ESTIMATED RELEASE: right this second
MOTTO: Fiddly Bits.

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CHANGES FOR A50

* COMPATIBILITY: World Developers who depend on the ART folder files: joshBoots, joshSwords, joshStaffs, and joshHelmets will need to copy these files to their world's ART folder before upgrading to A50.

* [bugfix] Shakespearean insult "****ered" removed for compatibility with noBleep server rule.

* [bugfix] You can now equip to your heart's content while on the map. (not in a scene)

* REINSTALLING WINDOWS should no longer lose your soul ID (and hence no longer cause old characters to get marked as modders after doing that.) Some other HD recovery from crashes might benefit from this as well. Likewise a 100% backup of your WoS installation, moved to another machine, might also allow you to move from one machine to another. None of this is intended to allow you to simultaneously use the same character on two machines. It is just to help you recover from unexpected drive crashes and windows upgrades.

* ADDITIONAL HACKER LOCKOUT THINGIES. Yes, even more sorts of backdoor fiddling with characters will be detected, but also I will now prevent you from accidentally reincarnating a hacked character (and thereby extending your hacker lockout to infinite periods of time).

Plus I hope to have fixed a sign-extension problem which led to longer than anticipated lockouts in the case of multiple hacks. I naively hope this ends my anti-hacker code development. Though I think I already know what looms next on the horizon...

* SIMPLE CUT SCENE SUPPORT. I haven't actually TESTED this yet... so consider it to be flakey until you tell me otherwise. If a scene is designated a 'cut' scene then the heroes in that scene are invisible (they are actually there, just not painted, so when the scene script finishes they will be able to use items and hit each other - though still invisible. Hence the expected use of a cut scene is to END it as soon as you have delivered your plot point, possibly even using the GOTO SCENE command to move to a new scene where the heroes will show up (or another cut scene if that helps you organize your thoughts better). I suppose none of that makes any sense. Just visualize the simplest change I could possibly make and that's about all this does.

To flag a scene as a cut scene use "cut" in the scene's STYLE field, as in:

SCENE 27 bkgnd.jpg, CUT, "Bill's Dream", ...

This is actually the first real use of the style field. You should continue to use "SCENE" as the style for a normal scene, as in:

SCENE 27 bkgnd.jpg, SCENE, "Hogwarts", ...

Who knows what other styles may appear in the future...

* TEMPLE OF FORGETFULLNESS EXTENDS TO QUEST 16. (note that you'll need to forget both quests 15 and 16 to totally reply the lyssa/toad combined quest)