Coding thoughts

[ichijo_akari]

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I've been a lead programmer at Obsidian for some months now, maintaining the ongoing support for NWN2 that we released last year. Sometimes I found myself wondering why it was I couldn't seem to get a grasp of every part of the NWN2 engine. Being unable to comprehend every aspect of the engine has been

Comments

[ichijo_akari]

Thanks for the good thoughts. :)

The problem with making a MU* client is that to be honest, Beip does just about anything I'd want in a MU* client, so I can't really see the point of starting one from scratch. Back when Beip's programmer was actively working on it, I'd bug him to put in just about any bell or whistle I could think of wanting and I think I got just about all of those.

One idea I'm semi-considering is a small plugin for Beip that would be an external GUI for parsing and displaying the Combat System feedback on MotM which I just recently joined. But I'll have to evaluate my interest in the place in the long term before I start on something like that. But when I was getting the tutorial on the combat system, I had to dig through several screens worth of spam to pick my reaction/action for each turn, and in the process, often missed other text in the window, like poses, pages, etc. So some little popup window to the side of Beip that parsed that stuff for me would probably be something I'd enjoy using myself even if no one else cared. :P

I'm also leaning toward doing a 'final pass' on Proto, just so I can get a version that I'm comfortable with that prunes out or minimalizes some of the whacked changes that have been made to it.

[rika]

Wow, even you're on MotM now? That kicks the place back into a
"I have to seriously consider this again." spot in my mind. Just
wish my previous concerns about it weren't still viable. x.x

Being able to actually RP again with you might be worth compromising
some of my comfort for though.

Yeah though, I almost mentioned Beip because of that. I tend to
agree, but for me, even though Beip has the features I want, a lot
of them aren't neccesarily implimented in a way I like or would do
myself. I was also thinking that knowing the netcode as well as you
do, you could pretty much get one optimized for performance like
few are. Even beip has some annoying hiccups now and then. =P

The "Akari Special" remix of Proto would be cool to see though.
I was trying to think of something non-mu* related that you might
find fun, but really nowadays...it seems like everyone's done
everything. o.o It sure ain't like the old shareware days, where
you could write anything and people would be impressed enough to
send you cash for it.

Though depending on the scale, you might consult Duro down there
on his needs for something that facilitates tabletop RP online.
That site I found seems to do that, but since I haven't P&P'd
since high school, I'm a lot out of the loop for what anyone
would actually need that sort of thing to do. If it didn't turn
out too ambitious, that might make an interesting diversion too.

[ichijo_akari]

Yeah, I was going to post my thoughts on MotM, why I decided to join it, and what my initial impression is of it. But I figured that would be a longer post, so went with the above post for this mornng, with the MotM post to come tonight probably. :)

[davin]

I'd been interested in writing one from scratch based on wxWidgets, actually. Something that leverages MCP in useful ways, or hell, even supports MCP other than Trebuchet. (nobody uses it) Part of the appeal to MCP is the ability to do some clientside parsing tricks like Pueblo would, without anyone who knows Pueblo code being able to force your client to play obscenities like duckjob.wav because they're bored (since only the game itself can trigger MCP because of the pre-shared key). ...Not that I've ever done that to anyone or anything. Nope. Definitely not me. *cough*

Mostly it'd be an opportunity to get fully broken in to C++. I'm still a script guy for the most part sadly, but I'm finally getting to the point where I'm ready to tackle some of the lower level data structures at long last.

Something to think about if you think you can stomach a n00b.