ESTIMATED RELEASE: Sunday, Feb 4 2001
MOTTO: Computers are not to be trusted.

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CHANGES FOR A49

COMPATIBILITY: This version brings about some unpleasant changes made necessary by the behaviour of certain hackers. Your old characters should, in general, be compatible. However, any character which moves from one soul ID to another will be marked a modder/cheater on the new machine. Hence, characters are no longer 'portable'

Please read the release notes below for other odious changes :-)

* [bugfix] Fixed the 10x rating reporting to the guild pages. (oops).

* [bugfix] Fixed the IPX LAN play mode (used to claim you had lost your connection)

* [bugfix] Turns out the server "noBleep" rule was only working if you had your bleeper turned on. This explains why I am still having to banish so many people from my server for language violations.

* [bugfix] Also turns out that the check for 'invisible' skins was only made at the map level and not the scene level (sigh). Anyway, this might stop oden.bmp from crashing people, but I don't know for sure.

* [bugfix] Magical Effects are now drawn in their entirety (right up to, but not including, the guidelines). You can thank Josh for catching this.

* NEW SPELL AND ATTACK GRAPHICS. Courtesy of our hero, Josh!

* NEW CHARACTERS NOW DEFAULT TO NON-PKER. I think the time is right to make this change. I don't want anyone being surprised by the PK experience.

* PK CHOICE CONFIRMATION DIALOG. There is one more dialog each time you create a character. It reminds you of the consequences of your PK choice and gives you a chance to back out. (surprise!)

* CHANGE TO SCRIPT CONDITIONAL. Those of you familiar with the "Qword" conditional, and who have been discomfited by the fact that you cannot have a space character in the word... well, you can be happy again.

You still can't use a space, but if you use a "^" symbol (shift-6 on a USA keyboard), I will pretend it is a space.

Hence:

1: What is your favorite color?
ASK 30
IF Qred^orange, @isRedOrange
IF Qred, @isRed
...

So "red orange" will be detected (note that if they type "red^orange" it will actually NOT trigger the conditional, so I hope you weren't in love with the ^ symbol!)

* ONE MORE CHANGE TO THE Qword CONDITIONAL. It is now case insensitive. So you can type "red orange" "rEd ORANge" etc and it will still match. Again, I hope this doesn't break any existing worlds.

* ONE THING TO NOTE ABOUT THOSE CHANGES is really nothing new, but make sure you check things in the proper order. For example, doing this:

IF Qred, @isRed
IF Qred^orange, @isRedOrange

will NEVER go to @isRedOrange because the first test will always trigger before the second test gets evaluated. (since red is a subset of red orange)

* NO LOSS OF XP IN MULTIPLE AFK KILL ENVIRONMENT. Say you go afk, and some hoser comes along and PK attacks you and kills you. Yes, you'll lose half your XP/PP.

Now say he rezzes you and then attacks you again. This time you WON'T lose half your XP/PP.

He can keep killing you as much as he likes, and your XP/PP will stay unchanged.

Until you start fighting back or otherwise show you are not really AFK.

I know this doesn't completely stop a snert from irritating you, but it's a tiny step forward I think.

* PKers CAN NO LONGER STUN. Actually, no spell which causes loss of magic or hand can be used by one human on another any more. Sometimes petitions work, but don't let that fool you into thinking you have any REAL power :-)

* OOOPS. More than one person has asked me where they enter the 'server rules' in their MIX server. I knew it was a bit dodgy hiding that under the MSG button, but I didn't notice until just now that I hadn't even labeled the edit window. So now, that third edit window is no longer labelled "Static" and is, instead, labelled "Server Rules"

And THAT, is where you enter the server rules.

* BAD NEWS FOR PORTABLE HEROES. If you move a character file from one machine to another (or otherwise change your soul number), the character will be marked a modder. I wanted to avoid this, but it has become inevitable.

* BAD PET NEWS FOR CHEAT/MODDERS. To avoid other nasty problems of late, Cheater/Modder characters can no longer capture or use pets at all. Existing pets will be lost when used.

* PET STATS IN PERCENTAGES. Instead of absolute values.