AccessMUD developer's log

[murray83]

OMG just been given a link to this as im attempting something akin to this mine is more of a text based point and click and so far its no where near as good as your's

keep it up and good luck, cant wait to see and play the finished version

 

[Aeristan]

@Mark_ @murray83 Yes, I would like help, and to work with others to complete this! I'll send you friend requests. I'm not sure how that could work -- but I guess that's part of what I'm going to school to learn.

Summer semester starts next week. I have to force myself to focus on Accounting and Business Management for 8 weeks.

 

[Aeristan]

Hello everyone!

It's been 10 months since I have posted here, and six since I have worked on my AccessMUD project. I got involved with other hobbies and projects and I was really afraid that this had faded into memory like so many other endeavors. I am very pleased to say that I was able to pick it back up where I had left off with a minimum of learning curve.

I also wanted to share something I finally got to work: Reciprocal Directions.

I want to begin editing the world data now, and the Forms are the tools I need to do that. In order to make the mapping process efficient and error-free, I need a way to put together the Locations more intuitively.

When the large Reciprocal Directions box is checked (which it is by default), then whenever I create a passageway that links this Location to another along one of the twelve defined directions, the software will automatically create a similar passageway in the destination Location, which leads in the opposite direction back to the current Location. If I delete the passageway, the corresponding passageway in the second Location is also deleted. And if I change one passage to a different destination, then both occur: the old passage back is cleared and the new destination will have the return passage created. (If one-way passages are desired, simply uncheck Reciprocal Directions. These will be uncommon.)

This was made more complicated by the fact that the MAP subform is bound to a temporary table, which contains only the records from the MAP table pertaining to this Location, LEFT JOINed onto the DIRECTIONS table. Any time I am messing around with data that can affect multiple Locations at once, I want to make certain that the changes are correct before I commit to them. When the Update button is clicked, the MAP table is updated with the changes I have made (including the ones to other Locations using Reciprocal Directions). Because MAP is nothing more than an association table with LocationID and Direction forming a compound primary key, any entry in the table represents an existing passage; deleted passages must be removed entirely, not simply set to Null.

The directions themselves are not hard-coded; they are entered into a look-up table. (One could go "in" or "out" of an extradimensional space, or maybe a vehicle.) I chose twelve because I didn't think anyone would need more than that. Changing the number or names of the directions is as easy as editing the values of this table, although since I turned off the scrollbar of the subform, one could not edit more than twelve directions using this form.

In the Fall, once the college (hopefully) re-opens, I will be taking a Web Database Integration class. This sounds like a lot of fun because I will finally be learning some server-side stuff. Certainly whatever semester project we get to choose will have to do with this!

Note: currently, the fields for Length, Width, and Height are not implemented. AccessMUD consists of logical Locations linked by directions without any sense of distance. I placed these here because I suspect I will need them to handle ranged vs. melee combat some day, but I don't know how that will work. For now, they mean nothing.