After running the automated tests generated by Pex, it’s amazing how many functions in the old codebase received various class or structure arguments and immediately started working with the data in them without ever checking for null. It was a paradigm followed by the old public code release of Diku, Envy, Merc, etc. and was unthinkingly carried on by the Basternae 2 programmers, myself included. This lack of data validation is being corrected.

It’s no surprise that the old codebase crashed a lot. After seeing the extent of the damage, I feel like I need to go back and revisit the Magma codebase and add a lot of stabilization.

In fact, one of the main things with Basternae 3 that will help stability is the fact that all player-entered commands are executed within a try-catch block. This means that typing in a broken or unsupported command should never crash the MUD, which was a huge problem in the “bad old days”. Instead it will log an error and appear to do absolutely nothing from the player’s viewpoint.