The pathfinding code is working
I finally got the first draft of my term paper done for Japanese, giving me free time. I don't have Internet at home at present (that may change -- it's quite inconvenient not to have it, though it does make it easier to concentrate on my studies) so as you've likely noticed I haven't posted much.
Anyway, last Saturday I got pathfinding working, so that's all good now. The pathfinding code properly detects obstacles that pop up along the path and repath if it finds any. The way it determines what is and what isn't a tile is a bit of a hack, so that's the next thing I'll be changing. After that I think there are a couple bugs, and then it'll probably be time to do at least basic game logic. Hopefully over this coming spring break I'll be able to make good progress. The pathfinding wasn't actually that hard per se -- it only took two days to get from broken to working fairly well (I didn't do it entirely properly so I may have to change it later -- because I used floating point and allowed arbitrary orientations for entities -- big mistake as far as sanity, time, and bugs go), but those two days were basically devoted to the pathfinding.
Another thing that the client and server do now (since I last posted anyway, it's not really new) is use Kerberos for authentication. The problem is that the Kerberos server doesn't normally run on Windows (the last version I downloaded anyway, which was admittedly about half a year ago), so I have to run it under Cygwin and even then with some changes. It's got a lot of old code and that wouldn't be a problem except that it doesn't mesh well with our current conception of citizen accounts. If any of you know how to have Kerberos mirror passwords between different subidentities do let me know... The idea of having to have a separate password for logging in as a citizen isn't too appealing in my opinion, so...
As far as game logic goes, it'll probably be basic monster AI, perhaps attacking code, though I'm questioning how much I want to hard code that. After all, what I _could_ do is make attacking for weapons (and receiving attacks for armor) scriptable functions, allowing customized responses on both ends of that. Actually before I do any of that I need to alter pathfinding so that it can stop right before a destination instead of trying to go to it, so that it'll be possible to pathfind to creatures instead of just to tiles...
A couple unrelated bits... Does anyone know how to get a PC-like Home/End behavior on a PowerMac? It's driving me batty how this thing goes to the start of the document instead of the start of the line. Next thing, having taken a year off from college I get the idea that a lot of the stuff people do here they could easily learn on their own. Then again I'm taking sophomore-level Mechanical Engineering classes so perhaps it's to be expected (sigh). All for a piece of paper. Hurrah. Hm, that's about it I guess.

Hm, I've been procrastinating on the pathfinding code since it'll be a pain, so I've been working on other parts that'll have to be done eventually anyway. I'm writing sound code right now (using OpenAL), and earlier I got some of the accounts system code in. I'm using MIT Kerberos for that. Hopefully there aren't any pitfalls w.r.t. that, since the documentation was cryptic and I've never used it before. We'll see