One step forward, Two steps backwards.

If you've ever written code, you probably are loathing that piece of code you wrote several years back which you forgot about, but someone pops up and asks you to maintain. Sometimes PyMUD is like that. It's like a shiny car when you look at it one way, then notice the interior's falling apart. After making a major breakthrough with the object ID system, starting a new ORM-based persistence layer for our data, and converting a bunch of commands into abilities, we were feeling pretty svelte. Steven logged onto my machine for some ability testing, and the results were pretty positive.

But one straw broke the camel's back.

It was a pretty simple thing, actually. In implementing "yell", we traverse all open doors to any rooms within a certain radius. So what better to do than to check door.closed ? Obvious, right. Why would we make such an obvious property than to put a boolean True if it's closed?

Of course, it didn't work. Debugging through the code and printing out nearly everything I could, I finally found the problem. door.closed was a string. Where was the boolean we knew existed? door.opened, of course. door.closed is what we show to the user when the door has been closed, meant to be customizable per-door if we want to allow for flavor text. Upon inspecting the Door class, we found several other poorly named properties.

And so, we begin the Great Cleansing Fire. Before we tackle the character class system, we will revisit every class, documenting, removing un-needed properties, and trying to rename things to fit. It's going to cause a good bit of break&fix debug cycles, but it will be worth it in the end.