10.12.05
Lots of Stuff
So, while it didn’t seem like an especially interesting day, it seems it really was. First I went to the PSAT (more reflection on this later perhaps), and then I got out for lunch at 11 till 12:26! Woot for long lunches.
UNI classes were alright today. We got our first test back in CS I. Sadly, I missed one. However, it was quite amusing to hear the remarks when O’kane said, “Yeah, the high school junior did much better then all of you. He was the highest score.” Yes, it certainly made my day. I would have had 100% had the question I missed not been written obscurely. I’ll live.
In summary of academics, I had two classes today. Yay.
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My short story seems to be doing alright. I think the second scene lags a little, though I’m not quite sure what it is lacking. I’ll have Wilkinson look it over tomorrow.
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The final topic of this post goes to my ALPHA project and my lab credit for CS I. While I happen to be about halfway done with my interpreter, I realized a few things today. First, why the hell do I keep the file open? String parsing would be much easier to do for this, as you could keep an ordered array of the lines and get them one by one. This would make GOTO much easier.
Simply put, to be better (as workable just isn’t good enough), it would take a little redsigning. I’m a little too tired to count my two hours of research/work that I did tonight, as I’m not quite sure if I really want to do what I am about to propose.
Yes, many of you know I have desired to build a MUD (Multi-User Dimension) from scratch. Yes, my friends Carl and Hillary shall be embarking upon the quest (Kaladea). So, why not start now? After all of this time, I have an ALPHA project of coding, and I could dump some serious time into this. I could also probably get O’Kane to give me the lab credit for it.
I really have two options. As my socket handling skills are sketchy, I think it would be best to start from one of two very skimpy code bases. One is SocketMud++, which is a very very basic telnet server that does nothing besides keep, track, and update sockets. Very nice if you don’t want to mess with that stuff. Also well laid out.
However, I am currently in favor of TinyMUD v2.2. It is some 1800 lines long, and takes care of a great deal for you. It has a base framework of many things, such as saving players/rooms, loading system data, and providing a command structure to work off of. I spent an hour tonight tinkering with it and fixing it up to run on cygwin, and thus from my machine (and hopefully from a future host with little effort).
The downside to TM2.2 is that the code is very hard to read at first. While its fairly easy to tell what a command does, some things are done in obscure ways. I will elaborate more tomorrow.
http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?bbsubject_id=4496&page=999999