Modern Distro news 2019-11-02

Discussion about the development of POL's official distribution scripts.

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Yukiko
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Modern Distro news 2019-11-02

Post by Yukiko »

It has been awhile since I have posted news about the Modern Distro.

I thought I would mention a few of the things added, changed or fixed recently. Anyone who has been checking on GitHub will know about these but not everyone uses GitHub to download the Modern Distro. Nor should they have to.

I refactored (That's a fancy term for rewriting a programme that will appear to behave the same as it did before the rewrite.) the buff icon support was handled in the timedScripts package. The reason for that is as follows:
Copied from the Trello card:

Code: Select all

The Core addbuff method requires 5 parameters:
1. The buff icon gump graphic number.
2. The duration of the buff.
3. The cliloc number for the name of the buff.
4. The cliloc number for the buff description.
5. A string containing value(s) to be inserted in the buff icon description cliloc.
The timedScripts package was wriiten with the assumption that each buff would have only one value in the 5th string parameter.parameter. This is not always the case. For example, the Bless buff requires 3 <tab> delimited values in the 5th parameter. Curse requires 7 <tab> delimited values.
To correct this flaw I am going to need to refactor the spell scripts that apply buffs and the timed script start and end scripts.
The way it works now is, if the buff is timed, as with the Bless and Curse spells, the starter subscript under the timedScripts directory will add the buff and the end script, in the same directory, will remove the buff.If the buff is a toggled buff as with the Protection and Reactive Armour spell, the spell script adds the buff and removes it. This required refactoring a few spell scripts as well.

I have been adding documentation to the Modern Distro. It can be found in the main POL directory in /docs/Distro Documentation. I chose to do it in HTML. I do not know much about scripting HTML. So I chose to use Austin's Attributes documentation as the template for the Distro documentation. It isn't fancy but, if nothing else, will present a unified look to all of the docs.

The Incognito spell, along with refactoring for the buff icon support, also received some love. It now supports the Elvish folk and Gargoyles.

There have been other additions and bug fixes but I cannot remember all f them. You can review the commit history on the GitHub repo and see all of them.
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