vbMUDdotNET / News: Recent posts

I would like to welcome Dan and Noah on as developers on this project.

Dan has a good imagination and a strong sense of database mechanics. I hope that he will be able to strongly assist in the development of the Universe Generation and Development Application that will shape the world(s) that the MUD server can utilize.

Noah has a strong coding background and I hope he can make headway intot he core server components that handle communications.

I recently uploaded a new fork of the original code. I have reoslved a lot of issues in the communications classes and I think I have established a good framework for moving forward. Ther eis still an incredible amount of work to be done but I hope that strong developers with an interest in helping will become involved.

With work and such, I have had to scale back this project a bit. More to come soon, though. I promise!

More work to clsMovement has been done and I hope it is the last for a little while. The restriction and sign matching code has been implemented with database lookups to get the failure messages to send to the client. While this may not seem like much, it is/was the last piece that had not been implemented that I wanted to be there for the initial release. I hope now that I can focus on completing the table structures to allow the clsMovement and clsLook classes to work properly. once that is done, I can move back and forth between tweaking the table designs and building the zone/world/map editor. Once that is complete, the visual classes \(such as clsLook\) will need to be revisited to enable them to pull the complete set of objects for a given room or entity. Still much to do, but it is coming along. I am just glad that I am able to kee this project far more active than many of the other initiatives I have seen both on the web and on SourceForge more specifically. I still have hope that someone will happen across this and be inspired to join this project. I am all for speeding up, enhancing, and expanding this project and encourage anyone who feels the same way and has sufficient knowledge to contribute to contact me.
Thanks\!
Matt Ray

This morning I was reviewing the processes involved in moving a character around the world. Not much had been done in the way of database planning except that I intended to keep the basic structures I have used in the past. I decided to start resketching the laytou for the tables in an attempt to eliminate multi-record recordsets. Why? Well, it would increase code efficiency, make world/object editors easier to use and code, and reduce calls to the database (which will become a little more important as connection volume increases). So, I have changed some of the structures around. Specifically, the restriction values for rooms and objects (including obstacles) have been moved to a coded string format. What this means is that there is a reduction to one base record per object/room/etc and a field will be available that will hold a concatenated list of name and value pairs in a format similar to: "exitDirection=N;connRoomID=123;obstacleID=332;obstacleID=2121". One interesting side-effect that I found quite pleasing is that you would then have the OPTION to stack multiple obstacles for a given direction. Off the top of my head, I would liken this to someone wanting to recreate Alice in Wonderland style of doorways with 12 increasingly smaller doors you must open before you can go through to the next room. This might also make someone have to move several boulders to clear a path and many other scenarios start to come into play.
In addition to this, I have started working on some of the table structures within mySQL on my local machine. I intend to keep my table structures available in the zip files in the near future in the form of SQL script files. Well, that is all for now!

I have been kicking around the idea of doing this project with a few other people for some time. Recently I decided to take a look for another available code base that was written in VB.NET and had a ard time finding one. I found a couple of places claiming to be working on one, but I never could locate source code that had been worked on. I found some projects that were writing it in VB6. While this is certainly feasible (and was the original scope of the project), I think it serves the community better to use the modern implementation of the VB language. This is further underscored by the projects underway to port the CLR and some compilers to other platforms such as Mac OS X, Linux, and others. With that, the apps that we are writing to target the Win32 platform now may eventually be ported to other platforms with a minimum number of modifications.
I certainly encourage any constructive ciriticism and/or contributions to this project and hope that more people will become involved and help this grow and mature into a viable and well developed code base.