When will we have a real client?

Client work continued hard and heavy today, with two major additions going in: first, the hp/mana/movement status bar is functional. This is a bunch of progress bars, red for hp, blue for mana, and yellow for movement, that goes between the command-entry window and the main window. As you get beat up or heal, your stats update in real time, and the bars get redrawn to give a graphical representation of your current status.

A lot of this code was portable from the old client codebase, but between two different sets of library bugs on two different platforms, I ended up spending several more hours than is reasonable getting it all working. And in the end, I ended up doing a full client release with a trivially obvious bug in one of the display settings: the mana bar displays movement numbers if the client window is made wider than a certain amount.

The second thing I got working was to use the autoexit data to highlight/darken the various direction buttons. So if you're in a room with 3 exits showing, those three direction buttons will be lit. You can use the others if you want anyway (eg. to find doors by bumping into them), but if you're running from something or exploring, this should help.

The surprising thing about the autoexit buttons is how ugly they are. The display is just plain ugly, and I'm not real sure why. I'll have to poke around with it a bit more and see what else I can do with it.

I looked a little at the scrolling issue listed in the previous post, but it's entirely unclear to me how you would hook such an event with this library. I'm also pretty well stuck on the accessibility functions. Unfortunately, noone makes howtos for something this specific.

Tomorrow, other things permitting, I'm going to try to get new style automaps working. That should be fun, and probably overly ambitious: I have enough bug fixes and miscellaneous cleanup to probably consume the day already, and web page work is starting to fall behind.

For web pages, I have a large number of directions for the blind maps project, and an event report from christmas which needs to be put up.

This would be easier if I could fork copies of myself.