More stuff on its way

I haven't abandoned this! I've been travelling.

There are 4 more days to the review period for the MUD competition, after which I will deploy the latest daily. Beware: this will reset the database and you'll have to start over, not that there's much progress to have made.

Here's what's in the pipeline thus far:

• Class system improvements, including (subject to change) titles for combinations of strengths and skills. Skills still don't do anything but they will once the magic/battle/crafting/NPC systems are fleshed out.
• A higher-level construct for map generation: biomes. Biomes have cells. In the past cell spreading/generation depended on clever tricks to make the cell-based generation appear more clever than it really was. Like Minecraft or whatever.
• There is now a concept of tiled blocks, so algorithms that can apply to large scale stretches of ground  can apply just small pieces at a time.
• Noise generation built in. Look how smooooooth that map looks (attached). Generated piecewise in 8x8 chunks as it's explored.
• BoltDB is still there. It scales fine for the small number of players I've been testing with. I'm using Msgpack now instead of JSON for storage in the DB which stores things faster and smaller.
• A few optimizations on how things are stored in the DB too. For instance, creatures are keyed as packed <point><zero byte><creature id> byte streams for lookup rather than having to deserialize and reserialize per-cell JSON arrays. Faster and less error-prone. User inventory and items on world cells already did something similar.

Once I get map generation returning something roughly as diverse as what we were seeing prior and the 4 days have passed Ill make another announcement.