Sunday, May 22, 2016

Evennia 0.6 !


As of today, I merged the development branch to make version 0.6 of the MU* development system and server Evennia.

Evennia 0.6 comes with a lot of updates, mainly in the way Evennia talks to the outside world. All communication is now standardized, so there are no particular treatment of things like text - text is just one of any standardized commands being passed between the server the client (whether over telnet, ssh, websockets or ajax/comet).

For example the user can now easily plug in "inputfuncs" to handle any data coming from the client. If you want your client to offer some particular functionality, you just need to plop in a python function to handle it, server-side. We also now offer a lot of utility functions for things like monitoring change (tell the client whenever your health status changes so it can update a health bar or flash the screen).

The HTML5 webclient has itself updated considerably. Most is happening behind the scenes though. Notably the webclient's javascript component is split into two:

  •  evennia.js, acts as a library for handling all communication with the server part of Evennia. It offers events for a gui library to plug into and send/receive. It will also gracefully degrade from a websocket connection to AJAX/COMET long-polling if the player uses an older browser. 
  • evennia_gui.js is the default front-end and implements a traditional and stable "telnet-like" interface. The html part uses uses Django templating to make it easy to customize and expand. Since this simply makes use of the resources offered by evennia.js, one could pretty easily slip in some other gui library here, or set up calls to get all sorts of interesting information from the server (which talks back using inputfuncs). 
There are a truckload of more updates and features that are covered on the mailing list.
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Griatch

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