Dead Souls news

[cratylus]

This is where I'll be posting updates and news from now on,

because it's just easier on me, plus you can ask questions if

I'm unclear on something.

-Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

Old news:

Old news will remain available at: http://dead-souls.net/news.html">http://dead-souls.net/news.html

Latest work:

The alpha package and the demo mud now include the

new potion lib object, and potion examples. Visit Oana's

magic shop for a few sample potions. They work by adding

an invisible object to the player, which is removed when the

effect is timed to wear off. The new potion object is /lib/potion.c

and the invisible object is /lib/bonus.c . Oana is 1 south, 1 west

of the Town Clocktower.

The alpha package and the demo mud now also include

mounts and an example of a mount. Ingrid's stable now has

one horse that you can use as a mount. Before you can mount

a horse, you must become its friend with the new "befriend"

verb, like this: "befriend horse". Then you can "mount horse"

and "ride north", etc. If you are done playing with the horse,

you "dismount" and "abandon horse". Ingrid is 3 east,

1 south of the Town Clocktower.

There are probably a few bugs left in the mount system...please

let me know what you find.

-Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

Well I got tired of certain performance problems so I

moved things around a bunch, and now I'm on a 4-way

server with 4gigs of ram. It makes a world of difference. I'd

been feeling like I was underwater.

However, there's bad news. The new server is UltraSparc,

which is a different architecture than x86, which is what the

demo mud had been on. I don't understand how, but it seems

that the change hosed up user passwords. I hadn't thought

this would happen, since DS2 now uses MD5 hash passwords

from an internal algorithm...but it is what it is.

It means that you'll need to re-create your characters when

you log into Dead Souls Demo. There's a limit to how bad

I feel, since very few people were seriously coding. For those

of you that want access to your old homedirs, send me an

email and I'll fix you up.

For the folks whose muds I was hosting,  just shoot me an email

with a temporary password you want me to use and I'll hook

you back up.

Sorry guys.

Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

[cratylus]

Hey guys.

Those who know me know that I love a good debate. Probably

*too* much actually! I am not a fan of suppressing opinions,

and often try to elicit them from people I *know* will

unload on me with both barrels...because even though

it's unpleasant, I appreciate honesty and facts.

Not advocating flames here, btw. Talking about forums like

mudmagic and TMC, and the old gjs, where I've traded barbs

with the roughest of them.

What I do have trouble handling is people who are being

ignorant and difficult just to be ignorant and difficult.

That is really, really hard for me to take. People who

do not argue from good faith, or who refuse to acknowledge

fact when confronted with it...this stuff is hard for

me to deal with.

The reason I'm saying this stuff is that it occurred to me

today that I am feeling a bit too imperious. I banned

someone today, and then questioned what it looked like

from the other end. Suppose that person had been honestly

just expressing an opinion, and not being deliberately

oppositional for negativity's sake?

It occurred to me that as lib maintainer, forum admin, and

i3 router admin, it might seem like I'm simply not open

to arguments. And that seriously worries me. I *want* people

to tell me when I'm being foolish, because I'm human, and

so foolish by nature.

I don't want people to think that they can only say happy things

to me, because that's not right.

Fortunately, today people felt free to tell me that I'd

gone too far. I think that's correct, and I thank them for it, and I

want everyone to know that I'm not looking for approval and agreement

from people. Just honesty and reason.

Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[tigwyk]

[cratylus]

Dead Souls Demo will be down this evening while I

track down some driver problems. Sorry for

any inconvenience.

Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

Dead Souls Demo is back online.

I think I fixed the password problem.

If you had a user on Dead Souls Demo, please try to

login with your old password. I think it should work. If it

doesn't, please let me know.

Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

Alpha 9 is out, with a new file/function

search system that no longer craps out on extra-big jobs.

Also of note are new race features, and events to do

a daily refresh of the file and function daemon caches.

For those unaware, the "alpha versions" are rough,

pre-release packages that are like the official

release, except they are more cutting edge. That

makes them both fun to try out (which is why I make

them available) but also not really stable to use

for your production mud, because often with new

features come new bugs.

One of the big reasons I'm not doing frequent

public releases, with patches, is that a great deal of

the stuff I'm doing represent compatibility breakers

with 2.1. If I did frequent "official" releases and

upgrades, people would be running into compat

problems continually.

Instead, I'm holding off until I'm more confident that

the big compat busters are taken care of, so that subsequent

releases and upgrades are less painful. The idea is

to have big compat pain just the once.

So, that's the idea of making sneak-peek alphas

available, but not officially supported releases.

Having said that, the alpha releases are more stable

and feature-rich than any lpmud lib you'll find out there,

so when I say they are "unstable", it is purely relative

to what I expect DS official releases to be. So it's

not insane to start a mud with one. It just may be

inconvenient for you down the road.

