[BMA] I may restart development of my variant

Issues, news, and discussion specific to any other servers.
Post Reply
Berendol
Evil Iggy
Posts: 868
Joined: Mon 11.11.2002, 19:13
Location: Loot Pile
Contact:

[BMA] I may restart development of my variant

Post by Berendol » Fri 19.01.2007, 20:06

I've been having a lot of fun talking about improvements to the game and weighing balances lately. I really want to get started coding again in the near future... possibly as soon as next week.<br><br>However there is one minor problem: I don't have a server, and some of my hardware is too new for even Gentoo Linux to work with properly, so all of my work will go into the client until I have a server.<br><br>So here are some of my ideas for the client and I think it should be just a few hours of work.<br>* Logging of chat and/or messages<br>* Alterable keyboard layout or new layout for laptop users - entirely client-side<br>* Recreate my lost code for the Windows BCLIENT.<br>* Better party handling (details still fuzzy)<br><br>I've had an offer for a free computer that would work well as a server but I need to finalize my own living arrangements and actually get a worthy connection before I set up a server.<br><br>More on this at some point next week.
By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property. (Voltaire)

Berendol
Evil Iggy
Posts: 868
Joined: Mon 11.11.2002, 19:13
Location: Loot Pile
Contact:

Re: I may restart development of my variant

Post by Berendol » Fri 16.02.2007, 15:28

It's been about a month. It's status update time, and I'll give the bad news first.

The bad news: I can't compile the client on VC++2005. So, I will defer work on the Windows client until I come up with a better solution. I may resort to using Cygwin and forcing my users to get a copy of the Cygwin DLL. If my client winds up being significantly better than the alternatives, and that's not certain, then maybe it'll be worth while.

The good news: Since I discovered VMWare's free Player, I have been running Ubuntu Linux in the background and thus can do Linux server development :) AND wow, does it work great. I have totally new Makefiles that make common tasks a lot easier (you can make clean from the top level, for example), and some diff/archive utilities. Also I've been busy cleaning up the code such that it compiles without messages with "-Wall -Wunreachable-code -Wundef -pedantic -std=gnu99 -O0 -pipe -x c -g -ggdb" :)  I hope to clear up warnings from -Wextra -Wshadow -Wredundant-decls -Wconversion by some time next week. New features so far include... Level feelings, better town generation, larger houses, better house pricing, ownable log cabins, wooden castles with moats, reworked wilderness monsters/difficulties, ability to run by water, ability to run when a monster is in the room, regenerating wilderness levels (farms, inhabited houses, etc). I removed most of the remaining artifact code and removed support for 286, Acorn, Amiga, DOS, pre-OS/X Macintosh, and VM/ESA. I'm also removing old, dead code that has no function and code which I can't support. The old Sun support is staying in as an experimental feature, mostly because it doesn't make things much more complicated. There is a new configuration option so you don't have to recompile if you want to enable/disable ghost diving, and the config file can now be saved by a Windows editor without breaking. And finally, your server's configuration is printed to the screen/log when the server initializes.

Current savefiles will NOT be compatible with this new version.

I will make a release very soon, hopefully!
By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property. (Voltaire)

Berendol
Evil Iggy
Posts: 868
Joined: Mon 11.11.2002, 19:13
Location: Loot Pile
Contact:

Development of my variant

Post by Berendol » Wed 14.03.2007, 00:30

As a bit of a prelude to my upcoming release, I have put together a simpler website for all of my stuff.

Behold, my Angband Loot Pile.

Things of special note:
  • BMAngband source archives, client binaries and changelogs spanning several versions
  • My utilities
  • A new utility called "RogueWorld" for editing vaults
My biggest chore right now is comparing the state of my code right now with the 6.4.4 code, and making a useful changelog. I should probably look into a version control system... leaning towards SVN.
By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property. (Voltaire)

Billsey
King Vampire
Posts: 272
Joined: Sun 12.02.2006, 14:36
Location: Oregon, USA
Contact:

Re: I may restart development of my variant

Post by Billsey » Fri 16.03.2007, 10:51

Why not setup a project on SourceForge with your stuff?
Mangband Project Team Member

Post Reply