Well of Souls
(c) 1998 -2005 Synthetic Reality Co.

You have found the Well of Souls REALLY OLD RELEASE NOTES PAGE

If you were looking for more recent release notes, you want: recent release notes.

If you were looking for even OLDER release notes, you want: even older notes:

Otherwise, keep reading here to see positively prehistoric release notes.

7/7/2002 ALPHA 69 INCLUDE:
COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! (In the sense that your old characters still work) but incompatible with other versions, so once you uprgade you only see the existence of other people who have upgraded.

BUGFIX: Fixes broken scene lock. (also known as the "I am too scared to PK" bug.)

BUGFIX: Character's with spaces in their name may now petition to join (and leave) guilds.

Cheat characters may now throw money and items to ACTORS (important for some new quests, and for world developers who must depend on cheat characters to get work done).
New Slash Command: "/web" opens web panel (showing previously fetched web page). I couls have sworn this was already in there. My apologies if it is redundant.
FLEE is slightly easier than in A68, based upon a SECRET ALGORITHM. But still harder than it was two versions ago.
Bugfix: Fixed a bug with the "HIDDEN_CLASS nn" command which could trigger the hack detector.

6/16/2002 ALPHA 68 INCLUDES:
COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! Well, sort of. You will only be able to play with other people who have A68. However, all your old un-hacked characters should continue to work (and most hacked characters will probably also continue to work, but hopefully some will break :))
SOUL MIGRATION MEASURED. I've added a memory of the soul ID each character is created under (look in the Karma section of the Diary) so you can sort of track characters which are being shared around.

Of course, this also affects characters which are imported/upgraded to a GS.
NEW SERVER RULE: noMigration.
A server may now optionally demand that only characters created by the same soulID can be played on that server.

Note that this is also akin to "only characters created in A68 or later" since no migration information exists for older characters.

This is sort of that "full character wipe" some people have asked for in the past, but implemented as an optional server rule.

Good for tournaments and such.
THIS TIME FOR SURE you can enter an unlocked camp by clicking on any member of that camp. Honest. For real.
DEFAULT SKINS FOLLOW GENDER. This was a tough bug to find. Thanks to those who stood in a scene for a long time to help.
NO FIRST-USE OF CHEAT CODES in a PK Attack scene.
NEW EVENT IN TOWN: GIVE STUFF TO ACTORS
OK, you can now toss items and cash to 'actors' in a scene and, if the scene supports it, something might happen. Don't start doing this at random (unless you want to get rid of items or money) until you're pretty sure the world you are in supports it.

World Developers:

1.) It is only sense when the scene has 'ended' (just like the right-click on actor event). It then brings the scene back to life at a specially-named label.

2.) The label name is @eventActorGiveN where N is the actor number used in the ACTOR command. When that label is called, several stock cookies will have been set for you.

3.) The stock cookies are:

#<item.id> either the item ID or 0, if it was gold.

#<item.goldGiven> The amount of gold given, or 0 if it was an item.

Since item.id will have been set (overwriting any old value it might have had, the as-yet-to-be-mentioned item accessor cookies will refer to the item just given)

Interestingly enough, I think anyone in the scene can do the giving (though the computations are only done on the scene host -- the only one who runs the script engine).
NEW STOCK COOKIES: #<item.xxxx>
These cookies let you get information about the 'current' item (set by new itemGIVE event or by you manually setting item.id)

#<item.id> read/write Sets current item id for the remaining cookies (which are read-only)

#<item.name> its name
#<item.class> its class number
#<item.price> its price (in store)
#<item.level> its level
#<item.element> its element number
#<item.attack> its A points
#<item.defense> its D points
#<item.hp> hp it gives when consumed
#<item.mp> mp it gives when consumed
NEW STOCK COOKIES: #<monster.xxx>
#<monster.id> (read/write, the id #) Set this first and then all the other cookies refer to this. It is the ID # of the monster in question. If you set to a value outside the legal range, it will use index 0 instead (the so-called monster multiplier entry)

It is also set each time a monster is killed, so it is likely to be the id of the last monster killed (not necessarily in this scene)

The rest of these cookies are read-only

#<monster.name> its name
#<monster.dex> its dexterity
#<monster.agi> its agility
#<monster.sta> its stamina
#<monster.str> Its strength
#<monster.wis> its wisdom
#<monster.level> Its level number
#<monster.element> Its element (number)#<monster.hp> its max HP points
#<monster.mp> Its max MP points
#<monster.attack> its A points
#<monster.defense> its D points
#<monster.expPts> How much XP it pays.
#<monster.gold> how much GP it pays.
#<monster.alignment> monster's alignment
#<monster.skin> skin name of monster
NEW STOCK COOKIES: #<scene.xxx>
These are all read-only and apply to the current scene only.

