Pure Java is Better Than Starbucks Coffee

I enjoy a cup of joe Starbucks like most people, but when it comes to coding Java, there ain't nothing like Intellij IDEA from JetBrains. Those people know Java and those people know IDE's. I've done a lot of coding on a lot of different platforms and I think that I come back to Java a lot when I don' t know what else to choose simply because of the quality of this piece of software.

Some of you hard core guys out there will never use an IDE because it takes too long to learn or for some other reason that escapes me now. It took me a long time to get over the hump, but now that I am, I won't go back. Features like refactoring, method extraction, integrated debugging and drag and drop GUI widget just can't be done with vi or notepad.

If you are just starting Java or some other language, by all means get out notepad and start making mistakes so you know what all of the different things in the language do, but if you know the language, try an IDE. I don't particularily like Eclipse for Java, by the way; It just doesn't have the coolness factor of IntelliJ IDEA.

Here's a screenshot of an standalone Java application that I'm working on as a tool for builders who will be working on an upcoming Sloth enhancement. Just a teaser for now, but I will have it fully functional soon.



It is a Java Swing application that I developed with a lot of drag an drop, trial and error in the IDE to get it to behave exactly like I want. It would have taken me four or five times as long to do this without and IDE or else I would have stopped short with an inferior product.

Perhaps I'm just a poor coder whom uses the IDE as a crutch, but I don't think so.

If I get a little time soon, I may even describe in some more detail what this project is if Kjartan doesn't get around to it. In any case, it will be something unique to Sloth.

Fauxnetics and Tipos

Playing a text based game is somewhat of an anomaly in today’s computer graphic intensive world. Interacting with them can be difficult at time, even when immersed in the game.

The English language is full complex spelling rules. “ph” sounds like ‘f”; “tion” sounds like “shun”; and my personal favorite the silent “e”. The Qwerty keyboard is designed to slow people down when typing which increases typos when people rush. The most commonly typed letters are moved off of he home row and the only vowel on the home row is on the left pinky; for most right handed people, their weakest finger. There are also colloquial spellings that complicate interaction. In the fantasy world, a Brit may attempt to cast a ‘colour spray’ or ‘color spray’ at his foe depending on where the thought the game creators are from.

For native English speakers it can be frustrating at times. Much of this has been made much easier by the standard and advanced features of MUD clients. But, there are still frequent situations where typing of unfamiliar things is required.

We focused some of our time at what players were typing to find help. We noticed that about 90% of all entries that didn’t return a result were misspellings. The other 10% were topics that were either not covered or just use a different reference. We corrected the latter relatively easily. The suggestion was made to correct the typos or misspellings by applying an algorithm based on phonetics.

We did a little investigation and testing and think that probably 90% of the typos will be corrected by this implementation. It’s particularly important to us because of the number of non-native English speakers we have.

As usual, this was a group effort. Kjartan came up with the suggestion, I did the coding and Splork did data gathering and testing. The coding was much harder for me than it should have been, though. I often switch languages depending on the project I working on. In this case, there isn’t much choice since the game is coded in mostly in C. For some reason I got quite confused on how C uses pass by value instead of pass by reference. Specifically, I wasted several hours of time debugging and rewriting the same 20 lines of code until I used examples in Wikipedia which reminded me I needed to use pointers to pointers to accomplish what I intended.

At any rate, it’s not a huge improvement in the overall experience, but a small step in the right direction. We’ll keep working on the “slothy” feel we have that tries to reduce the amount of mechanical things required including fixing typos and misspellings.

Slothmud III Website Wayback..

I was doing a little research on the website history for a page I am planning to make. I found a few things while using the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is quite flakey so if any of the links below don't take you to a page, file a complaint to the proper authorities (AKA, not me).