For information on the big differences between recent

alphas and the 2.1 release, read this:

http://dead-souls.net/RELEASE_NOTES">http://dead-souls.net/RELEASE_NOTES

The alphas are at http://dead-souls.net/code/alpha/">http://dead-souls.net/code/alpha/

Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

[cratylus]

Folks, this is a reminder.

Please make sure you install any applicable fixes listed on the

hotfix page: http://dead-souls.net/hotfix.html">http://dead-souls.net/hotfix.html

That stuff really is important.

At your leisure, also review the minor fixes page for less important stuff:

http://dead-souls.net/fixes.html">http://dead-souls.net/fixes.html

Users of alpha libs should not apply fixes from either of these

pages, as the alpha libs include the known fixes and may

be incompatible with the older fix files.

-Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

Dead Souls 2.1.1 has been released today.

It is just a bugfix release. The neat new stuff

is still in alpha, and not released to "production".

2.1.1 contains the hotfixes and minor fixes

that have been released to date. The only super-new

fix is the chat.c replacement, so 2.1.1 can

be considered a stable, bugfix release.

For specifics, read the 2.1.1 section of

the release notes at http://dead-souls.net/RELEASE_NOTES">http://dead-souls.net/RELEASE_NOTES

NOTE: If you have installed 2.1 and added the minor

and hot fixes, you DO NOT need to upgrade to 2.1.1.

2.1.1 is 2.1 + (minor fixes + hotfixes)

-Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

Dead Souls 2.1 Alpha 11 is now avaliable.

This is not a general release. It is only for daring souls

who want to be on the cutting edge of DS development,

or those who really really need some of the new features.

For the most part, a11 is under-the-hood stuff. There are

no fireworks this time out.

URL: http://dead-souls.net/code/alpha/">http://dead-souls.net/code/alpha/

Major changes:

-------------------

- Fixed bug in router code that created problems when muds

  originating from the same ip connected and reconnected.

- Added commands: files, doctool, showfuns, createfix, findfun,

  pk, find, chanremove, chancreate.

- Got rid of confusing null long desc on doors when initfixed or reloaded.

- Got rid of a null error message in reply command when the target

  is missing.

- Fixed problem in help daemon that prevented race help from displaying.

- Revolvers reimplemented.

- Driver options now output verbose warnings about inherited function

  conflicts and unused variables if you use local_options.debug at

  compile time.

- Eliminated various function conflicts in lib files.

- true() and false() now can take any number of arguments, and always

  return 1 and 0, respectively.

- Fixed bug in "home" command.

- mudos.cfg now has a time to swap value of 0, to disable

  swapping. I've seen now more than one driver crash due to

  a swap bug, and I'm not sure what the problem is, so until I do

  know, swapping will be disabled by default.

- Added RELOAD_D for objects that need to somehow get

  themselves reloaded without incurring recursion problems.

- ROUTER_D now resets every 25 hours or so.

- The banish command now has an "-s" option to banish offensive

  substrings from names.

- Corrected problem in addraces command that distorted which races

  could be used by players.

- Modified make_workroom so that newbie creators who hose their

  workroom can "restore workroom" without first having backed it up.

- Fixed bug in snoop command that caused bizarre situation when

  snooping yourself using your capitalized name.

-Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

Hiya folks,

I've released a public domain version of Dead Souls

based on the 2.1.1 release.

It is Dead Souls II, and you can read more about it here:

http://dead-souls.net/ds-II-faq.html">http://dead-souls.net/ds-II-faq.html

-Crat

http://dead-souls.net

[cratylus]

Alpha 16 is out. As usual, you can check out the notable

changes on the release notes: http://dead-souls.net/RELEASE_NOTES">http://dead-souls.net/RELEASE_NOTES

Please be aware that the groupmod help file contains an error, and

should read like this:

 Syntax: groupmod [-a|-r] GROUP NAME

               groupmod [-c|-d] GROUP

For the curious, this is the help text for the groovy new mudconfig command:

Modifies various system settings.

Examples:

mudconfig autowiz [ yes | no ]

mudconfig locked [ yes | no ]

mudconfig justenglish [ yes | no ]

mudconfig justhumans [ yes | no ]

mudconfig encumbrance [ yes | no ]

mudconfig pk [ yes | no ]

mudconfig compat [ yes | no ]

mudconfig retain [ yes | no ]

mudconfig maxcommands [ yes | no ]

mudconfig defaultparse [ yes | no ]

mudconfig disablereboot [ yes | no ]

mudconfig maxip <max connections per IP>

mudconfig monitor <monitoring level, 0 to 2>

mudconfig newbielevel <max newbie level>

mudconfig offset <offset from gmt in seconds>

mudconfig extraoffset <offset from GMT in hours>

mudconfig resets <interval between resets>

mudconfig router [ on | off ]

mudconfig startroom <filename of start room>

mudconfig intermud [ enable | disable | restrict | unrestrict | reset ]

See also: admintool

The convenient part is that it not only changes the

config file, it also reloads the appropriate subsystems in order to

make the changes take effect immediately (where applicable).

-Crat

http://dead-souls.net