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Patch A40
Our Motto: "What's the buzz? Tell me what's a happenin'"
Estimated Release: Late June
Release Date: 6/30/2000
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* COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! But resumable skin xfers won't work unless both players have upgraded.

* BUGFIX. You are no longer limited to a single 'equip' command while on MAP.

* BUGFIX. It *should* be impossible to see the notification "X casts <blank> on Y" unless the spell's actual name is <blank>. I gave the BOOK and SUMMON spells some goofy names since people didn't like BOOKn and SUMMONn (of course, you lose the sense of relative strength as a result).

* BUGFIX. Removed 30 second delay which occured in SOLO mode after selecting "Leave This World" during which time you were stuck looking at the rock, with no "solo or multiplayer" dialog

* BUGFIX. Closed a long overdue UI hole where *canceling* the "Solo or Multiplayer?" dialog after playing the game for awhile didn't return you to the main menu.

* BUGFIX. Healing a pet just as it dies completely should no longer apply your heal spell to an enemy - it should heal some random friend instead (whether they need it or not). As a corrolary to this, it is hoped that lagged moves can no longer result in a spell firing off the top of the screen.

* BUGFIX. Massive clicking before traveling through link point will no longer result in 'last click' occuring on the far side of the link.

* HUNT BUTTON (Thanks, F'nok) is the new way to start a fight with a monster. So, go stand on the map then push HUNT over and over until you get a fight. The more you use it, the higher your HUNTING SKILL and the easier it is to start a fight. Also, the better your hunting skill, the easier it is to walk long distances WITHOUT getting into a fight. (Plus, your use of the HUNT button is appreciated by mister bandwidth)

* AUTOMATIC WAY_POINT CALCULATIONS. This was a bit of work and it took me awhile to come up with an algorithm to do it (and who knows how buggy it will be! And don't expect miracles!) Anyway, now if you click somewhere on the map, your character should automatically avoid impassable terrain on his or her way to the destination. If you use the /terrain feature you can see the path it will take.

I added an option to the Book of Options to let you turn this off in case it turns out to be too buggy to survive waiting for the next update.

This is harder than it sounds, so please don't nag me when it can't figure out a path that looks self evident to you. You're smarter than WoS, big deal .

* PET STORES. I added the first cut support for this (only store in evergreen is the BeastMaster's lair in MacGuyver castle). World designers take note:
1.) Make a monster in the monster table - those are the stats which will be used when fighting.
2.) Make an entry in the ITEMS table for each pet to be sold. Set the itemClass to 200 and the "arg3 - image number" to the MONSTER ID of the monster in the monster table which represents the pet.
3.) Make a scripted scene for the pet store and use the OFFER command (*not* OFFER2) and call out the item number of the pet. Do not confuse the pet item number with the monster ID number. Do not confuse stats from the item table with stats from the monster table. Oh go ahead and be confused... see if I care!

Please see the items.txt file of Evergreen for an example.

* MONSTERS CAN NOW HEAL. If a monster is of the life element or has access to life spells by virtue of its amazing wisdom, it will now preferentially HEAL (or even RESURRECT!) a team-mate. Actually, resurrection will probably only work with your pet resurrecting you or a team-mate. Monsters will probably waste resurrection on friends doomed already to leave the scene.

IN general, a monster will heal any friend who is less than half full on its HP.

* CHANGED BASIC WOS TIMING. Borrowing a leaf from what I did in Rocket Club, I have totally changed the way the WoS timing works. As a result, either you will experience a more responsive WoS than you ever though possible, with never a goofy 'hidden dialog until you press ALT' *or* it will be even more horrible than you can possibly imagine. I hope the former :-)

To the degree that WoS is smoother, however, other apps that you run at the same time might be chunkier...

* FIDDLED WITH NAME AREA. Various changes here.. you can optionally turn off the pet 'owner tags'; pet's now have green shadows; long player names should not get clipped; pet's have "samsyn's green jelly" as their name instead of "green jelly"; a monster's life meter will not look empty just because they have only a teensy fraction of life left.

* RESUMABLE SKIN TRANSFERS. After only a year or two of promising this, I have finally gotten around to implementing it. I think A40 skin xfers will still be more or less compatible with A39, but only A40 users will see the benefit of 'resumability'

(what's resumability, you ask? Imagine someone enters the game with a skin you dont have. You get the first 5K of it downloaded and then they leave. It used to be that you would have to get that 5K again the next time you meet them. But now it should pick up where it left off so that EVENTUALLY you will get their skin, even if they hop in and out like a jackrabbit (or you do.. or your connection does). And Lurch is the official squeaky wheel on this one, so thank him for the grease

* EXCESS ELEMENT/HAND TRAINING IMPROVES ATTACK. This was somewhat true before, but more true now. If you are trained to level 9 in the water element, and you cast a level 4 water spell, you are 5 levels 'overtrained' and that makes the wimpy level 4 spell much more powerful. Saying that another way, when you first reach level 4 in water and earn the level 4 water spell, it hurts... oh.. 20 units. If nothing changes but your water training goes to level 9, that same spell will hurt.. say.. 80 units. The situation is similar but different for hand weapons. In that case, you see an improvement for every level above 5, no matter what the minimum level of the weapon itself is.

