ACTUAL RELEASE: Tuesday
ESTIMATED RELEASE: May 22nd? Tuesday?

MOTTO: "No, that's MY xp, thank you very much!"

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READ THIS!!!!
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Remember: if you have too much money or stuff, get rid of it (Dow Bones, a friend, or a pet) *before* upgrading to A55 since if it doesn't fit in your pocket/wallet, then you will lose it soon enough.

Your wallet holds 20K + 10K per level > 1 or one million GP at level 99.
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CHANGES FOR A55

* COMPATIBILITY: Marginal! You might see a modder warning when trying to play worlds other than Evergreen until the world author updates their world to be compatible with A55. (See world Dev forum for info).

ALSO your wallet and pockets will get smaller, so if you are carrying more than you need in gold or items, get rid of it before upgrading (or you'll lose it completely). I mean, buy some stock, and feed your pets your spare armor. See below for new portage limits.

* [BUGFIX] Weird mis-use of the "mirror" skin no longer causes your Equip/Pet screens to crash you.

* [BUGFIX] Apparently most of the stuff I put in before to prevent the use of hacked pets was, in fact, not even working. Silly me. It should work better now. You *will* lose your pet BWs now...

* SKIN UPDATES BY JOSH. Josh has been up to his zero-defect skin tweaking tricks again, so expect your old favorites to be even less old and even more favorite. (If you're like me, you might want to archive the older versions since, for example, the new assassin rocks, but the old assassin rocked, too...) But don't let Josh see you hanging on to an old version!

* DEFERRED LOADING OF IE. In theory, the embedded copy of IE won't get loaded until just before you use it. This might speed up your load time and/or performance. Until you use the web, then you will have to wait longer. You'll probably see some ugly red "could not load browser" window until it gets loaded. My experience with IE tells me this is a somewhat risky change, so please let me know if IE is now broken for you (and wasn't before, please).

* NEW QUEST (assuming I don't forget the link file this time!). This makes the 'cold wolves' and the 'lost dudes' into a real quest, plus an old friend has something new to say...

* NEW PORTAGE LIMITS. This is sort of like not being able to carry as much, but I think you'll see it isn't much of a limit. For each item (unique item ID number), you can only carry as many at once as your level plus one. So at level 10, you can carry 11 whatevers. But that's 11 of EVERYTHING, not just 11 things total. At level 99 you are back to where you were before with room for 100 of everything in your pants.

* NEW WALLET SIZE. Many of you have asked to be able to carry more than a million GP in your wallet. Not only are you NOT getting that (you losers!) you are getting ANTI-THAT. Your new character's wallet will hold only 20K GP. It then expands another 10K for each level up. So at level 99 you are back to being a millionaire in your wallet.

* NEW WAY TO BECOME A MODDER: Mess with your computer's calendar. Be sure your calendar is set correctly when you create a new character. Your character won't be able to travel 'into the past' any more. I imagine this will inadvertently affect some nice people who just haven't paid attention to their computer's calendar. This could also be an issue when moving characters between PCs. It will warn you before actually marking the character, so back out if you see the calendar warning.

* NEW MAP FLAG: No Pets. A map with this flag set will not support the use of pets (though you can still tame as normal, you just can't summon)

* NEW MAP FLAG: No Eavesdrop. You will no longer hear-via-eavesdrop if you or the other person is on a map with this flag set. You can still whisper, shout, IM, etc. across this boundary. It's not a cone of silence, just a reduction of background noise.

* NEW SERVER RULE: "noPets" removes the ability to summon pets at any time on that server. I don't know if anyone asked for this, it was just easy to implement It's optional, of course, as are all server rules.

* NEW THING: SHARE POINTS. I keep track of the number of times you hit monsters and establish your portion of the total 'share points' which are then used at the end of the fight to share the total XP/GP. More on this later.

* EXPERIENCE AND GOLD ARE NOW SHARED PROPORTIONALLY TO LEVEL. OK, it's a done deal. Now we'll see how we REALLY felt about easy levelling... sure everyone *said* it was ruining the game... It is no longer to your advantage to fight alongside a more powerful partner... since if they take part in the battle, they will get the lion's share of the XP/GP.

* NEW CHEAT COMMAND "/share" will enable a little message explaining what your share of the XP/GP was, so you can compare notes (yes, I expect this to be buggy and require several patches to get right...) Each time you hit a monster, you generate N share points, where N is your current level. So a level 5 player generates 5 share points per 'bash' while a level 99 player generates 99 share points per bash. Your share of the reward is equal to your percentage of the total share points. So if you contributed 10 share points, but the total pool was 345, then you only get 10/345 ths of the total XP/GP. (i.e., not much).