• 1998: Over 12,000 rooms and 3,000 distinct mobs, 4 classes (mage, cleric, thief, warrior), forging, brews, quests, multiple continents, and more, Sloth offers enough challenge to make even the most seasoned mudder never want to go anywhere else.
• January 2000: Slightly New website design and update:..5 classes (cleric, mage, thief, warrior,avatar), forging, brews, quests, multiple continents, and more...
• December 2000: Site redesign.
• With over 21,000 rooms and 7,500 distinct mobs, our world is absolutely enormous. With the inception of 4 new classes (necromancer, druid, bard, and monk)
• 2004: Relauched site on PHP Nuke with a different theme.
• 2005: With over 23,500 uniquely described rooms, 8,300 distinct creatures, 12,200 characters, and 7,100 pieces of equipment...
• October 2006: Changed to custom Sloth theme. (current site)

In total, in about 8 years we've gone nearly doubled the number of rooms, nearly tripled the number of creaturs and added a lot of equipment. I haven't tried to quantify the additions in functionality to the website, just the number of graphical redesigns.

If anyone has numbers on the size of the game or some screenshots of the website prior to 1998, I'd be very interested.

Ch..ch..ch..Changes

On Slothmud III there have been a lot of changes over the past nine years. We are embarking on making another (in my opinion small) change that is likely to be accompanied by a decent amount of controversy. The controversy is aggravated by the fact that though it is a small change, it seems to be relatively confusing (or perhaps I haven’t figured out how to easily explain it).

A few of the administration have discussed our approach to minimizing the controversy and have come up with a few simple steps. The approach revolves around being proactive with communication before we implement the change. Typically we announce changes after we implement them, so this is a pretty big departure. We’ll see how it goes and if we continue the practice.

Specifically we discussed the following steps: We will post an announcement on the Slothmud webpage announcing what is changing, when it is changing, why it is changing and what we expect the impacts to be.

Though we have the answers to all of these questions, it got me to thinking about all of the changes we make in general and how best to answer those questions. It got me to thinking that at a high-level that all of the changes we make go to ensure we have a game that has the following characteristics:

• Is Immersive
• Stays challenging at all levels
• Rewards risk takers
• Rewards explorers
• Creates a cooperative atmosphere for players
• Encourages grouping
• Minimizes repetitive tasks or makes necessary ones easy (we are Sloth after all!)
• Is fair to all players
• Is balanced for all classes
• Integrates well into the web experience

I’ll work on breaking this down into some more detail and you may end up seeing some version of on our homepage.

This brings me to the last point about changes on Slothmud. We have historically made changes that are in line with the above goals, but they have mainly focused on how they impact experienced and long time players and made a few changes that help truly new players. This applies to the majority of changes for the past nine years. From now until then end of 2007, I’d like to swap this with the intent of expanding our player base.

Back to Reality With A Vengence

This past week has been mainly filled with work and travel. These are two things that independently aren't the most attractive things in the world to me (business travel that is). When combined, they can really dig into my motivation and energy levels. It's very hard to stay involved in activities related the SlothMUD when sitting on a plane.

When I had a predictable commute to work on a commuter train, I would jot down area descriptions when there was enough room to pull out a pen and notepad. It is much less convenient to do this on a plane. I feel I am either putting up my tray table, passing along a drink to someone else in my row, getting up to let them out to the bathroom, or some other interruption. Not to mention that the 5 inches of leg room on a United flight cost $39. I'd pay half that for 3 inches, but they don't seem to offer that option.

In any case, I managed to a very small amount of coding during the week of travel. We'll see if my contribution ever makes it any where. I suppose the overall point of this post is that, despite our desires, even the most mundane of activities can really interfere with our ability to enhance this game.

Builders Port Experiment Part 2

One of the builders who has joined us recently has completed an addition to the game that we have moved over to the live point. I'm not clear on how much work is left before it actually goes live and gets connected, but it seems to me that the experiment (still in progress) has been pretty successful.

We have approximately eight people who have joined up on the builders port and are developing areas. As with any group of eight people, there are differing levels of completeness. This poses somewhat of a challenge for us as administrators since we haven't been scaled up this way in a long time. Typically we've been heavy on the administrators and thin on the builders. Now we are nearing the reverse situation where we have a lot of work to be examined, improved (through collaboration) and approved. It's a bit hard for us to actually track as we are usually self-centered and the projects we are working on are the ones we focus most of our attention on.

