Evennia 0.9 released

Griatch

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.

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

Spawner was updated
Simplified Chinese translations (by MaxAlex).
Lots of Bug fixes

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. Then 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

Sparks

@Griatch said in Evennia 0.9 released:

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).

Oh thank the lord; this means in my little custom core I've been writing for future projects, I can kill off my @display command; that was meant to let you set all your UI preferences (header/footer colors for all output, EvTable styling, etc.) One less thing in the core, one more thing in the base and globally used... that's a win. Remind me to thank Volund later.

(Though the idea of converting all of Arx's codebase from Evennia 0.7/Python 2.7 to Evennia 0.9/Python 3.7 gives me a mild feeling of existential terror.)

Griatch

@Sparks said in Evennia 0.9 released:

@Griatch said in Evennia 0.9 released:

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).

Oh thank the lord; this means in my little custom core I've been writing for future projects, I can kill off my @display command; that was meant to let you set all your UI preferences (header/footer colors for all output, EvTable styling, etc.) One less thing in the core, one more thing in the base and globally used... that's a win. Remind me to thank Volund later.

This still needs more docs. But it's there.

(Though the idea of converting all of Arx's codebase from Evennia 0.7/Python 2.7 to Evennia 0.9/Python 3.7 gives me a mild feeling of existential terror.)

Friarzen already made a draft PR for this process for Arx. So hopefully it should not be too horrible.
.
Griatch

Reason

Just in time for Shadowrun 6th edition. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Also: Love moving async callbacks into a decorator. Significantly lower barrier to entry.