These are the release notes for Well of Souls Version A56 ACTUAL RELEASE: one week
ESTIMATED RELEASE: one week
MOTTO: "Hopefully fixed in A56!"
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CHANGES FOR A56
* COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! Except that you can no longer use skins which contain certain wacky characters. (Currently the wacky list is just [, ], and =.) But the writing is on the wall, so to speak) If your favorite skin has a wacky letter in it, just rename it without the wacky letter and you'll be de-wackied. Long time players will have heard me whine about wacky letters in skin names for a long time now. Of the 4000 skins I have collected, surprisingly few have these characters in them. But enough do that I suspect SOMEONE out there is going to feel hassled about this. Oddly enough this only affects your ability to pick a new skin for yourself. If you are already wearing a wacky skin, you'll squeak by for awhile with no problems. Still... expect more letters to become wacky over time, perhaps.
* [BUGFIX] The MP meter on the Train Pet dialog was not updating in real time (it updated only when the HP changed, not when just the MP changed). Hopefully it works better now (though it might be off a little when you're not the scene host)
* [BUGFIX] I found the long lost reason for why you sometimes showed up with the adventurer skin when entering someone else's scene. (or at least one way). If the scene host doesn't have your skin, he appends a '*' to the end on his map list, and unfortunately, I pass that back to you (and everyone else) and it gums up the works. In case I didn't already establish this, using a * in a skin name would be a bad idea in general and soon a VERY bad idea... For now I am removing the * entirely. How many people knew that * meant you didn't have the skin yet?
* [BUGFIX] The doublespeed option was completely broken in A55, so no items could give you doublespeed... Sorry about that. Gonna mean for slow walkin' until something more significant forces a push of A56.. (pray for a bigger bug!)
* [BUGFIX] The guidelines which magically re-appeared in the Book of Skins are gone again now :-)
* [BUGFIX] Element training.
* [BUGFIX] Being in the Well no longer prevents maxAFK timeout.
* [HACKFIX] No more illegal hand and magic ratios.
* [BUGFIX] TAKE command, no longer GIVEs when your pocket was empty.
* [BUGFIX] Invalid actor numbers should no longer be as incredibly dangerous as they were. Actors 0-9 should work now, but I'd avoid depending on actors above 7 until you're sure everyone has A56.
* [BUGHUNT] I'm still trying to track down why some people have their buttons disappear after awhile. In THIS version, when your buttons disappear, see if they are replaced with little green squares instead. (And let me know).
* [BUGFIX] Skin xfers were suddenly no longer resumable from where they left off, and always starting from the beginning again (very frustrating if you have a perennial dropped packet problem). While I understand why it broke (new world versioning), I can't swear it is fixed until I see it in action (requires both sides to be A56). Fingers crossed, it IS fixed in A56.
* NEW FEATURE: In Your Face QuickStart Popups. The quickstart instructions will now automatically pop up each time you run the game, for the next 3 times you run the game. You will see them just after your first incarnation that day. (that game run, I mean). So you will see a total of 3 of these unexpected popups in your entire life. Pretend you're a new user, since that's normally who will see this.
* NEW FEATURE: Skin Categories. For now, this is just on the book of skins, but soon enough the book of skins will be used to pick the skin of a new character. Use right-click in the category window to add a category, then DRAG skins from the skins list to the category of your choice. Click on a category to see only the skins you put in that category. Or click on "All Skins" to see.. um.. all skins you have.
Categories are a personal choice, and your categories are not seen by anyone else. The skin files themselves are still held all in one folder (the SKINs folder, of course). But that folder now gets a .INI file for each category you create.
The "List Uncategorized Skins" command is incredibly slow (if you have 4000 skins, I mean), but will be useful to you when organizing your categories over several sessions. BEar in mind that skins with funky characters in them ( '[', ']', and '=') are not categorizable, so it will confuse you when you THOUGHT you already categorized them and they keep coming back.
This is why I no longer let you select such skins to wear. But I keep listing them to remind you to either delete them or rename them.
The BoS is now a more 'standard looking' dialog (black and yellow etc) and has a couple new features in addition to the category stuff. Double-click on a skin name to open it with your favorite bitmap editor. Point in the preview area and see the credits as long as the mouse stays in the preview. In fact you only see the credits when you point, so that you can get a clear picture of either the credits or the skin itself.
* NEW FIGHT FEATURE: '*' As a world designer, in the FIGHT opcode, you used to have to choose between "fight the monsters from this part of the map" or "fight this specific list of monsters" But NOW you can have both. Just use "*" to mean "the usual map monsters" So:
FIGHT *, 1, -2
Would mean to fight the regular monsters from this area (same as having pushed the HUNT button) PLUS an evil monster 1, and a friendly (mercenary) monster 2.
If you fiddle with the FIGHT command(s) in your world's SCENE 2, then you should be able to have all sorts of interesting fights in response to just general HUNTs (not specific scenes, I mean). For example, a mercenary, or bounty hunter, or whatever who appears in regular hunt scenes based on randomness, tokeness, levelness, cookieness, etc. Only one * is necessary, additionals are ignored. The * represents a group of monsters, not an individual monster.
* NEW FEATURE: PASSWORD PROTECTED CHARACTERS. You asked for it, you finally got it, you'll be sorry you asked for it :-) Type "/password" after incarnating to set or change the password for your character. Thereafter you will need the password each time you incarnate that character.
CASE IS IMPORTANT and there is no way to recover your password if you forget it. So tread carefully..
To remove your password, type /password again and leave the edit boxes empty.
p.s. Give this feature a REAL GOOD WORKOUT on a character you don't care about. If it turns out to be buggy in A56, I don't want you to have ruined too much in the process.
* NEW FEATURE: WEAPON ELEMENTS. If a weapon is set to any element but 0 (and I hope you followed the A52 warnings, world designers, to set all your elements to 0), then the weapon will be 'of that element.' For example, a "Fire Sword" and will be most effective against the opposite element. The effect is pretty pronounced... so fire hits water about 50% better. fire hits fire about 90% worse. So an element-weapon is actually likely to be worse than a regular weapon, except when used against the proper element. I will, of course, have to avoid providing a weapon which makes it even easier to kill catapaults, of course. In fact, evergreen has NO elemental weapons yet, so that answers that! THis is for other world designers, not me I only tested this for the regular elements (1-7 in this case, since 0 is not legal here). In theory you could bind a weapon to one of your chaos elements, but it probably wouldn't be very exciting. Same as death, I guess.
* WORLD/THEME CAN OVERRIDE "misc32.bmp" art file. This lets you change the little teensy campfire and clashing shield animations shown on the main map.