Been working on finding an alternate pre-processor. Also tried out ucpp. Didn’t work either. Got the Linux sources from Ken Perry for “PP”. Had to go through cleaning warning / error messages and got it to work. Amazingly it works just like cpp worked back in those days. It handles quote counting and works with multiple lines of text without backslashes for each newline, it expands a self-referential macro correctly, and it expands macros correctly when quote counting. Wild! And incredibly odd. But that’s really how cpp worked back in the day across a wide range of operating systems. One tiny issue seems to be that double line breaks (in quotes) get turned into a single line break. I’ll live with that.
Now I’m waiting for Ken to do a little magic with the Makefile for PP. Once that’s done we can close what could be a first release.
Meanwhile I’ve been weeding out a few zone errors. I’d like Diku II to run in a full blown setup without too many run-time log warnings. And during this work I came across the zone Haon-Dor and the ubiquitous Midgaard. Those two zones are some of the oldest in the Diku II series. Haon-Dor is such an incredibly nice zone for beginners. Here you can go rabbit hunting and solve a few quests but beware of the dark part of the forest. Haon-Dor was written by my friend Mads Haahr (Quifael) while we studied together at DIKU.Mads also helped out a lot with the Midgaard zone. And he introduced me to role playing games as well and was an excellent game master back in the day. :o) We also worked together for six months in 1997. One of the things we made back then was a true random number generator. The first version was built with a few low cost radios we bought from Radio Shack. Mads has since continued with it and runs random.org today. Anyone who likes randomness should definitely check it out – such a super nice service :o) Check out Mads’ history page for more info.
This takes me back. KallistiMud started in January 1992 with DikuMud as it’s base on a server at hamburger.orst.edu. It’s still going and still uses Midgaard and Haon-Dor, although they have changed a lot over the years. Recently we found a backup copy of Kallisti’s code and areas from 1995 and it’s been fun to go back and see how everything was originally designed. I think that Dwarven Kingdom might have been one of the old originals too. I like Midgaard since you can log into a diku mud and get oriented quickly if they have kept at least part of Midgaard.
Good job getting DikuII to compile. We moved to a new Ubuntu server 2 years ago and it took 3 weeks of off and on work to get it to compile on the new OS and compiler.