* CHARGE METERS HAVE GREATER EFFECT. Those little charge meters under the HP and MP meters (which discharge after your attack and recharge a few seconds later) now have a more obvious effect on your attack. Still not a HUGE effect, but more of a 50% range difference. That is to say, I think you will actually NOTICE the effect now, whereas before no one believed me that it made any difference at all. The charge meter, by the way, becomes less useful as you become more powerful (and need/deserve it less). So if you are trained to level 9 already, the charge effect will be minor.

* TRAINING ABOVE LEVEL 9 IS MORE EFFECTIVE. You know how you can keep training above level 9, but just don't see it? And how I keep telling you that it actually does make you a little more powerful to keep training? Well, that turns out to be true now. I also show your 'fractional training' on the training screens.

* DIRECTSOUND DELAYED. Prior to this version, even if you had "Disabled All Sound" from the SOUND menu, I would still instantiate the DirectSound object, only to disable it a moment later. (d'oh!) Now, I check the flag in the correct order and do not instantiate it at all if you had disabled the option before running the program

(translation:

1.) run WoS,
2.) "Disable all Sound" and
3.) shutdown WoS then run it again).

Following that prescription will have WoS never call into the DirectSound API at all. HOWEVER, it is still linked to the DirectSound DLL, so I imagine microsoft will still have a finger into your sound card.

Oh, this was to address the complaint that WinAMP didn't like to share the sound card with WoS. Who knows if it will have any effect :-)

* HONOR WARNING... Not this version, or perhaps not even in the next, but *eventually* I will be limiting the max level your character can achieve based on various metrics. You can expect a 'cheat' character to be fairly severly limited (say to 80% of the max level). It's your choice to make the trade-off decision for gameplay difficulty vs high level.

Similarly, you get to choose how much you want to swear in the game. While not specifically censoring you, your use of blue language will be measured and a foul enough mouth will cut your max level by a degree proportional to your foul-ness. So.. you see.. you have free speech, but you also have consequences. Just like real life (ought to be).

I intend to be pretty vague about how I handle the profanity metric, so don't bother asking me what words are allowed. You only need to worry about this feature if you are regularly potty-mouthed. Going a while with no violations will cure you of the limits. (likewise, a sufficient stream of off-color remarks might in some cases *lower* your current level.)

If you really need to swear, I advise not doing it in a character whose level you are trying to max out. I also measure your 'spamming' and will factor it into the overall determination of "dishonor via chat" which will set the number of levels you lose as a result.

My dishonor-architecture is that in each metric category is a variable number of levels you could lose as a result. Your total lost levels is the sum of the lost levels from each metric. (hope that sentence makes sense to you )

* NEW OPTION: ENABLE NO JUNK. This lets you refuse to pick up junk left behind by a dead monster. By 'junk' we mean anything more than 10 levels beneath you. (should I make that even tighter?).

* PETS LIKE JUNK FOOD. Don't throw that junk armor away too soon though. If you toss it to your pet (bring your pet into the scene and then give it the junk just like you were giving it to a friend), your pet will eat it and gain a little attack/defense as a result.

In A40, it gains 20% of the armor's effectiveness (permanently) and you can keep feeding it until it reaches 2x the standard A/D for its level.

The Pet dialog shows current/max for the pet's A/D values.

Please note that this is now the ONLY way of raising a pet's A/D, so feed it some armor each time it levels up.

* MAGIC USERS STRONGER. This is a fairly small set of changes, so don't expect huge differences. Basically:

1.) Humans are more susceptible to magic than they were,
2.) you no longer pay the 'pet penalty' when casting ALL spells,
3.) staves are a bit stronger.

The greatest imbalance will still appear in PKer battles, so I am still interested in your statistics for such fights.

* ADDED THE "CAN'T WALK HERE [x] CURSOR" to the mini-map.

* CHANGING UI 'THEMES' (via the book of options) now reloads button bar. Plus the buttons themselves are now universally overrideable by theme.

* PURGE SOUL now purges pets and portfolio as well.

* MUSIC.INI file has a few new entries (read the file itself for details) I still don't support play-lists, however.

