So over this last week, we’ve been pretty busy figuring things out and fixing things and figuring out what we were missing and maybe even fixing another long-time error in M&F.
Firstly, we’ve managed to identify several places where how forms were rendered ended up resulting in extra greater than signs, ‘>’, being scattered about. I think we’re up to five now, that we’ve corrected.
Past that, thanks to some assistance from Anaris from the BattleMaster development team, hierarchy and family trees will now render on the test server. I was apparently missing an application called graphviz. Telling my server to install it solved the problem right promptly.
On a more interesting note, I think I’ve worked out an issue that was resulting in permissions not being applied to the correct characters. From the player’s perspective, when you make a permission list and want to add a character, you can type in the characters name and it gives you a drop down menu of selectable characters and IDs that match the criteria. Unfortunately, displaying the ID was added later, and even then I don’t think it was fully implemented. What would happen is when the player submitted the update, just the character name was passed to another function that would find that name in the database and associate it to a character ID.
In certain situations, particularly when a player made a character, killed it, then made another character with the exact same name, the permissions system would grab the first, dead, character rather than the active one. As an interim measure, I’ve worked out a way to force the game to only try to associate the name submitted with living names, and in an attempt to, hopefully, reduce abuse, to associate it to the character with the lowest ID.
Long term, we’ll need to rework how that particular part of the permissions system works, hopefully by letting it submit the ID straight from the original submission rather than having to reverse engineer it off a character name. We’ve some ideas how to do that, but it’s uncharted territory for us.
Next up? Figuring out what is going on with the conversation system.