I added NPCs with heartbeats, adjusted the command handling a bit to account for exits a bit better and fixed a bunch of little things. I'll probably build a list of things I want to do which will probably hinge around adding new things to the world.
Well, I haven't touched Lyntin in the last week because I've been busy doing that work and that holiday thing. But now the plan is to go through all of the Lyntin-devl email, look for issues I missed, toss them all in one big todo list, and adjust the roadmap accordingly. Depending on how that goes, I'll be releasing Lyntin 3.0 in the next few days.
It's been a really long road (14 months or so now) and it'll be nice to finish it and get it out the door.
So I was putzing around overhauling old Varium code which I haven't really touched in a couple of years when it occurred to me that the code I'm overhauling involves features I don't really care about--at least not at this stage of the game. This sudden realization caused me to re-evaluate what I was doing and take a new approach.
I took the testserver I wrote for Lyntin and expanded it into a series of modules and 1300 lines of code later I now have a working mud that has multiple rooms, heartbeats, multiple players, and a series of other things. More importantly, it gives me a good base to add on new features as I need them--giving me time to architect things as I go along rather than doing the whole thing up front.
I need to do a few more things before it has enough of a a critical mass to be interesting.
I bumped into a full explanation of escape codes in xterms and it occurred to me that I could set the title bar of the xterm session and thus have a non-moving status bar of sorts in the textui. I spent 5 minutes slapping together a module that sets the title bar for the textui (if you're using an xterm) and the tkui with name/value pairs that you set using the #setstatus command.
Link to said module is here.
Incidentally, the ability to whip together additional functionality like this in such a short period of time is what makes Lyntin such a powerful mud client.
Just did some additional edits to the hooks which fix some potential race condition problems between when Lyntin core hooks get instantiated and when they get registered with the HookManager.
Left to do:
After talking to Josh for a bit, we decided that we should overhaul hooks a bit before putting out 3.0. The reasons for this are mostly that the existing hook system didn't allow module developers to build hooks easily and have those hooks referenceable by other modules written by other developers.
I just finished coding up the HookManager class which holds registered hooks. Hooks can now be retrieved via the old method (accessing the Hook directly) or alternatively through the exported module which talks to the HookManager which knows about all registered hooks. I spent some time overhauling the existing Lyntin code to account for this adjustment and it's working nicely so far.
Hopefully this is the last big issue to solve before 3.0. It needs to sit and cook for a bit, though, so this will push the 3.0 release off at least a week--possibly more.
We had this idea to overhaul the logging functionality so that it's in a manager just like most of the other functionality. I just finished this up tonight. I'm tossing around other arguments you would want to pass on the command line--haven't gotten there yet.
The next big issues:
So I have this program that I wrote in C and then re-wrote in Perl that I've been running for some time. I just re-wrote it in Python. I feel kind of funny re-writing the same thing over and over again in my new favorite language, but the issue is that I've forgotten large portions of the old favorite languages and it takes a while for me to remember how to do things so I can fix new issues I've found.
There isn't much progress on Stringbean yet. I do want to re-tackle it when Lyntin 3.0 is released and development dies down to a slow murmer. The first thing I'm going to do is overhaul all the Varium code and include a lot of the changes that I made for Bluemud (ansi parsing, word wrapping, ...). Then build an online tavern from that. It's not going to be much of an adventure mud from the beginning--I just want somewhere I can hang out with cool people (online).
I was looking to release 3.0 this week, but I'm going to re-write the ticker functionality and the logging functionality so they're both managers. I also want to investigate decoupling hooks from the hooks module or at least provide some registration mechanism so that module writers can create their own hooks and access hooks written by other module writers.
I also want to review all the mailing-list archives for things I intended to do, but then didn't do as well as Sebastian's emails to see what ideas he had that are now appropriate to do.