03.21.06
Posted in ALPHA, KaladeaMUD, Programming at 4:38 pm by Nick
Time: 20 hours
Total: 66 hours
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This is my update for all of spring break about KaladeaMUD.
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I have finished the room OLC. All rooms can be created, destroyed, and edited online. One of the things I am appreciating about the design is my implementation of vnums. I have dubbed the entire thing the Flex Vnum System. In SMAUG, a room only existed as its vnum, and if you wanted to change the vnum you either needed a new room or to redit the entire thing. In Kaladea, vnum is merely another field you can edit. Vnums are used for identification purposes, as well as exit linking, so they are quite vital. However, since we have 4 billion of them and we can now use them even more efficiently, I doubt I’ll ever have to worry about the mechanics too much ever again.
As noted before, all of the mud relies on Avatars to execute commands. Avatars are any player that is logged in. This presents a problem, as you want all MUD-driven players (NPCs) to be able to use commands as well. However, to make them Avatars is a waste, as they dont need a lot of the information associated with Avatars (sockets, ip address, etc). This is a good example of when to use a derived class.
A derived class is like a specification of a normal class. For instance, every rectangle is a shape, but not every shape is a rectangle. This is referred to as a is-a relationship. You can take that example further by saying every square is a rectangle, and every rectangle is a shape. Thus, a square is a rectangle and shape. Note how it gets more specific. In this instance, every player (Avatar) is a character, but not every character is a player. Thus, you can make players a derived type of character. Then they inherit all information based on characters (name, description, stats, etc) and add in the player specific data. Then the entire engine need only support characters as mobiles, instead of Avatars and NPCs.
I made the slight transformation required to accomplish this. Compiling and testing still have yet to be done, as well as modification of the editing interfaces. The character class is empty, but that doesnt stop it from being an inherited base class.
In other news, I installed the updated string library into the bowels of Kaladea. It already needs to be updated again. ::sigh:: Hopefully I will be able to put it to good use. In Ksilyan’s future plans for it he said he may make each bucket into a binary tree, which I think would be quite nice (even if not needed).
In other other news, I hope to get the actual www.nick-cash.com web site going agian, this time Kaladea related. I kind of miss having my own forums. Sorry to all of those two hundred members, you’ll have to sign up yet again. With any luck at all Kaladea will be in the alpha stage by the end of the year, in which we might be able to do some minor play testing.
And, finally, in other other -other- news, I’ll continue uploading the other 5 pages of ALPHA quotes into phpQuote and hopefully make a few modificaitons to the displays so its a little more clear what you can search for (I mean a list of searchable categories) and display the total number of quotes within the DB.
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03.16.06
Posted in ALPHA, Programming at 2:25 pm by Nick
Time: N/A
Total: 46 hours
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I made a small (but very useful) change to the interface today. Before if I wanted to edit or delete a quote (which is done by quote ID’s) I had to look it up in the MySQL DB. Needless to say that was very annoying. After realizing a couple typo’s on my part on two or three quotes I decided to make it display the quote ID’s for all quotes displayed for admins. Thus, the change should be invisible to all but the superuser(s).
It only took a few minutes, so I won’t log the time. I did feel it was semi-worth noting though. The interface as a whole could use some spiffying up, but that is not something I’m likely to do. The only thing I’m considering is adding a “## quotes in database” section to all pages, where the ## would be the number of quotes currently in the system. Currently it is 55.
I have also added the link to the Links box on the right side of this blog, in case you can’t seem to find it elsewhere.
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03.14.06
Posted in General at 9:25 pm by Nick
I’ve been tinkering with the actual www.nick-cash.com stuffs for a while and I’ve been able to recover most, if not all, of the web links and download data. I’ve been experimenting with some other Nuke features, and I must say its all very nifty. I’m glad I chose it. Now all that needs to be done is some creation of graphics and to fill the thing up with Kaladea related content.
Again, sorry for all of the GWA hopefuls. It was but a dream, a dream long gone. Oh well. ::sigh::
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Posted in General at 12:27 am by Nick
So, its finally here. The break we have all been waiting for. However, I do not think I am going to be as fortunate as my fellow classmates this time around. There is so much that needs to be done around here, it doesnt leave a whole lot of time for slacking or programming (though I’m trying my best). I’ll give an update on Kaladea at the end of break unless I get around to it before that. It has been running without problems for two days straight on my computer, so I think it is doing well.
School sucks. I have massive amounts of math homework to do, my Eastern Civ notebook to organize/complete, Computer Org. homework to do, and I need to read Crime nad Punishment over the course of this week (to page 198). How is this spring break?! I better start doing something about this massive amount of homework.
My good friend Carl was kind enough to allow me to buy the audio version of Crime and Punishment (unabridged = 25 hours…), so it shouldnt be too bad if I can find the time to listen/read it.
This week, overall, is just repair time. Yesterday I spent several hours at the hospital with Dan sorting out bills that needed to be paid. Oodle of household chores still need to be done, and my room is a complete mess. I’m not really sure what the point of my rant is though. It is good to have time to finally get things back in shape. I just wish I could use the time for more personal things.
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“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.”
