Late morning

My mother woke my up with a phone call att 11:30, so I had a long restful sleep.

A quick breakfast and back to coding. I checked some more of my old quest and decided on what changes to make. Now I only need to figure out exactly how.

It is a part where you should show that you know what you are up against later in the quest, but unfortunately that part was non-random. In an attempt to make a quick-and-dirty fix to introduce more randomness, the maintainers of the MUD used my planted red herring. Better than nothing, but I feel it has to go so I made a history test. The questions are there, now all I need to do is get the mechanics working, get approval to introduce the changes to the game and then get on with the rest of the work.

About two effective hours.

Back to basics

Took some time off from the project. Some thinking done on simplifying the weather simulation to a point where it no longer is a simulation. The reason is that it will not add that much to the playing experience.

Today I went through parts of my area, checking it with fresh eyes after these years not seeing it. Found and fixed 3-4 bugs. Got ideas for changes I need to make before I get back to expanding the area.

Estimated time: 4 hours

Time estimates

Been doing some rethinking of the weather simulation, it shuld actually change during the day. Faster changes (colder night, warmer days) if there is no clouds.

Estimates on hur much time I put into this:

Saturday:
coding/experimentation: 2 hours
Sunday:
documentation/prestudy: 8 hours (aka maps)
coding/production: 2 hours
Monday:
coding/production: 2 hours
documentation/prestudy: 4 hours
Tuesday:
coding 4 hours
Wednesday:
coding/production: 3 hours
Thursday:
codin/experimentation: 1 hour
documentation/blogging: 3 hours

Welcome to the Future

Previous entries are all fake.

I started the blog today.

I also thought of another, more complicated, way to implement the weather system using deltas that are applied daily. Randomize these and on top of that add weather anomalies to get some nice, smooth, weather transitions.

Started looking at the weather simulator and write it in Python. Decided to scrap the new, more complex, system as soon as I started filling in data for the simulator.

Most of the non-working day spent either in front of Discovery Channel or at work, so non-producive from the point of view of this project.

Unless you consider this blog a project in itself, then it was highly productive work of documentation.

Tomorrow is Friday, once I have checked for available jobs I should get back to coding.

Even more weather

Long day at work (full 8 hours).

But before I got there, I more or lesse finished the weather daemon. There are now weather anomalies moving around (and varying their strength) on the map.

Left to do:

Snowcover will be handled, as well as the global weather rooms windspeed, athmosphere (i.e. clouds), temperature and rainfall.

My weather system also is more fine grained than the global one (I use values 0..99 for all ranges instead of the 3 or 4 used in the global system), but I am not sure if I will let this show through in the room descriptions.

If a room has asked for it's weather and is still loaded, it should be notified about changes.
Make the daemon use the tick function of the global time daemon.

Might do:
Run a simulation written in C (outside the MUD) so see just how the weather will behave.


This sure is fun.

Weather system is moving

Basic weather is done, I incidentally created an area tester that will find any rooms in an area that do not have working exits. I did this because I do not want to hand edit the weather deamon to include the locations that should be affected by weather.

I also have a cache in the weather deamon that keeps track of what rooms are loaded, this does not affect the weather daemon really but helps reduce system load. The weather will work no matter when a room is loaded or cleaned up.

But there is still much work to get all these features working flawlessly, and I will probably do some redesigning on the way. More than once.

Monday, coding starts in earnest

Monday, had to work evening, as usual. Watched Arrested Development and Myth Busters after work.

But I had the whole day off, so I started planning och coding some of the wather daemon. Just before having to get to work I got a Heureka moment and realized why the default time room did not have changing descriptions. Looks like I will have to do all those myself, which is not necessarily a bad thing as it will be integrated in the decription and not an obivously added on line of text.

Status: Weather deamon planned, most of the design is in my head, some coding left.