MishMash

A quick note - I built up a Muds and Mudding lens over at Squidoo. Squidoo is one of those new things which I don't entirely understand, like I don't understand Facebook or Myspace. But other people do, so perhaps it's not such a bad idea. The url is:

http://www.squidoo.com/mudding

I've been thinking about and doing a bit of work on the client recently. One of the newer changes was the addition of an enemy hitpoint bar; the current release client has this bar between the automap and the buttons. I moved it to be in the regular prompt bar, and this serves to make the screen a lot less 'busy'.

All this has got me thinking about what to do next. I really should allow for an unhooked/floating automap, so users can position it wherever they want. I've also been thinking about having a sort of 'list window' where people can perform actions on list items, such as looking in containers, getting things from containers, etc.

Until recently, the mechanics of how to do this in the code have been somewhat questionable. As usual, talking to my girlfriend about it generated a solution: uuid strings for objects and characters, that you can always use to get an exact command reference to that object or character.

I started on the first stage of this process last night, with infrastructure. The game has had a really, really bad PRNG for years; I threw something together with basically no experience about ten years ago and we've been using it ever since. Looking at the code, I'm actually somewhat surprised it didn't cause a lot of visible trouble over the years.

We now have a brand new, 10-register lagged fibbonacci PRNG driving the game. Not only is it faster, but it actually produces reasonably high quality random numbers to drive the game mechanics. Using this, im now generating proper UUIDs that I can have some amount of confidence in.

The list window however I'm less sure about. I suspect this needs a proper design.