– Oscar Wilde, found via Wallingford’s blog
I was just over reading Wallingford’s blog, and he talks about teaching methods and how they often take precedence over course material. I can say from a students point of view that weekly quizes feel like a waste of time, though pure lecture does as well.
I enjoy CS II (pure lecture and examples), but I know from helpping many of the less savvy students that they do not. The do not have any one on one time with the professor, and it makes it very difficult for them to learn. Time in the labs doing small programming activities could do wonders for them since most of them have no idea how to do the homework. I have a feeling both of the females in CS I would have stuck around for CS II and stuck with the CS major if we had used the labs and they had more time in class to actively program and figure things out.
It is often interesting to view Wallingford’s comments from the student perspective. It seems we agree on many points, leading me to believe he not only has a good grasp on computer science theory but also on the teaching of computer science. He seems to understand many of the issues students have with computer science. He also seems to understand that computer science, while not a “natural” science per se, is very fundamental in the world we live in and why it doesnt come very well to many students. I would be glad and honored to have him as a professor someday.
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03.10.06
Posted in ALPHA, Programming at 9:01 am by Nick
Time: 1 hour
Total: 46 hours
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Lisa told me I spelled her name wrong, so I went to change it. But alas! I had no editing interface! For the time being I just used a normal MySQL query, and it has taken some time to find the time to make the editing page, but it is now complete as well. You can edit every aspect of every quote, though you need to know the ID number. This poses another problem which I may remedy by modding the search/display page. I can make it so any admin’s logged in can see the ID’s.
Also to come will be the full display of a quote. That means the quote, author, date it was added to the database, and any background or contextual information logged for the quote.
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03.08.06
Posted in ALPHA, Programming at 11:57 pm by Nick
Time: 3 hours
Total: 45 hours
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I finally finished a display type page for phpQuote. This news is a few days old, but still relevant for blog purposes. You can search by author, category, or a pick at random. It is still rather primitive in the respect it doesn’t display all information that is input when the quote is created, but I will be making a display page that, based on the selected quote, will display all information (date, category, id number, any additional information (listed as “context”)).
The engine can be found at http://www.nick-cash.com/quote. It is worth noting that five pages of ALPHA quotes are waiting to be put in.
In other news, Spring Break is finally drawing near! I have some heavy plans for it. The current Code Challenge on MudMagic is to create a string library. This is something I plan on entering, though I must say I’m not exactly looking forward to using C-style strings again. These many months of programming in C++ have taught me that I absolutely love the STL string class. We shall see how it turns out.
In addition to the string library, I plan to work on Kaladea a bunch. I will finish the current implementation of rooms and room editing, then follow up by making Avatar’s a derived class from Characters, or some form of that. Currently I need to rearrage the base a bit so that NPCs can execute commands, which is currently impossible. After such a thing is done, I will work on integrating Ksilyan’s string library into Kaladea.
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03.03.06
Posted in College, General, High School, School at 11:01 am by Nick
Right, so my seemingly great week has turned to crap. Lets go over why it was great:
- Perfect score on the Eastern Civ test (100/100). Woot.
- Perfect scores on CS II homework and test (without testing code even).
- Made $20 tutoring a college student
- Assembled a kick ass computer, for which I will (eventually) recieve $80.
- Spring break is but a week away
- My truck still has half a tank of gas (yup, this is a good thing)
- The play is on Saturday
- Great Books w/ Demoss is amazing, as is the Apology by Plato.
- Got to eat Village Inn and Carlos O’Kelly’s in the same week
- Made top 10 posters on Gammon’s forum
Ok, some intermediate things here:
- Signed up for the ACTs
- Got some sleep, but not too much, by pulling shifts with Dan
- Hacked away some math assignments (see next section)
- Video in Eastern Civ on Monday.
- Reading time in Eastern Civ today.
And the kickers, all of which have been happening recently (minus the first one):
- Mom back in the hospital on Tuesday (this cancels out like, 5 good things)
- Still have several math assignments to do
- Literary Analysis paper is due next week (I have a bit to read yet…)
- Comp. Org. homework due today that I don’t have done and don’t really know how to do…
- All of the problems of putting the computer togeather (eg. incompatible RAM, SATA troubles, optical drive troubles, Windows installation troubles (err, SATA troubles again…))
- No time to work on Kaladea
- No time to work on phpQuote
- No time to work on much of anything
- Horrifically unprepared for the ACTs next month
- Cable/Internet died during ACT registration
- 65 point quiz in Eastern Civ next week
- My knees died (I contribute this to tripping on the sidewalk, but standing for 4 hours straight prolly didn’t help either). This was resolved after two hours of icing them down with frozen peas.
- Terrible weakness and sickness Thursday morning.
- Mental meltdown + seemingly unavoidable academic failure
- Absolute depletion of care for math class ::sigh::
- Only got to see my Grandparents yesterday for a total of 45 seconds (twas leaving for tutoring)
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I’m not really sure what else to say. This weeked is going to be incredibly busy, as is next week. Then, finally, I’ll have a break from it all (which, sadly, will be used to catch up on things…).
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Can anyone name the song that contains this posts title in its lyrics? I’ll give you two imaginary cookies if you do! Google should make it easy.
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