I fixed a few more glitches, and the MUD seems to be a lot more stable. Bang on it, see if you can break it! First one to crash the MUD gets a cookie.

Something went horribly wrong with the communication code, so logging in wasn’t possible for a few days. All is well now.

I finally got around to taking care of two things that have been bugging me for a bit.

1. Every boot the MUD would reset the time/day/year to the first day of the first month of the first year (time zero).  Now time continues across reboots.  No more Groundhog Day.

2. The current, maximum, and record number of players data was not being kept correctly.  It is now.

They haven’t been deployed to the server yet since I’m in the middle of reworking the map engine on both the client and server for the new graphics, but when that’s done those two fixes will ride along.

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.

Fixed a problem with object updates that would sometimes cause crashes when an object disintegrates.

* Fixed crash with monk class mobs and barehanded damage skill checks.
* Fixed crash with mob tracking. Track mobs probably don’t work yet, but at least we won’t have crashes because of it.
* Fix for spell learning when players advance levels. This may or may not have caused crashes (was a little unclear from the logs). This means that psionicists and clerics and such should auto-learn spells as they level.

Made a couple fixes for things mentioned by Tiu:

* Enslaver races added to creation screens.
* Printing move point values twice when they’re low has been fixed.
* Will and sing command processing has been fixed.

There’s still a shortage of connected zones with teacher mobs and a bunch of other things still unfixed…

* Fixed a crash bug with automatically combining piles of coins when a corpse containing them decays or when someone drops them.
* Item auto-pricing has been enabled.
* Fixed a bug that would cause forage to always fail.
* Changed messages for a few commands.
* Coins were not saving in player files. This has been fixed.
* Fixed the deposit and withdraw commands. Banks are working now.
* Made the economy command immortal-only.
* Added spellbook and light support to the compare command.
* Changed adding objects to a room so they are added at the beginning instead of the end a room. This fixes an issue that caused the second mob killed in a room to end up as 2.corpse instead of 1.corpse.
* Changed adding mobs to a room so they are added at the beginning instead of the end of the room. This means that the second troll to walk into a room will now be 1.troll instead of 2.troll. This is the behavior everyone should be used to.

One thing that’s nice about the Basternae 3 engine is that a player-issued command is incapable of crashing the MUD directly. The only crashes that can and will happen are when the database gets corrupted or otherwise out of whack. Autonomous mob activity and object/room/weather updates are the only places that contain any danger anymore, and those are getting sorted out pretty quick.

In the past week, average uptime has increased from 2d7 hours to 2d20 hours.

Hurry up, break it while you still can!

By the way, “turbo level” mode is on — which means you gain ten levels for every one level you would normally gain. Should help with testing.

Looks like I sorted out that nasty little affect removal bug, so onto the next…

With this and the previous fix, now would be a great time to sign on and start testing the heck out of things.  After all, you don’t want me to run out of work to do, do you?  😛

I had a chance to tinker with the code today. I made a bunch of relatively minor fixes (code-wise). Here’s the list:

– Fixed game menu consistency so same one appears every time.
– Some minor text changes and/or typo fixes.
– Made the help editor a little easier to use and added a ‘delete entry’ button.
– Made the MUD screen editor a little easier to use.
– Fixed the immortal ‘slay’ command.
– Fixed the immortal ‘load object’ command.
– Fixed the ‘history’ and ‘!’ commands, the latter of which would instantly crash the MUD when used.
– Improved the issue system and added the ability for immortals to create issues.
– Some help entry additions and improvements.

There are two major bugs right now that will take some digging to fix properly: Items can’t be picked up, and spell/skill effects never seem to wear off.

Even though there’s still quite a lot of work to do before the codebase conversion could be considered ‘complete’, it’s becoming a bit more fun to work on.

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.

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 uses of the “who” command would lock up the MUD.  This appears to be fixed now.  Report any anomalies.

One of the nagging problems I had been meaning to get to was the non-functional scan command. It’s a recursive command, and the C# way is a bit different from the C++ way. It was easier to fix than I had expected and is working now, so scan away.