then, and now I’m on 9.04.
After updating the old makefile, I found there were a few minor issues. Of course there was the expected forward/back slash in filenames and that’s an easy fix. There were two that were a bit of a surprise:
warning: cannot pass objects of non-POD type ‘class wxString’ through ‘...’; call will abort at runtime
error: no matching function for call to ‘wxRichTextCtrl::AddPendingEvent(wxCommandEvent)’
/usr/include/wx-2.8/wx/event.h:2400: note: candidates are: void wxEvtHandler::AddPendingEvent(wxEvent&)
The first one is because I was passing wxString arguments to the wxString::Format function. Visual Studio was smart enough to convert those to the char* type that printf commands understand for %s, while GCC doesn’t make any assumptions and does what you tell it to rather than what you intend. Differences like that have been known to start religious wars. Adding .c_str() to the arguments in a dozen places sorted that out for me.
The second one was a bit of a stumper, and the folks at the wxWidgets Discussion Forum helped me out. I’ve dealt with a lot of user communities for various APIs and toolkits, and the wxWidgets folks have always been the most helpful and knowledgeable.
I was able to get the client to build. I was even able to get it to run. I could almost even use it. Here’s a screenshot:
The main problem with it is that the input window doesn’t actually work — you can type until you’re blue in the face but nothing ever gets sent to the MUD. Strangely enough, if you program a hotkey and click that, the text goes across fine. I was able to clumsily log in and fight something using that method. I’m sure there’s some OS-specific stuff in the key handler for the input window, but that probably won’t be too daunting to figure out.
Now I’m going to have to learn how to create Debian (.deb) installer packages so I can distribute the thing. I might also have to figure out how to do .rpm, but since I don’t run a Redhat/Fedora-based version that might be a little low on the priority list, especially since I’d have to set up VM just to build/deploy it. I might be the only one who uses Linux that would connect to Basternae anyhow.
It would also probably not be too tough to get this working for MacOS and Solaris, but since there’s zero chance of me having a Mac to work with and the only people who run Solaris work at Sun Microsystems, those aren’t really a priority.
Zone Converter Works Better Now
I solved a few issues with the zone converter and it handles some zones it couldn’t before, so I should be able to attach a few more soon.
First Release of the Basternae 3 Client (v0.11)
You should be able to tell from the version number that it’s far from done yet.
I spent some time working on the status window, and it now appears to work more-or-less as intended:
There are a handful of issues I know about, and probably a good solid handful that I don’t know about, so feel free to report anything that is broken that you wouldn’t expect to be broken in a partially-done MUD client.
I’m also curious to know what this client would have to do for you to give up your current favorite MUD client, whether it be ZMud, WinTin, tintin++, or some other app. I’ll throw one out there — before I’d be willing to use it as my main client it would have to support aliases, all those extra newlines that show up in the main window would have to go away, and room description formatting would have to be less wonky.
The cool thing about having our own client is that we’re no longer just restricted to 16 colors of ANSI text. We could do 2-D graphics (i.e. the sample tiled map that shows when you first run the app — since we don’t have surface maps yet it won’t do anything, but hey..) We could do any number of colors. We could do anything we have the skills and motivation for.
I don’t at any point plan to make this client mandatory — you should always be able to play with Windows Telnet. It’s just going to be there for those who want the “full experience”. Tinker with it imagine some neat possibilities that I wouldn’t have thought of yet.
You can either click on the link in the sidebar (which will always have the most current version), or you can get it HERE. There are no real instructions, but you’ll get the hang of it. The other dialogs can be shown with the “View” menu.
Immortal ‘Set’ Commands Repaired
One of the casualties of the codebase rewrite was the disabling of the immortal ‘set’ command, which is pretty useful for administrative tinkering. It’s been repaired, so immortals are godlike once more. It doesn’t improve gameplay any, but it does help development.
Thank You To Drevarr, Nauraki, Sarim, Sarlac, and Thendar
They’ve been nice enough to grant Basternae 3 the use of their zones.
I’ve also found out that the converter needs some work — there are a few special cases that it doesn’t handle and zone format variations that it doesn’t handle perfectly yet, so it will probably be a bit before all of the zones we can use are fully converted and attached.
Repairs For The Tell Command
The tell command was rather broken. I fixed the broken parts that I knew about, so if there are any broken parts left in it, they’re ones I don’t know about.
Some Solid Client Progress
Over the past two days I’ve made some good progress on the client. It’s now working with colored text and functioning scrollback. There was a bit of difficulty in figuring out how to post text from the network thread to the main window, but that’s been solved thanks to the helpful folks at the wxWidgets forums.
The equipment window works now, but the equipment names are not in color yet:
The earlier screenshots of the client just had some placeholder text — now it actually processes your equipment list and displays it.
The hotkey (hot button) window also works — you right click to set a command and a hotkey name. When you click the button the command is sent.
The prompt processing and room info display still needs some work, but it’s coming along nicely. I haven’t even started on the group info window yet. I think it may be about three solid days away from being able to release a test version, but I can’t recall the last time I’ve been able to get in a “solid” day of development. Usually it’s anywhere from one half to four hours at a time.
We’re On FindMUD Now
Even though Bast3 will be in development for quite a long while, I added a listing to FindMUD.com. Just trying to raise awareness and whatnot.
Who Command Repaired
Some uses of the “who” command would lock up the MUD. This appears to be fixed now. Report any anomalies.
Visual C++ For C# Programmers
At my dayjob, I’m a C# developer. 2.5 years ago I was a C++ developer during the day. When I wrote C++, it was all for multiplatform applications that never touched any of the .NET libraries. When I switched to C#, it was all .NET. Never once did I try or even look into using any of the .NET libraries with C++. I knew there was something like __gcnew available, but I took one peek at managed C++ back in 2003 or so and got scared, running away because it looked so ugly.
I had heard that it was improved, but never bothered to look into it until now. I picked up a copy of Pro Visual C++ 2005 for C# Developers
The remainder of the book explains more of the intricacies and specifics, but any competent C# programmer can be writing C++ in only two hours with this book.
Minotaur Stronghold Added
The Minotaur Stronghold zone I mentioned doing some testing with a few days back is now uploaded and connected to the MUD. It’s a scenario where an Orcish army has a Minotaur outpost under siege. Enjoy!
wxWidgets Client Resurrected
As I mentioned in my post yesterday, not being able to support scrollback with the client was a problem in the wxWidgets-based version. This is because it used the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) for the text rendering, and that just has a 2-D panel that text can be rendered to. Adding scrollback to that kind of system would be a large amount of effort.
Since the original development on the client was started back in 2005, wxWidgets has added the wxRichTextCtrl control, which lets you create rich text box — as in, a text box that has color, images, and all sorts of happy goodness like that.
I spent some time ripping out all of the SDL portions of the client and replacing them with the rich text control. The end result is that it does everything it did before, but has scrollback, uses less CPU, and has less memory copying going on (which means fewer possible points of failure). It still needs some tuning, but it already uses five fewer code files than the previous attempt.