Sunday, March 14, 2010

A month later

I'm making good headway through reading the C# 4.0 in a Nutshell book; some might say that it's not really a front-to-back book, especially in the later chapters where it's definitely reference information, but I find it a good way to get a sense of the capabilities of a system/API/library to go right through.

I'm loving C# 4.0. It has some really good advanced features of "modern" languages that make it very powerful, such as delegates, lambdas, generics, operator overloading, dynamic lookup, named parameters, variance... yes, I'm aware some of these features existed in C# before 4.0. And many of these features are available in other languages, but not usually ALL of them. Having some of my favorites from C++, Java and Lua, all bundled together, makes for a delightful language. Many of these features go very well with the way MUDs/MMOs work, with the idea of object trees, feature inheritance, scripting events and the like: if you "use" an object, the engine just has to call the object's use() function; if it doesn't have one, then nothing happens, and if it does have one, it just gets called. No having to check the object type, no need to check for member availability, no need to cast -- no need for the engine to ask "is this a useable object" at all. But now I'm encroaching on the content of my other blog.


I've just finished the first step of the asset-stripping project; I can now pull out a terrain tile and save it to file. This is something that was much quicker to do in Lua and Go, mainly because of fighting with the build environment. Even though I have access to C# via Visual Studio, I'm a die-hard command-line coder, and am much happier (and much more productive) when using emacs and make. Thus, instead of just writing the code that I've got in ten minutes and having it work, I've been fighting with getting Mono, the free implementation of C#/.NET, working for me. Some of the problems were on installation, and some were on CLR usage that looked like installation issues until Google saved the day.

In the end, though, having the full .NET library available makes things so much easier. In Lua, I ended up dumping the sprite rendering onto ImageMagick, instead of trying to find a decent PNG library. In Go, PNG support was provided with the libraries, but all of the explicit typecasting really made for an unenjoyable programming experience. In C#, once I got around the compilation issues, it was nearly trivial, with zero-indexed arrays (unlike Lua), and natural type conversions.

My next step is to get Mono to display the graphic for me, instead of just dumping it to a file; this will be the first step into writing an InsideUO clone, and my first step towards being ready to write a test game client for MMORF.