MUDs

I'm very excited about this latest bit of code and data that I checked in today. I fixed the stats so that they load a template from whatever gaming system is currently setup to run. First let me enumerate the systems that I tested with today:

• Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Quick Start
• GURPS Lite - Generic system, can literally run any genre
• PathFinder - D&D 3rd edition clone
• ShadowRun - Magic and SciFi together
• The Artifact - Science Fiction
• Warrior, Rogue, and Mage - Very simple fantasy system

I got the stats loading for each one. Here are screen captures for each:

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Quick Start

GURPS Lite

PathFinder

ShadowRun 3rd Edition

The Artifact

Warrior, Rogue, and Mage

As you can see, I have the stats for all of these 5 gaming systems loading. It was relatively painless to do this. It took me about 15 minutes per new gaming system to get the stats up and running. Here are the steps:

1. Navigate to the Files\GameRules directory
2. Create a directory to hold your new game system's content
3. Create a Data and Parsers directories under this root directory
4. Create a XML file to hold the stat information, and put it in the Data directory
5. Create a C# parser file, and put it in the Parsers directory
6. Create a master xml file and place it in the Files\GameRules directory
7. Adjust the contents of the master file to point to the root game directory
8. Modify the mud.config file for the new system

Here's a screen capture of the region of the mud.config file that we need to change:

The values above will run The Artifact rules. The most important key here is "masterfile" that will tell WheelMUD which system to pick up. The "currentruleset" value is a human readable label that will be used in WheelMUD for admins and builders.

My main push behind this, is so that I can start figuring out how to do basic combat. I really want to get the core systems working ASAP. I will be moving a lot of stuff off the 0.5 task list, so that we can concentrate on core stuff. The first casualty will be the remote admin stuff. That's just distracting me completing the core systems, which is what we all want to get done.

I've been racking my brain to get Exits to be more programmer friendly. The answer just hit me, and I wanted do a brain dump, so that I don't lose this idea while it is still fresh in my mind.

Here are the two main memes that I had:

• Instead of ExitA and ExitB, rename them to ExitTo and ExitFrom
• Use something like the mediator pattern to deal with things like doors

The first one is so obvious that it gives me physical pain. I have no idea why something so simple didn't surface before. Must be that I was tired every time I looked at this issue. I still think that Foxedup original idea is pretty good, and these semantic changes will make it much easier to deal with.

The second meme is not so easy to explain. I've been studying design patterns in C# for some obstacles and research that I've been doing for the last 3 weeks. The mediator pattern jumped at me, because it could help decouple the doors (and other mud objects) from the exits. I would like to include this logic into the ExitBehavior class in the future.

I think I'm finally getting used to my new work schedule. I hope that I can return to finish coding WheelMUD's 0.5 milestone soon!

I've been exploring options for people to host their own WheelMUD muds on 3rd party servers. I believe I found a viable alternative... Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, better known as Amazon EC2. Amazon just introduced a low cost, low traffic option to run Windows Server 2008 images. MUDs are low traffic applications, so their new Micro On Demand Instances are perfect for this. Their pricing is about 3 cents an hour. There's 4 regions where you can run your intances; North Virginia (East Coast), North California (West Coast), Ireland (Europe Region), and Singapore (Asia and Oceania Regions). The pricing page is here.

There's a caveat for Micro instances. Amazon does not save the data once the instance is terminated. You will need to create a volume (image of a hard drive)  in their Elastic Block Storage (EBS). The cool thing is that there is an API for all their services, which can be done from various languages, including .NET.

If anybody is interested, I'll be willing to create a tutorial on how to create one of these instances. I know that some people still think that this is way too much work. I'm exploring the posibility of creating a hosting platform specific for WheelMUD.

I just wanted to show everybody that SharpDevelop 4.0 is a good IDE to work with WheelMUD. Here are some screenshots of me running WheelMUD from SD4:

I just put up the first 1U server on the rack. I had to switch from the PowerEdge 1850 to the PowerEdge 1750, since the 1750 can't run Windows 2008, at least not easity.

The most impressive part was when I downloaded the Windows Service version of WheelMUD from CodePlex and unzipped it. I only had to double-click on the WheelMUDWindowsService.exe program to install it. I then went to the Services snapin and started it. It ran flawlessly. Now that's how software should work!

The test MUD is now up and running again.

I was finally able to put together my new system. Gotta love quad-core with 12gigs of RAM! I need a third hard drive to put all of my dev projects, but I ran out of money. Fortunately, there is an IDE 500gig drive that I can plug in, until I get a new SATA drive sometime in the next couple months. I will be installing this drive tonight.

I upgraded my CMUD to CMUD Pro last night, and wanted to give it a spin. Went and tried it on StarMUD, my favorite MUD. It is sweet on my 28" monitors! I got a couple of them. It really help my old eyes. I'll see if I can get screenshots and pictures in the next few days.

I downloaded Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and installed it into a new Windows 7 virtual image. WheelMUD compiled without errors right away. I had the zero size database issue, but a quick file copy fixed that. It just amazes me that we got WheelMUD to work this well out of the box.

My health is a bag of mixed news. On one hand my headaches are getting worse, and have them every day. The Tinnitus keeps getting louder and louder. Fortunately, I found an Ear, Nose, Throat clinic that I feel comfortable with. I've scheduled an Endoscopic Sinus surgery for the 10th of December. I will be out aproximately one week. I'm hoping that this will deal with my isolation. Any strong smell makes me very sick, so I'm basically confined to my house and work. I can't go to malls, movies, and some restaurants, because I usually end up sick for a couple days afterward. I do know that my sinuses are swollen, and have been for several years. It just gotten much, much worse. I've eliminated a lot of posibilties, so that surgery is the last resort. The good news about this is that I'm both a good candidate, and that this endoscopic sinus surgery has had a LOT of sucess since it was implemented. I avoided getting the previous type of surgery, because it was basically just a roto-tiller up the sinuses.

Anyways, I will be ramping up my activity over here soon.

I've been following the guy that took over CruiseControl.net. His blog has been extremely helpful, as a lot of what he talks about relates to WheelMUD. It's been quite instructive. I would like people that read this website to go and subscribe to his blog.

http://csut017.wordpress.com - Automated Coder's Blog

I have been very focused on our offline universe/world builder. I believe that this tool will help people, especially non programmers, see WheelMUD in action. I'm hoping to get this ready for the version 0.3 code drop.  The first version of this utility will have the following:

• Creating new MUD things (areas, rooms, exits, players, mobs, items)
• Deleting MUD things (areas, rooms, exits, players, mobs, items)
• Custom long string editor (for the propertygrid control)
• Custom room chooser (for the propertygrid control)
• Custom room exit editor (for the propertygrid control)

There are still quite a few properties that will need custom editors, but the above list should get people started with shaping their world.

Here are a couple screenshots of my latest work:

The source code for this utility is in the repository with the rest of the WheelMUD source code. The docking control, to simulate Visual Studio tear out windows, is a commercial control. This means that in order to add more tear out windows, you will have to buy it.  The creator is DivElements and the url is http://www.divelements.com/net/controls/sanddock/

I'm happy to report that WheelMUD runs just fine with .NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Windows 7. I didn't have to change one thing. That's pretty cool!