Current JediMUD and Version 6.0

[Austinpowers]

Hi Everyone,
As you know, we are having socket issues. There are some other annoying bugs as well going on. We have identified junk skin, prompts, weight, and socket calls. I will give some sort of an update, before TJ starts to question the theory of evolution.

Over the years, we had several coders which had their way of doing things. Nothing was well organized, but the game kept going. People complain about not seeing the admin, but what you DO NOT know is how much behind the scenes they do.

Doc and I are cleaning up the directories, reorganizing things, an archiving the older files on the game box. Doc is also organizing world changes, keeping the game box up and working.

Kailyn monitors everything in sylogs, world updates, text file updates, and keeps us all thinking out side the box.

Silverking has been setting up the websites and helping Doc move the current website off to a managed SITE. he also maintains our 6.1 tracking website. he will also help me keep current backups of both the current active code and the 6.0 code.

Ego is the Asst. world coordinator, as well as assisting with Quests. He is also assiting with my Statue to get my long awaited item

While no official role, Agony, Sykes, despair, otherwise known to us as Tom, is currently handling Quests. I am personally helping him with approval of items now.

Ching, is quite busy at the moment. I would say Ching is our Jack of all trades here.


I wanted to share this, because all I hear lately is about no one doing anything.

As you all know I am always on in the evenings. I try to keep a presence and allow everyone to talk to the coder. I believe in this whole heartily. I also believe in an open book policy, if there is an issue, i will let everyone know. If I see someone take advantaged of this, not only will I warn, but I will freeze after that warning. I have the same policy where I work, and if you piss me off, I do the same thing, I escalate up to mgmt and since I log everything, I give the facts straight to the people that make the decisions.


So what am i doing with the in game issues. I am in the middle of removing global buffers. So far in 8 files, I have done 12k+ lines of code. I converted the communication aka SEND_TO_CHAR, SEND_TO_ROOM, SEND_TO_XXXX (blah blah) to use VA args. This is the standard for Circlemud currently. As I remove the global buffers, I am also removing the sprintf calls and just combining them to send_to_xxxx calls. I also did this with logging, because I was sick of seeing the same GCC warning errors.

The game loop has been updated to the current Circlemud standard, and has the 6.0 code in it! This also allowed me to move the 6.0 prompt code over as well and 6.0 color parsing.

Once I see the game stable for a few weeks again, then I will push more out. This will go on until the unvail of the full 6.0 game code.

What will change. Color will now be ON of OFF. This is all under the hood changes. It made sense to start moving 6.0 code over, so people got used to changes as I could push them.

I wish people could see how much there really is involved with the code. I have completed 12k+ lines of code in 15 hours of work. I have moved over the game loop code, the prompt code, and color codes.

Please feel free to reach out to the admin or myself at [e-mail] or [e-mail]

i will be glad to answer any questions or issues that you might be encountering. Stupid questions get stupid answers. intelligent questions get intelligent answers. If I get RANT emails, i will just share with the admin and delete.

Have a great week all!


OH if you see the socket issues, please email me. I will log in from my smart phone and reboot the port. Thanks for your understanding as we try to grow and improve the game.

AP

[monkichi]

Thanks for the update AP! I for one certainly appreciate all your hard work and dedication and I'm sure I'm not alone. When some serious bugs were identified and brought to your attention, you did the right thing and took the game down for maintenance, sacrificing your time and energies to fix the game that we all love. You worked straight through the weekend and got the game up as soon as possible for our enjoyment when you fixed what needed fixing and when you realized that the rest of whatever needed doing could be done while the game was up. That shows you care not just about the game and the code, but about the players as well.

Keep up the great work and take a night off for yourself once in a while! (i know, I know, you won't stop until everything is good or you drop dead at your keyboard...)

[Austinpowers]

Hi Everyone!
As everyone knows, I am quite frustrated with what transpired the past month. I am a big believe in things happen for a reason, I realized this is very TRUE! Someone pointed out to me that this happened to force me to put more of 6.0 in.

As I did one thing, it required another thing, and so on.... hence why I back tracked the code last week, so I could concentrate on that.

Since I started, I took what I could of 6.0 and started updating the ridiculously old formats we had. Global buffers had to go, and once I realized this was gigantic in itself. I just started pulling all the 6.0 code I could over and modifying it using the current formats I have.


I am not updating the databases, or moving over to ASCII code yet. I kept the fight system and magic system as is.

I am going to call this version 5.8.

It makes even more sense so the players can see and adjust as we move out 6.0.

5.9 will add the new menu system, and introduce the new loaders, and finally 6.0 will add all the fight system, magic system.

It wont be much longer before I ask for testers

AP

[hawkeyex]

Just ask, and ye shall receive.

[Austinpowers]

Just an update for all. I have converted all the *.h files, act.h, comm.h, constants.h, ban.h, sysdep.h, conf.h (all new), db.h, structs.h, utils.h, handler.h (all made to the 6.0 format and allows for backwards compatibility.

Files converted so far:
act.comm.c
act.obj1.c/act.obj2.c => act.item.c
act.informative.c
act.social.c
act.movement.c
act.wizard.c
act.other.c
act.offensive.c
adl.c
ban.c
constants.c
alias.c
assemble.c
boards.c


As you can see, that's 25 files I have updated. It has been fun, you can catch all the different coders and what they did. I hope to have this done over the weekend.

What I have done is move us towards JediMUD 6.0. Remove global buffers, move all the structures and MACRO calls over to the 6.0 format. It is far easier to change the MACRO then change all the individual calls to a function.

I have converted comm.c (game loop and communications) over to the new format. WAIT STATES are now in 6.0 format, all old syslogs over to mudlog, all communications over to use VA_ARGS.

You might ask what does that mean VA_ARGS; well instead of pushing everything to a buffer:
sprintf(buffer, "What the hell are u talking about %s", GET_NAME(char))
send_to_char(buffer, char)...


I have converted it to send_to_char(char, "What the hell are u talking about %s", GET_NAME(char))

Do you see the big difference? Its 1 line, instead of 2, it uses VA_ARGS to push out to the communication call (send_to_char).

Now imagine that fact it was combined with global buffers? For us in the code world that means memory leaks galour!

I did this for all 12 communication calls we had, and converted them through the 50+ files we had.

None of the database loaders (aka characters, aliases, rent files, world files) are touched. I will do that for 5.9 release....

I just wanted to give everyone an update where I was...

Oh and btw, I have had Strep throat this past week, so it was even harder to do, and why I was not so visible the past few days.

AP