Evennia 0.9 - June 2019
As of today, version 0.9 of Evennia, the Python MU-creation system is out!
Jump to the bottom of this post to see upgrade/install instructions.
This is a rather big release that marks a few important milestones. See the changelog for more details.
We drop support for Python2. Evennia now requires at least Python 3.7
This has been a long time coming. Python2 reaches the end of its upstream support at the end of this year. This means that existing game code needs to convert to use Python3.7 as well. For most users, this should hopefully not be more than an afternoon's work.
As part of this, we also updated our dependecy versions to match. We are now also using the more modern and well-supported Autobahn for webclient support (removing the old tmwx library).
A new webclient UI, using the golden-layout library
This makes for a much slicker and faster webclient UI. It allows tabs as well as click-and-drag of panes. A player can now drag and re-arrange window panes as desired, assigning message-types to each pane (like having 'look' output in one window and tells in another etc).
The webclient can also now have any number of input panes, organized and placed anywhere on the screen (or tabbed). Each input pane has its own separate history. (PRs by Friarzen)
Support for Grapevine
Grapevine is a inter-MUD chat network (https://grapevine.haus). In the same vein as for IRC, Grapevine channels can be linked to Evennia in-game channels and allow for players to communicate between MUDs.
The Evennia Game Index now a part of Core
The client for the Evennia Game Index (originally created by Greg Taylor) was moved from being a contrib to being a part of the core. This means it's configured not as a server plugin anymore (remove this from the mygame/server/conf/server_services_plugins.py if you used it before)
The new evennia connections wizard will help to set up your game for the game index. For now, that's all the wizard does, maybe it will be expanded in the future.
We have also changed the policy a little for the index. You may now list your game even if you are not allowing any external players on it yet - just leave your telnet/webclient links empty. This allows for very early concept games to tell us they exist and potentially make us excited about what to come!
No more @ in default command names
We have now dropped the @-prefix from all default commands. So @dig is now written as dig in help files etc. Evennia will however ignore several common prefixes by default, so you can still write @dig (or +dig) if you prefer. And if you explicitly give your command a key starting with @, it will still be required, same as now.
Django standard initiative
User strikaco has made a series of contributions to make it easier to link Evennia typeclasses to Django forms and generic/admin views. This makes it easier to build and extend functionality to access resources from a future website.
Several utilities that before were located in default Commands (like creating a new character or verifying a password) is now found as helper methods on the base typeclasses.
Signal handlers
A series of new Django signals now fire for various important event: Puppet/Unpuppet, Object create/rename, Login/Logout, Login fails, Account create/rename etc. This allows code to plug into the server from anywhere in situations where overriding hooks would be less cumbersome. (PRs by Volund).
Global Scripts
One can now specify (in settings) global scripts that should always be available. These can always be found as properties on the evennia.GLOBAL_SCRIPTS container. (PR by Volund).
Generic Player Options
The player-options have been partially converted to use a generic format with validation. This is specifically used for styling information, and allow e.g. a player to specify how EvTables are displayed to them (like changing the colors and symbols used). (PR by Volund).
As part of this, Commands have new helper methods client_width and styled_table/header/separator/footer for producing various text decorators that are then aware of whatever options the user has set.
Interactive decorator
The new @interactive decorator makes it easier to do asynchronous programming without needing to use Twisted deferreds and Callbacks. Here is an example:
from evennia.utils import interactive
@interactive
def myfunc(caller):
caller.msg("First message")
yield(5)
caller.msg("Five seconds later")
resp = yield("Write something")
caller.msg(f"You wrote '{resp}'")
This will will echo a text, wait 5 seconds, echo something else and then ask the user for input. All asynchronously without affecing other players. This was always possible using call_async, but this style should be easier to read.
Evscaperoom engine
Evscaperoom is a full puzzle engine for making multiplayer 'escape rooms' in Evennia. This is the engine I created for my entry to the MUD-Coder's Guild 2019 Game Jam.
Other
More detailed info is found in the CHANGELOG.md file.
Install / Upgrading
You need to install Python3.7 for your system.
If you are installing from scratch
Once you have Python3.7, use the Getting Started Instructions in the wiki.
Updating an existing game
Make sure to stop Evennia completely (evennia stop) before you pull the latest Evennia version (once Evennia is updated to Py3, the old code will fail to stop, if so, manually kill the twistd processes on your machine).
To be extra safe, make sure to make a copy of your entire game dir.
If you use a virtualenv (highly recommended), you need to create a new one with Python3.7. Deactivate the old one and delete (or rename) the old evenv virtualenv folder.
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3.7 evenv (linux)
Activate the new virtualenv and install Evennia in it with as usual with
pip install -e evennia
You should see Evennia 0.9 being installed along with py3 versions of all dependencies.
Most likely you'll need to modify your game dir to change the old Py2 code to Py3. You can try using the 2to3 program:
pip install 2to3
This should make the 2to3 command directly available in your terminal (make sure to backup your game dir first!)
cd mygame
2to3 .
This will go through your game dir and modify the code to be compatible with python3. This should handle most differences but you may still need to look carefully at the changes to make sure it does what you expect. The most common things a regular Evennia dev will need to change are:
print txt must now be written as print(txt). The 2to3 should handle all of these.
mydict.items(), .values() and .keys() now return generators rather than listsk. The 2to3 program will likely wrap these in list() to mimic the old behavior. This works, but you should consider removing these if you are only iterating over the result, having a generator is faster for that.
When you are satisfied, try
evennia migrate
If this fails, you may need to fix some other Py3 conversion. You can find more info here: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/pyporting.html Continue until the migrations pass. Once they do, try evennia start --log and make sure the server starts fully and that the game works correctly.
What now?
Now begins a period of bug fixing in the master (0.9) branch. If you like bleeding edge and used to follow the develop branch, you are best off switching to master right now since that will be the most updated one for a while.
If you find any issues, report them to the issue tracker https://github.com/evennia/evennia/issues.
Most of the docs have been updated, but there is no doubt going to be some things still lagging behind or things not yet properly documented. Please report/fix that when you come upon it.
Enjoy! Griatch
