Coding stuff

[Jamus]

What does it take to code a new skill in, or add a new area or something? Does it take an hour to figure out, or a good 5 minutes?

[theobserver]

The coding time could take hours, days or weeks depending on the complexity of the skill being coded. But the hard part is the creative process of coming up with interesting,balanced skills and spells in the first place. Then there is a lot of math and simulations behind things to ensure the damage scales properly as you increase in level.

You have probarly written a seven line description for your character. Now imagine writing unique descriptions for 70 differnt rooms, 70 differnt mobs and 70 differnt items and you begin to get an idea of how much work goes into building an area.

[Jamus]

Holy crap! That would suck! Let's see, my character's description has 10 lines, and it took me about... 20 mins to get it all figured out and cool. Man. Why do you do this for free? Do you even play? Or do you you just code day and night? Props, you coders out there. Props.

[marsd]

I'd expect AR's code to be about 400,000 lines correct if I'm wrong
The hardest part about programming for a game is not skill idea/originality.. because everything is interlinked, if your singular code snippet you add in is messed up, the whole game balance can change because of that.

if you make a syntax error in C/C++/Java the compiler will not compile. that's not the case in mud... the mud'll just fail. If you make a logical error... well heh, props to you and infinite loops

[Jamus]

So, if you mess up one or two letters/numbers in a line, then the WHOLE thing will just give a big 'screw you!' and shut down?

[Sebryn]

...hence those mud crashes when Resatimm is around.

:whistling innocently:

[Andur]

If you make a syntax error in C it will not compile. GCC will let you know all about the syntax error.

If you make a bad reference (ie, invalid pointer), the code will compile, but will crash when the code is referenced.

Second correction...

While I recognize that the coders of AR have put in a large amount of work over the years with regard to new items, the base of the code came from ROM, and I think it's fair to say that without ROM, (Russ Taylor, Jason Dinkel, and the crew), a good number of muds would not be operating today. If you've ever built an area, you used OLC, which was a part of the initial ROM release. The socket code, the nanny functions, all part of the initial ROM release. So, again, not to take anything away from the work AR coders have done, but because of the lovely world of Open Source, we're able to get this work for free, and play for free.

Kudos.

[Jamus]

Exactly how many time has Resatimm screwed up the mud? Anybody? Resatimm?

Edit: Oh, and how come I was a gnome citizen, and now I'm a halfling?

[Sebryn]

Too many times to count. :haha, j/k:

As for the gnome/halfling citizen thing - that's based on your post count. I think that viewing your total posts has been disabled for some reason, but that's the reason why.

I think that once you've been here for a certain period of time (registered on the forum, that is) you can change your title to a custom one in your profile.

[Jamus]

Yeah - I noticed that. Um, in the memberlist, the total number of votes/website were switched around. Maybe it has something to do with that. Hmm.

[theobserver]

[Sebryn]

[theobserver]

Removed post count from the memberlist too.

*sticks tongue out*

[marsd]

lol. what a busy modder you've been going insane yet? Lol

[Guest]

very interesting...

[marsd]

haha actually after giving a thought, it's not difficult to remove post counts.... but it's still there, torkalen just removed that table column from the templates