Out-of-band mergings

As of today the development repository of Evennia, which has been brewing for a few months now, merged into the main repository. This update grew from one experimental feature to a relatively big update in the end. Together with the "many-character-per-player" feature released earlier, this update covers all the stuff I talked about in my Behind the Scenes blog post.

•  Evennia's webserver was moved from Portal to Server. This moves all database-modifying operations into the same process and neatly avoids race conditions when modifying a game world from various interfaces. 
• The OOB (Out Of Band) handler was implemented. This goes together with a protocol for telnet sub-negotiations according to the MSDP specification. The handler allows on-demand reporting whenever database fields update. It also offers regular polling of properties if needed. A user can customize which oob commands are available to the client and write whatever handlers are needed for their particular game. In the future we'll also add support for GMCP, but the lack of a central, official specification is off-putting (if there is a central document besides accounts of how individual games chose to implement GMCP, please let me know). For our own included web client, we'll likely just use JSON straight off.
• Our channel system is now typeclassed. If you are not familiar with Evennia this won't mean much to you - In short it means developers will be able to customize their channel system much easier than in the past since a channel can be treated pretty much like any Python class (thanks go to user Kelketek who actually did the implementation).
• We added the concept of Tagging, as a more generalized version of our old Alias system. Tagging is just what it sounds like - it allows you to tag all your objects in order to group them and easily (and efficiently) find them later. Tagging offers a powerful way to create what other code bases refer to as "zones". There are many other possible uses though, such as having effects appear only in certainly tagged rooms, indicate which Characters have joined a particular guild and so on. 
• Behind the scenes there were a lot of cleanups, along with minor API changes mentioned on the mailing list. A slew of older Issues were also fixed with this merge.

Now, in the immediate future we'll be working on updating the documentation. Evennia prides itself with having a large body of documentation and this update comes with small changes to various existing systems. There are also a few bigger new features (such as OOB). No doubt the near future will also see other issues popping up as more people try things out.

 

Imaginary Realities update

Apparently the reboot of Imaginary Realities (to which I contribute two articles) has been pushed forward a week or two. Reason being, apparently, to finalize the actual presentation of the content. I already signed off on the last editorial fixes way before deadline, so I guess it's just to wait and see what comes of it!