NaBloPoMo

I was struck with an idea for a blogging-related event to run on Astaria last night.

As many people know, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  People participating are encouraged to push hard on getting an entire novel written throughout the course of the month.

It turns out that November is also NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month.

So my idea is this: Any Astarian who starts a blog in between now and November 1st, and posts at least one on-topic article demonstrating at least some minimal level of real effort, per day for the entirety of November wins a prize.  I haven’t decided what the prizes are yet.

Anyone interested in participating should comment in reply to this post, and when their respective blog is up, I’ll happily add a link exchange to my sidebar.

Security: Code Injection 101

One of the junior wizards on Astaria suggested yesterday that I should write an article about why the old housing system was removed, and what’s been done to fix it — always a hot topic.  I started to demur, since there’s a lot of complex technical issues involved that not a lot of people seem to be aware of, but then it occurred to me that some of these are fascinating topics in their own right.

So, courtesy of Clovis, today’s post is about security: specifically, basic fundamentals of code injection attacks.

Behind the scenes

While I was writing about caravans yesterday, and mentioned templates, it occurred to me that a lot of people have probably never seen the code behind an Astaria object, and that I could use one as a very basic guide to what wizards see as opposed to what players see.

This, then, is the template I used for weapons for that caravan.  This is the glowing green Matrix text waterfalling down my screen.

Caravans

Beggars can’t be choosers.  I’m short on ideas for anything to write today, so I opened up a code/design Q&A on the Astaria line to see if anyone asked anything interesting that might prompt something to write about.

Lyric [astaria] you could write about the creativity of players vs
wizards when it comes to the old caravan items
Kizayaen [astaria] That'd be a really short article.
Kizayaen [astaria] "Oh my fucking god creating these items made my soul
hurt."
Kizayaen [astaria] done.
Lyric [astaria] its still an article is it not
Kizayaen [astaria] Actually not a bad idea, though.

I’m going to stray beyond the provided scope and talk more generally about what a caravan looks like from the wizard end of things, though.

Idea report

I received a mail ingame recently posing the following question concerning the feathered cape that one can purchase from the Snipe Hunter as a reward for a number of tokens:

I saw that the cape isn’t autoloading or pvaultable. That’s a lot of points to dole out for something that won’t last more than a boot…. Not to mention how hard it can be to find a hunter sometimes you don’t catch up with one until a couple days before a boot. Any thoughts on changing it?

Project: Fantasy Name Generator (Part 2)

In my last post, I described a method of procedurally building syllables that I devised after taking exception to a particular syllable-based name generator I found online.  This was the core functionality and beginning of a program which had, as its goal, the ability to generate lists of name suggestions for fantasy RPG characters.  When I left off, we had a set of rule for defining the logic of vowel and consonant sounds, and a set of rules for combining those sounds into syllables.

Project: Fantasy Name Generator (Part 1)

For my first post of actual content, I thought I’d write about a recent small C++ project I took on.

For a bit of background, I play a lot of fantasy RPGs.  The identity of my characters is very important to me — not always from a roleplaying perspective (though sometimes that too), but more the combination of name and appearance.  I spend a lot of time in character generation honing those two aspects.  I’ve gotten booted out of games for “inactivity” timeouts because they didn’t feel that character generation counted as doing things.

This project dealt specifically with names.  I have a decent sized stable of names which I’m fond of and use frequently, but sometimes for one reason or another, that option isn’t available to me and I get to think up new names.  Usually this involves thinking of names I’ve liked in the past, combining, swapping vowels, reordering syllables, and just generally playing with letters like Lego bricks until I come up with something that’s both aesthetically appealing, and available for my use in the game in question.

One recent time in particular, I wanted to move away from my long-held personal quirk of using names beginning in K, so that invalidated my entire stable of regulars and necessitated that I do a lot of name mangling.  To get some name seeds to play with, I ended up using some online name generator websites.  Most work pretty well, but every now and again I’d run across one and just scratch my head going “Man, I could write a better namegen than that.”

Famous last words.

First Post

Welcome to my personal development blog.  I plan to use this space to write primarily about my work on the MUD Astaria, but also sometimes about other code projects and other code-related and technical issues which are of interest to me.

I welcome questions about specific or general technical issues as well as suggestions for future posts or articles, though of course there are some confidentiality concerns surrounding disclosure of actual code from both Astaria and from work.

As for me — who am I?  Well, I’m just a guy who’s worked in technology kind of a lot.  Most of my work credentials won’t mean anything.  But for the Astarians, it’s a lot easier to point out what I’ve done to the game:

• I’ve been an active wizard for six years.  I was at one time an admin, but resigned, and was talked into coming back afterward only on the condition that I get to step down and stay at Elder indefinitely.  There’s a lot of complexity to that decision, but essentially it comes down to shirking the more frustrating parts of responsibility.
• I’m approximately one-third of the creative power behind the Druid’s Guild.
• I did a lot more behind-the-scenes work generating some awesome new functionality that nobody ever uses for the Cat and Fiddle Tavern in Astaria City than any of you realise.
• I coded some infamous mayhem monsters hard enough that they often despawn from inactivity rather than being killed — and they do so despite my personal standard that challenge comes from complex mechanical interactions, not just big damage numbers.  Dagoyel the Deathjester and Anise, if you’re curious.
• I’ve been proudly sending Astarians on snipe hunts for five years now.

For a slightly more comprehensive view of individual projects and personal history, I recommend you check out my Astaria wiki page (which redirects to my old name, Kalder.)

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and welcome!  I hope to have enough content to keep people interested in dropping by from time to time.