Welcome!

You've arrived at the starting point for a set of tutorials that will teach you how to develop areas and new code in the Wyvern environment. The tutorials start easy and make their way up to some full-featured examples. The tutorials include lots of sample code. By the time you finish all the tutorials, you should be able to code sophisticated areas and objects in the game.

Legolas (an Elder Wizard) has been working on a series of new Wizard Tutorials that show you the essentials for learning how to create objects and areas in Wyvern.

Do I have to be a programmer to make areas?

Nope. You can create new maps using the Wyvern Map Editor, upload them to the game server, and have them linked in the game without writing any code at all.

However, if you want to create an area, object, monster or quest that's truly unique, you'll have to write some Jython code. If you're not already a programmer, Jython is a great way to learn. The remaining tutorials cover different things you can do using Jython. If you work your way through them you'll be able to do some remarkable things in the game.

Before You Start

Here are some things you'll need before you start development:

• You need a reasonably fast development computer. Ideally it'll be 300MHz or better, with 128MB RAM or more. It can be running any operating system that supports the Java 2 Platform (meaning JDK 1.2 or 1.3). You also need to be connected to the internet when you're doing your game development (at least the testing part.)

• You need to download and install both the Wyvern Client and the Wyvern Map Editor.

• You need to have a Wizard account on our game server. You can do certain things locally, like create maps or write test code, but you can't actually test them until they're uploaded to the game server. And you can't upload anything until you've been made a Wizard.

• You should have a good-quality telnet client. The one that comes with Windows by default is pretty lame, but there are various free or shareware ones available that do better.

  You don't have to have telnet, but it's often useful to be able to telnet into the game server to test things without the overhead of firing up the full graphical client.

• You should read the documentation on Jython. It's not a difficult language to learn, and the better you are at it, the more sophisticated things you'll be able to do. However, if you're worried about it, you can always learn by going through the tutorials. There's plenty of sample code that you can copy and paste to get started on your objects.

  If you have no experience with programming, you might want to take a look at this Non-Programmers Tutorial for Python first.

You should start with the first tutorial on the left, Quick Start, which shows you a "Hello, World" program in Jython for Wyvern.