I'm working on a few scripts that should help the situation in that we should be able to tell who is nearing completion of rooms, monsters and other things without having to go login and look. The scripts (when finished) will show things like:

• Rooms with descriptions, names, and doors.
• Rooms missing any of the above.
• Rooms that are approved (a formal status flag)
• Monsters with similar settins.

I'm hoping this will help us keep ahead of the curve on getting the right attention at the right time and place. This is important to me as I've seen over the years that as we reach a tipping point of administrators to builders, we have found ourselves in the case where builders get frustrated and leave because of a lack of administrative support. We'd like to avoid that.

To be clear, the administrative procedures I've alluded to are not formalities of a beaurocracy, but a process that ensures all additions meet our quality standards and ensure that seasoned administrators provide feedback and suggestions to newer builders. This latter point is really the most important to us. We do really like to have correct grammar, spelling and punctuation in our room descriptions and do have a relatively formal building style guide which reflects this. But, these things can be corrected if missed (we'd still rather catch them first).

More subtle suggestions can have a much larger influence on the longevity and popularity of an area. These are the suggestions we want to make sure we provide at the right time and to the people who need them.

So far so good on the builders port, but it is still too early to call it a success.

Addiction to Mudding

I wasn't surprised to see an article about addiction to mudding, but was slightly surprised and pleased (but with some guilt) that it was an addiction to SlothMud III. It's a good read and may help anyone who is playing this game get the perspective of another person affected by a gaming addict.

Here is my experience as a player of this game. I don't play at all anymore for many reason, but fighting addiction is pretty low on the list. The main reason is that I don't have enough time in the day to do all of the things I enjoy to do, so playing the game has gone way down the prioritization list.

I once struggled with gaming addiction as many of the long-time players of online games like SlothMud III have. I spent a good portion of time during my second year of graduate school balancing "exp runs" with experiments and research. I used the university network while I was at school and used the university dial-in when I was at home. This got to be a bit hairy since in that day there was a 1-hour usage limit and it would kick you off. There was also a limited supply of dial-in ports and a large demand for them. I would have to time my connection so that I would disconnect during a regen that happened between 50 and 53 minutes after I last connected.

Wow, it was a huge relief to start paying for dial-up which we eventually did. I "needed it" so I could "continue the day's simulations and coding" from home. I occasionaly did that, but I'll admit to really wanting it to mud. My wife knew of this addiction, and she rightfully complained about it to me, but it wasn't a too big of a strain on our marriage for whatever reason.

I was highly organized in my play (at least I felt like I was and was sort of proud of it).

• I had scripts that did a lot of pretty cool things at the time.
• I had all of the maps printed out and organized alphabetically by name. (There was only one continent at the time, so I never got to breaking it out to continents with tabs, but oh, I would have gone there.)
• I had goals for equipment and did my best to learn the areas where they came from.
• I logged fights to see where things went wrong.
• I had a list of names of pthiefs and who they had stolen from for reference.

It was a mission to play the game well. Don't get me wrong, though, one of the things that drove me to this level was the people in the game doing the same thing. I'm somewhat obsessive compulsive mixed with competitive over achieving. This is a dangerous combination with a game like this.

Fortunately, I wised up after a while and went cold turkey from playing. It hurt for a while and there were definitely substitute games that occupied some of my time, but I managed to graduate within a reasonable amount of time overall. I do attribute a lot of good things to my mudding addiction which I won't try to justify in this post.

I mainly post this, since I have been doing a lot of stuff for the mud in the past 6 months and it came to a head this past weekend with the opening of the website and the corresponding quest. I was spending a lot of time in front of the computer and not spending as much time with my kids as I normally do. My wife correctly called me out on it and it has made me aware that I am somewhat addicted to being an administrator on this mud. It's a different kind of addiction, but it is there none-the-less. I don't intend to quit cold-turkey or necessarily cut back on what I do. However, I will be vigilant that it doesn't encroach beyond this into my personal and work-life.