It looks like I will be moving forward with the Alsherok Revisited project. I have a couple of people interested in making it happen. so I might as well grab onto that while I can. Alsherok Revisited is now the primary focus of Squirrel Alienz.

My first order of business is parsing through flat files used to store all the MUD data. Each zone is its own file that contains all references to the mobs and items inside the zone… This is going to be interesting. I originally attempted to throw something together in C# and it was slowly started to work okay. However, my iteration time was too slow and there seemed to be a lot of overhead. So, I switched over to using Python. I am almost done with the first round of parsing which will net me the mobs (mobiles) and the mobprogs (mobile programs). I am storing everything in a PostgreSQL database because, you know, Postgres is pretty awesome (and open).

Once I have the mobs defined, I need to send them over for modeling review. Oi. There are so many models needed with this transition from text to 3D. Even the background descriptions will need to be represented. I can see a lot of vague translation going on here. Either way, better to get started earlier on this part. Plus having the mobs already stored in a database will allow me to pull some interesting statistics.