Well those 9 months went very fast and here we are its all over now.  :)  I have a beautrful baby girl and I couldn't be prouder!  She was born on Tuesday and now that its over you will see a few changes coming to MudDomain!  More to come...

Yes, this makes *5* of them now. Every last one of them I've bought in the last 2 years now is dead or dying. I've already turned the previous 4 in for warranty replacement. This one will make the 5th.

After investigating the usual causes for blue screens of death - bad drivers, incompatible software, rogue code, etc - I've come to the conclusion the drive itself is showing the same signs my servers showed before. These things manifest more subtely on Windows boxes and if I hadn't suffered so many failures before I might have missed it entirely.

So once more, Hitachi will save my behind from another big fat mess. And to think, I just put the bloody drive back into a brand new motherboard and CPU and this is the thanks I get. At least the data is still readable so I can take the drive in and use the cloning machine at work.

And again, for the love of God, nobody buy Western Digital! This is just plain stupid!

Wow what should have been a few hours of downtime turned into over a week.  Guess thats what happens when you plane major site updates in the middle of flu season. We are now running the newest version of elgg (the software powerin this site) which gives us added stability, features,and alot of bug fxes.  With the upgrade i'm sure some of my custom additions have been broken.  I've not found any errors yet if you do let me know.  I will be turning on some of the new features such as bookmarks over the next few days.

 

Thanks Again!

Wow... been awhile since I posted here.  Who would have known that buying a house and the needed to learn how to fix things around the house would take up so much time :) and put on top of that it being Christmas which is happens to coincide with the busy season where I work (thank God its not retail though :) ) and there you go no time to update this site or other similar sites I run.  But, there is good news! Elgg, the open source project that this site is based on has just released another package and this being the package I was waiting on before I rolled the updates to the site.  I'm hoping to update the site on Tuesday at that time I will take the site out of beta mode and all users to sign up with out the need for an invite.  Unless you guys prefer it this way and like the more closed community?  If that is the case I will rework the invite system, but we will see.

When it comes to coding in new features to our mud, I've pretty much stopped doing that. Instead, I've been working with Lua and scripting a lot of things or extending the mud's functions and variables into the Lua environment so they can be accessed via scripts.

 The way Lua works in the C code seemed a bit weird to me at first, but I think I've gotten my mind wrapped around it well enough now.

Using a modified version of the call_va function from the Programming in Lua book, I've been able to strip out some hard-coded things from our random equipment code and placed it into Lua scripts. This has made it much eaiser to add in new varieties of names and affects for random equipment.

I've also extended the functionality of several of the item and mob invoking functions that were provided with Nick Gammon's Lua code for SmaugFUSS. (I had to do some slight modifications to this before I started since my code was based in Smaug 1.4a.) The extended versions allow scripts to generate new items instead of copies of indexed items and new mobs in the same manner. The scripts allow for adding of flags and various other settings assciated with item or npc. I plan to use these to create more robust tasks (again, using Nick Gammon's Lua task system, which is a questing system.)

Also added was the ability to award skills to, or remove from,  a character. Compensation is given to the character in the form of practices if the skill is removed. The number of practices depends on how well that skill was learned by that character.

I've been planning to replace the whole newbie training area with a set of tutorial-like tasks to teach new players the ropes. The goal is to make a new character's experience fun as well as teach them necessary things and reward them with items, equipment or skills designed for their class (or class combinations), race and/or gender.

My next projects with Lua is to create a generic skill handler similar to the smaug_spell function, saving and loading of items and mobs, and to create virtual rooms with linked exits.

Well, I think I better get back to it. 

Yet another Western Digital drive is on its way to the grave. Yesterday out of nowhere the other server that didn't get new drives began displaying signs that it's dying. It might have shown the first early warning last month when the CPU fan was replaced. The system rebooted and locked itself in a system wide file check that uncovered numerous disk errors, but it appeared to fix itself.

Obviously that was an illusion. I came home from work to check the box and found the system throwing all sorts of bad node errors, it refused to allow logins, and had to be forced off at the power switch. The filesystem went through another forced check after booting up.

So I get to spend part of this weekend on another drive replacement. For the love of God, don't buy Western Digital! Their quality has gone down the shitter in a relatively short time. This will be my FOURTH dead drive in a year. 

Finally after months of painfully slow changes that led to more changes that led to still more changes, I've gotten past the compiler! AFKMud 2.1 will now compile clean, launch with a relatively clean log, run for as long as I want it to, and shut down without reporting leaked memory.

This just leaves having to cleanup implementation decisions that didn't go quite as planned, like making the command table into a std::map. I hadn't counted on that wiping out the ability to set command priorities. So that will need to be undone. I apparently also broke one of the basic mob keyword lookup functions and the results of that are somewhat.... strange.

All in all, after all this time, it looks like the string converson has gone remarkably well. Things certainly could have turned out much worse. Of course, this is only the first stage. I still have many classes and structs to convert, but the bulk of it is done now. 

Finally,  I'm done moving and am begining to get settled in my new house.  After a few days of no Internet I'm back online and ready to push out some site updates.  Expect to see them with in the week.  I'm sure you'll be happy with some of the changes, bugfixes, new features, and cosmetic changes to come in this release.

 

Attention Smaug Enthusiasts!

The new SmaugMuds.org site is officially open. The intention of the expanded site is to become a more generalized Smaug resource site for Smaug MUD admins, developers, builders, and players. With this effort we hope that more interest will be generated for Smaug and that the combine membership of the former AFKMud and SmaugFUSS sites will be able to interact more productively instead of splitting their time across two sites. We welcome anyone who has an interest in the Smaug family of codebases to join and bring their knowledge and experiences to the table.

The site covers Smaug, SWR, SWFOTE, AFKMud, and any other Smaug derivative you might be interested in. We have an extensive list of bugfixes for each of these codebases as well as a sizable collection of Smaug related areas, codebases, and snippets. So come on by, join the fun, and lets build the best Smaug resource site possible.

Any outstanding links to either the afkmud.com domain or the fussproject.org domain will need to be updated to point to the smaugmuds.org domain.

SmaugMuds.org - The Smaug MUDs Community Center

Spending some much needed time away from work this week. Getting some stuff done I've been putting off.

The Arthmoor servers are getting some nice new Zalman CPU coolers. Don't buy Thermaltake crap. The last *FIVE* fans I've bought from them have *ALL* blown their bearings already. After a lousy 6 months. The other blown ones were less hassle to replace because people seem to get upset when the servers are down :P

I'm finally getting off my lazy ass and going in to have my eyes checked and get some new glasses. Do you think maybe 4 years was a long enough wait? The eye doctor sure thought so when I called this morning. He booked time on less than a day's notice. How cool is that?

Going to be looking around for some new shelving to finally get all my dragon status up off the floor. Leftovers from having dismantled and replaced my old computer desks with a single new one.

If I have time after that, I need to shop for a new bed. The one I have just isn't cutting it anymore and should have been replaced a long time ago, but it may yet wait.

In between all that, I'm making some excruciatingly slow progress on converting AFKMud over to widespread use of std::string. Serious pain in the ass, that. This has taken weeks and weeks longer than I would have liked and I'm sure it's due to my rather limited knowledge of C++.