VB Avatar:I've persuaded the 3D OXO game to work stand alone. Once we have a parser it will work properly! Also the colour subroutines are in and working! Whoo!

VB Avatar:
I've got multi connection ability and an exceedingly basic parser. QW sort of works. Its enough to show me I'm not totally barking up the wrong tree anyhow. My main concerns about using VB is the parser & dictionaries. Between them they are -the- most used areas of the system and as a result need to be really quick!
I've chosen to use VB to do this conversion as there's over 100,000 lines of code to change and its a lot simpler for me to use VB instead of re-writing from scratch in C++ which I don't understand too well. I -really wish- Vick had documented his code more, the stuff in basic is ok, but I've almost got no idea what's happening with the Parser and much of the Dictionary handler! Oh well, I suppose it will keep me busy! Once the parser is done it will be quite a simple (hah!) job to convert the rest of the stuff.
Using VB will also allow me to increase all the limits (depending on the JET engine), More rooms, more puzzle and more Objects make for a bigger 'n' better game! Whoo! I've also had ideas on how to create persistent objects on the game (that is objects that are reasonably unique) so we will be able to get away from the 'when one object breaks, they all break' thing we have at the moment. We'll also be able to do some cool things like randomly generating some of the object stats when its instanced! I'm not sure about containers yet though, it could be even more complicated!
The other thing I'd like to do is make the monsters more like Players in stats, spellcasting , armour and weapons ability. Needless to say, this is quite a way down the road yet, and needs quite a lot of work to implement. As its stands, its difficult to work out how tough a monster will be when you create it, especially spellcasters.

Problems Galore! The test server has been off line and will be so until I can find tome to do something about it. I'm getting really hacked off with the flakyness of the sockets layer and i'm also concerned about possible hardware problems on the Test Server. As a result of this frustration i've also made a basic start on moving Avatar from the Acorn platform over to Windows. The Risc PC is a lovely machine but the development environment really sucks!

This is just an update of these web pages. I've also fixed the Adult God board to prevent it displaying directors on the normal godling board. This is currently only on my test system, I'll have to up load it to the main Test server at some point (when I'm brave enough to do it!).

Here we go again! Test Avatar Mk2. We installed the new server drives on Wednesday 3rd, long with a newer version of the software (including a hopefully more stable error handler). With the new drives and a different IDE controller, super lethargy only takes about 1 min between chucking off players and rebooting. The Reboot server is now functional. The actual installation of the caddies was pretty simple. What was not was the software change to allow the server to simply have its hard drives swapped and re-booted!
Oh well. We shall see now if this machine lasts any longer.
I've also done an update to the frame here on the left. Its now an imagemap, so tell me if it does not work! Please!

Had a phone call today from the supplier saying that the 3 caddies and final hard disk is now ready for me to collect. This means that over the next few weeks I'll setup the drives and take a hacksaw to my RiscPC (Scream) and install one of the caddies in that. The other 2 will go into the machine that's currently sitting at JCC with drive errors. I want to make sure I can cut the holes correctly before I do anything else though! I've not had much time to be able to do any Avatar coding so far (paid work has a higher priority unfortunately), but I hope to be able to finish off the remote rebooter and check the socket code on the AvaNet engine side in the next couple of weeks... You never know, AvaNet might be running before easter (grin)!

Happy New Year!
I've got 2 of the 3 hard disks I've ordered and am still waiting for the 3rd drive and the 3 caddies to make the server simpler to change over. Once they have arrived I'll take a trip down to JCC and set up the test server again, along with the latest and greatest version of the code. What a waste of 2Gb!! The whole of Avatar takes up 109Mb and that includes about 2 copies of the rooms and accounts along with 18 older versions of Avatar! Sheesh. I'm almost the size of Win 95! Hehe.
I've done some coding on the remote rebooter - Look at the what's new section.