The rest of my project will be devoted to planning out KaladeaMUD and quite possibly sticking it into a Wiki. While I have much to do (and little time for programming), I hope to read more of Bartle’s book and figure out more of the issues.

I also figured there is quite a bit more reading I need to do in general. I should check to see what introductory economic majors at UNI use and read most of it. The worst thing for an online game is a super inflated currency. Hopefully come next year I’ll begin programming on it again, and this time with a battle plan.

In the mean time I will, over the summer and perhaps sometime soon, be learning both Ada and Lua. Lua looks to be the best scripting language to tie into Kaladea, and Ada is the language of choice for CS III. Now, I have pretty much skated through CS I and CS II without much strife or personal investmet. I doubt CS III will be the same way, so I’m looking forward to learning a new language.

In other news, I have one assignment (one extra credit assign if I can muster it) before I take my last final at UNI. To get an A in the class I need a 92% on the final. However, to settle for an A- I need to get a 66% on the final, and since the class average was 71% I’m guessing I should at least get that.

Alright, so I exported the code (and SQL) and threw it up for the world to see. Sadly it is in a bad shape, as I made a last ditch effort something like six weeks ago to institute the character class that avatars were to be derived from. When I came back (within the last few days) it was hard to tell what I had done to it and what the errors were exactly.

The statistics are listed at the bottom of the display page. It resulted in a net gain of 2646 lines and 9 files. Sadly, I had to gather the stats by hand, so I’m thinking I may make a program that will tally lines.

In any event, here is Scratch MUD with all I have added (movement, rooms, help files, and a bit more):

http://www.nick-cash.com/download/cs2/final

— edit —

I have updated the KaladeaMUD project page on the right with a listing of added features, the stats, and a few comments.

Despite the listed time for this, I’ve given it some serious thought. Ultimately, I would like to finish reading Designing Virtual Worlds, reread parts of MUD Programming, and finally learn some more Lua. An alternative to Lua would be Python. There are several reasons I like Python (very clean and neat scripting language), and the book MUD Programming uses Python for all game logic, while the basic kernel is coded in C++. This is a very flexible and efficient design.

Something I would also like to do is iron out a few more issues due to the design. Ultimately the design process on Kaladea could take a year or more. I am not very satisfied with the way it has turned out from Scratch, as I think the MySQL implementation (and a few other methods) are very bulky and annoying.

Thus, I have decided to scrap this current codebase. It has made some tremendous leaps, but it is currently just to unwieldly to work in the long run. I do, however, plan to keep the code around and use it for my CS II final project.

This is my update for all of spring break about KaladeaMUD.

–

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.

I’ve decided that after I get the OLC set for room creation I will take a bit of a break from the programming aspect. I seriously need to do some reading.

Richard Bartle’s book Designing Virtual Worlds has tons of information I should at least be aware of before I continue further. Beyond that book is the book MUD Programming by Ron Penton that I should also read in relation to design issues. His later example ties the whole mud to scripting, which would be -very- -very- nice to have. If I plan to integrate scripting, I need to do it now. It takes some serious work in the design stage (the SGE scripting system is a testament to feature addition without much through to the design aspect), and I should at least be aware of such things.

In the mean time I’ll keep up the programming with CS II and hopefully finish the phpQuote Engine (which will be publicly available to view).

In other news, I’m really far behind in my other classes and I definitely need to play catchup this week. I’ll see what I can do about phpQuote though, it would be nice to get it rolling so we can store the ALPHA quotes.