I’ve had a busy night tonight working on the Mud Designer, and I’m not quiet sure where to start. I think I’ll start with the projects new site over at CodePlex. It’s been setup and is running pretty nice. I got the home page configured, setup the Discussions and Documentation tabs and finally created a 'Help Wanted’ ad, which it must be a new feature to CodePlex as I don’t remember it having that back when I was working on the Mud Creator. I requested help with the Networking side of the designer along with assistance in writing the documentation for the project. I also noted under the Documentation the requirements needed for downloading the source and compiling it.
Next up is the File Type Backend, which is a pretty clever idea that I ran across while browsing the web tonight. The engine contains an XmlSerialization class that saved and loaded all of the designers files to XML. Nice right? What happens though, if I wanted to offer SQL support? How about adding support for a scripting language? Saving and Loading of the files will need to be changed, and it will need to be changed across every editor within the designer. That would be a pretty big pain to mess with, and as I’ve mentioned several times already, I’m wanting to keep the code for the designer and its editors simple and clean. So how do I fix this situation? I created a backend class called FileSystem. The editors now call Save and Load from the FileSystem class at which point the FileSystem checks to see what File Type the project is using, XML, SQL ect., and calls the class necessary for saving it in that file type. For now I only have support for XML serialization, but if I offer SQL the editors wont know any different. They’ll continue to call FileSystem.Save() and the FileSystem class will handle switching between XmlSerialization.Save and SQLData.Save. One location to make the adjustments and that' saves a lot of headache.
I’ve done a lot of work to the Project Manager and the MUD Engine and it’s starting to make some headway. One of the most notable changes would be the finishing of the Project Manager and changing the Zone class to inherit from Realm and Rooms to now inherit from Zones. This allows me to create default properties such as Name and Description within the Realm class, and all Zones and Rooms will have the same property. No re-duplicate coding required.
What’s next, I guess I can begin working on the currency editor, and better refining how the engine will handle the currency.
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