tbaMUD Development Update

[JosephVTK]

Changelog

Minor

• Provided significant cosmetic formatting in dg_XXXX.c for consistency and superior readability
• Updated .gitignore to include logs, player files, workspace files etc..
• Added additional error messages and extra context to existing messages in the dg_XXX_cmd.c files
• Fixed bug in act.informative.c that caused room description to be displayed twice
• Fixed bug in act.informative.c that prevented room contents from being displayed
• Fixed bug in one of the dg_XXX_cmds that would attempt to move a character to a non-existant room

Ongoing

• I've exchanged the majority of the sprintf functions for snprintf as was suggested in the development thread on tbamud.com. Most of these changes were superficial and overkill however I did stumble across a few that were medium-to-high risk for buffer overflows. I will look into strlcpy and strlcat later.
• I've added a new zone, currently at 450, for use in testing. I don't know if this will make the final cut but by using the dg-script engine for testing I've already uncovered and addressed some bugs that would otherwise of been near-impossible to find alone.

Major

I wrote a JSON converter for C which can be found here in my github called jsIOn.c and added it to the tbamud core. This is the most significant addition to the code, but it is mostly abstract and doesn't touch anything except potentially lib/misc/messages. The purpose of this was to offer the option of converting our current file system into a JSON compatible format for the benefit of importing/exporting it into third-party applications. As it currently stands, to ensure stability, it only touches lib/misc/messages, it only activates by toggling the CEDIT option in the operation options menu, and it leaves the original messages file intact.

Obviously no one gets excited over the arranging letters and numbers in a different way, but the ease of importing/exporting the data makes third party applications so much more feasible now.

# Python
import json

with open('../lib/misc/messages.json', 'r') as f:
            data = json.load(f)

And now you can alter, inspect, create data through a python script, send it to a web app for manipulation, or whatever your heart desires. Just 3 lines of code.

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Additionally, there is also a new scripts folder in the base directory. I've added a dirty python script which, if your JSON messages are enabled & created, will do an assessment of your messages for potential issues and write them to a JSON report AND create a mobile friendly HTML document for easy viewing of the report. Probably took 10-15 minutes.

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Finally, although there are a lot of changes, in the name of stability and reliability, I've kept most everything relatively surface or made it opt-in.