* MIX 1.08 BUNDLED WITH WOS A40. From now on you will get a shiny copy of MIX with every copy of WOS. And it will be the shiny NEW version of MIX as well. (don't get your hopes up, it's not all *that* amazingly different). MIX is small enough that it is lost in the noise of the WOS download, and there is a real advantage to its being present for everyone. So, running your own MIX server just got about as hassle-free as it ever will get.

This DOES mean you will have to shutdown BOTH WoS AND MIX when applying a patch.

* MAPS TABLE EXTENSIONS. Now, I KNOW you're going to like THIS. World designers who are familiar with the MAPS table will quake in their boots but DO NOT WORRY, the new FIFTH COLUMN is optional. It is the MAP FLAGS column and if you don't have one, it is assumed you have no flags turned on.

What is a MAP FLAG you ask? Well, only the key to the coolest and hippest WoS upgrade of all time, of course! MAP flags allow the world designer to set certain rules which apply to the specified map. With no rules, things are as they were in A39. The rule numbers are powers of two so you can add them together to combine rules.:

[1] Pet vs Pet. Any pets called out on this map will target the pets of other players.

[2] Can use pets against PKers (or against anyone if no safe haven on map). Pets will feel free to bite other players for you. (eventually they will pay attention to your guild/team and only bite strangers). Pets are stupid about casting ALL spells, however and if the 'all' a human, you will get hurt as well.

[4] NO SAFE HAVEN. A map with this rule is a dangerous area and you are at risk of PK whether your character is a PKer or not. You have NO PROTECTION on such a map. (world designers must use this carefully to achieve their desired results)

[8] SAFE HAVEN. A map with this rule protects you from all PK attacks no matter what. There is no PKing allowed at all on such a map. Note that this supersedes rule 4 if both are set. (Remember: keep avoiding modified quest files...)

I think a real pokemon arena map would combine rules 1 and 8. Then the players would simply be spectators and watch their pets battle it out.

* INLINE TOKEN DEFINITIONS. I don't know about other world designers, but I found it a constant source of irritation that the TOKENS table was so 'far away'. You can still use the TOKENS table, but now you can also define tokens in line in your scene with an opcode like this

TOKEN 43, "This is token number 43"

What I do then, is have a separate file for each 'quest' I declare the tokens for that quest at the front of the file, followed by the scenes for that quest. Oh, so organized now. Lovely. The downside is you might get confused and cross-number your tokens. If so, the "/funpak" thingy will show an error message when the world is loaded.

My organizational schema is: Quest 32 is in file "QuestScenes320.txt" which has tokens 320-329 and scenes 320-329 (not all of which are necessarily used, but ten scenes and tokens per quest feels sufficient - you can always break it down, and nothing prevents you from testing for any token in any scene)

The only reason, I remind you, that you define a token at all (it will work whether you define it or not), is so the personal history has something to read. But it also acts as a sort of outline for keeping your thoughts clear.

* PK WARNING GLYPHS ON MINI-MAP. Just above the map's nameplate you might see some little face icons.

If you see the red devil player face, it means you are in an unsafe area where you can be PKed by ANYBODY, whether you are a PKer or not.

If you see the yellow smiley player face, it means you are in an area where no player can harm you, no matter what your PK status. (if you see neither of these faces, then it is normal PK rules with the 10 level limit, level 40 protection, hit first, etc.)

Next to that icon you might also see a red devil pet face (use your imagination). This means that pets in this area will fight other pets (and maybe fight you, too)

In evergreen, these glyphs will only appear in the PET ARENA and the PK ARENA (which you get to via the town of WESTIN)

* REWORKED EQUIP SCREEN: 'ALL' and 'BEST' BUTTONS. Hopefully they are more logical now.

* BLESSINGS INCREASE YOUR CHANCE OF MAGNIFICENT ATTACK. Total Blessings minus total curses is your blessCount (count your blessings, get it?) If it is positive, then you are MORE likely to get a mag. attack. If it is negative you are LESS likely. If you can convince everyone in the game to bless you, it will make a fairly big difference. But normally you will only see a couple percent variation.

* PET vs PET. Covered already, but cool enough to get a separate bullet. Only in the PET ARENA (well, also in the PK ARENA but there they will bite you as well)

* PKER vs PKER. Covered already, but in the PK ARENA anybody can hit anybody at any time, pets will hit pets and people (but not their masters). (note, I still don't have formal PKer duels with rules, nor is there any scorekeeping yet).

* JOSH MONSTER TWEAKS. In addition to the new pets you can buy (which were SUPPOSED to be a secret until this release, but someone just HAD to blab about it :-), Josh has provided some tweaks for existing monsters.