* SO HOW CAN YOU ACTUALLY HELP NEWBIE PLAYERS? I dunno. Stand by their side and just heal them if they need it (healing them *will* earn share points for YOU, so they won't want you to heal them when they don't need it. This was so heal-only characters wouldn't be denied XP.)

* SO, HOW CAN YOU HASSLE PEOPLE? Well, I think the big scream now will be: "99ers are coming into my scene and grabbing all the XP so I get practically none!" As a non-PKer you can keep them out (lock party/scene). As a PKer I guess they could do the same thing before merely by killing you in the first place, so it's not much of a change. The life of the young PKer is supposed to suck, anyway.

* NO MORE MODDING OF MONSTER PLACEMENT AND LINKS WITHOUT GETTING MARKED A MODDER. And thank you, junior hacker kid, for adding this hassle to everyone's life.

* NEW 'CHEAT' CODE "/outline" puts a little 3D outline around the buttonbar buttons. This is just to help debug people with 'disappearing buttons' If your buttons disappear, try using this command when starting the game and see if the outlines disappear as well (then LET ME KNOW). Also, if your buttons disappear, type "/funpak" and look for error messages.

This does NOT mark your character as a cheater.

* NEW MAIN MENU OPTION: "Check on line for new worlds." This is now right at the TOP of the MAIN MENU, so people have no excuse :-) It seems to work with the following caveats: After you're done, it takes you to the SOLO mode 'pick world' screen, which I am going to pretend is a feature (encouraging you to try the new world in solo mode first). Also, Monkey Town is broken, and something about Lord FireFox's challenge's website locks up my copy of IE (and maybe yours too).

* NEW OPTION: AUTO-OPEN IM WINDOW ON INCOMING WHISPERS. If you have this turned on, any time someone whispers to you, it will open an IM popup window (if there is not one already). It also moves the keyboard focus to the newly opened window (not if the window was already open). I find this irritating and unnerving, but some people like this sort of thing. It defaults to OFF. (business as usual)

* NEW GLITZ. I copied the channel label code from Arcadia to WoS just for Azaman. With one little change, I remove the label if your chat window is too small, giving you as much space as possible for chat.

* SOUL DIARY CHANGES: Shows #PKs, and the GUILD button now opens your official guild page (last seen uniform) if appropriate. The field where you used to manually enter a guild URL is now a 'public comment' field where you can stick something like "I am married to Glendar the Magnificent"

* NEW COLOR IN THE BOOK OF COLORS: "Guild Text" for the color of people wearing the same uniform as you (but without hats. If you have given them a buddy hat, it will use the buddy color instead).

* GOTO SCENE COMMAND MAY NO LONGER BOOT PARTY MEMBERS.... (do I sound confident?)

* ADDITIONAL PROTECTION AGAINST HAND/ELEMENT TRAINING HACKS. If you are in the habit of using a gameHack to poke a bit of extra PP into your training, you should probably stop now.

* NEW FEATURE FOR SPELLS: RequiredToken. A spell which would otherwise appear in the "learn spells" dialog, can now be 'deferred' until the player has a particular token. see spells.txt documentation for details. You can thank Loric (and my apologies to anyone suggesting this or similar in the past when I was not yet receptive.)

* SCENE FIGHTS CAN NOW BE 'STICKY' That is to say, you cannot flee unless you wait 20 seconds without hitting. Hence, you will die if you are not ready for that fight. To get this effect, use the "FIGHT2" command in a scene (it does not apply to regular monster fights). UNlike PK Attacks, you can also leave immediately after winning the fight, if you like. FIGHT2 works just like FIGHT only it is sticky. Use it for big boss fights.

* ALL ITEMS ARE BOOTS (so to speak). What I mean here is that any item can imbue you with special terrain capabilities. See items.txt for details (spellbinding now has a sub-argument). Individual items are still limited to a single effect, but you could equip the "ring of firewalking" and the "shield of water crossing" at the same time as the boots of "incredible velocity" and all 3 effects would be present.

* QUEST LANGUAGE VIRTUAL MACHINE ACCELLERATED. Heh heh, sort of pretentious to call it a VM, but why not? I used to limit the execution speed to 10 instructions per second (not for any particularly good reason) and now I don't. The 10/sec limit was most noticeable if your script had a lot of branchig instructions and deferred actors. You would see actors pop in with noticable delays from the start of the scene. For the host, that should now all be pretty instantaneous. Of course, for the slaves, the individual actor appearances are still delayed by whatever lag is present, so it might not make much difference there. But overall, this is a good thing. You still need to watch out for infinite loops, however, and such loops will have a bigger impact on the cpu load should they occur.

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