#<scene.id> ID number of scene
#<scene.bkgnd> bkgrnd jpeg (might have path info)
#<scene.fx> FX number
#<scene.weather> weather number
DICE COMMANDS FROM ARCADIA
/dice 3d12 (rolls 3 12-sided dice and sends results to everyone)

/pdice 2d6 (rolls 2 6-sided dice and shows results only to the roller)

so, nds is n s-sided dice (with some limits) and if you give no argument at all, it repeats last combination.
CANNOT FLEE WHILE TARGET OF ATTACK
If someone has already placed their move against you (including monsters), you cannot run away before it hits you. Just like a real game. I intended this for monster situations, but I imagine this will turn into some big PK deal which will have to be dealt with in yet another release.
4/13/2002 ALPHA 67 INCLUDES:
* COMPATIBILITY: Excellent!
* Humans may not possess chaos spells. With luck this doesn't break any worlds...
* Changing your status to ghost using a memory hacker.... 'nuff said.
* Shop window position remembered
* Enter camp by clicking on any member of camp, but only if not actually locked by host.
* Scene clients will hopefully see actor 'jump to new position' instead of walk. (when so commanded by script, I mean)
* MONSTER GROUPS CAN BE NON-RANDOM. I hope this makes you happy. in the GROUPS table, use entry 0 (zero) to enable this, as in:
0, 1
then ALL your monster groups will be non-random. You don't get to turn it on and off on a per group basis.
Existing worlds should not be using entry 0, so they should be unaffected (their monster groups will continue to be random).
* A WORLD CAN HAVE UP TO 88 CHARACTER CLASSES. There is some cause to worry here, as people will need to upgrade to A67 before it is completely safe. Frankly... well... I dunno. We'll see, I guess :-)
* NEW COOKIES
#<str.uniform> Host's guild uniform
#<str.name> Host's name (redunant)
#<str.soul> Host's soul ID
(either "Soul n" or "XXXXXXXX")
* NO STRCAT COMMAND ADDED, because you can already do this:
SET test, #<test>new stuff added to end
* NEW SCRIPT COMMAND: STRCMP
Let's you compare two string values, similar to the 'c' function of the same name
STRCMP "apple", "zulu"
IF> @aComesAfterZ <-- wrong!
IF= @aIsSameAsZ <-- wrong!
IF< @aComesBeforeZ <-- correct!
The test is NOT case sensitive.
* NEW SCRIPT COMMAND: STRSTR
Not as powerful as the 'c' function of the same name, since you are not told WHERE the substring exists. But this lets you see if a string contains another string, as in
STRSTR "The Long String", "Long"
IF> @YesLongWasInTheLongString
The test is NOT case sensitive.
* Fixed a situation where someone could semi-permanently lower your maxHP to 1 (sadly, they can still do it temporarily - via memory hacking, but you should now recover with next incarnation.)
* NEW MAP FLAG = 262144 HIDE_MAP_LINKS.
When set, the little white link squares on the mini map will NOT be seen until you have visited the link in question.
2/8/2002 ALPHA 66 INCLUDES:
This is mainly a bugfix and minor tweak release, with a dose of anti-hacker changes.
Tighter Security for World Versioning. World authors are encouraged to /version their worlds early in the development process.
New Map Flag: No PKer Resurrection (applied to most maps in Evergreen, but optional for other worlds.) This prevents PKer characters from casting the resurrection spell on other players.
File menu includes "Check on line for New Worlds" which allows you to browse and download worlds while still playing the game.
11/25/2001 ALPHA 64 INCLUDE:
RELEASED: 11/25/2001
MOTTO: A Questing We Will Go

NOTE: There was no version A63. A63 was used for pre-release testing. You should upgrade directly from A62 to A64, thank you!

DEVELOPER INFO: http://www.synthetic-reality.com/wosDev0.htm
GOLDEN SOULS: http://www.synthetic-reality.com/donate.htm
COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! Except:

1.) It is a play-incompatible upgrade, in the sense that you can only play with other people who have upgraded to A64. Earlier versions will be invisible to you. Your characters, for the most part, are unchanged (see below).

2.) Well.... world developers should take note that I have changed/repaired the AUTO_MAX command (in the levels.txt file) so that it generates *exactly* the min and max you specify. This means that MP/HP values for old worlds will all change (go up, in fact).

This will be most noticable in worlds which set the max Hp/Mp above 5000 or so, since before it was nigh impossible to autom_max to that level, while now there is almost no limit. (I think you'll run into math errors if you auto_max *too* high, so please keep it reasonable. What character class could possibly need more than 5000 HP without some sort of circular inflation going on?

Which is to say, I don't warranty the operation of the game for characters in excess of 5000 HP/MP., but auto_max will no longer be the cryptic thing it was.

Well, this affects ALL worlds which use the auto_max command, so I recommend checking into it, if you are a world developer.

IF YOU ARE JUST A PLAYER, you will notice (probably) that each character you incarnate under A63 for the first time might suddenly drop to 1HP. Just visit some healing location asap and you should be OK.
[Bug fix] scene client synchronization..

Hey, guess what! I finally found why laggy clients often miss the beginning part of the scene script! For example, coming in just after the Soul Brother healed everybody...

This version should be a bit more reliable in that regard... however the down side is that everyone will have to wait until the laggiest party member makes it into the scene. (well, I have a timeout, so you don't have to wait FOREVER, but still it probably means you will see the start of scene delayed a bit when in parties.. or PK-attacking). Those of you who are lobos (you hunt alone!) shouldn't notice a thing.
[Bug Fix] MJ discovered the property editor didn't show the proper number of available frames for "right-hand" equipment (well, and shields, and armor).
[Bug Fix] Woo hoo! Just found a place where I didn't have some range-checking. If you had more than 4096 skins in your skins folder, you were at risk of crashing pretty darn well! Most likely right when you opened your book of skins, but it could have happened at any time.

On a related note, when I added the optional MAGIC frame, I didn't update the guideline remover, so you'll see some guidelines in the upper frames until A63. The truth is a bit weirder than that, but this explanation will have to do for now.
SMALL MIX UPGRADE. For your convenience, banished IP numbers are now remembered after reboot.
NEW OPTION: Stop Web Stuff on Return to Game.

Someone WANTs it to do that, someone wants it to NOT do that. Now *you* get to choose. Default is to stop.

Now, I was joking before about the lying and everything, but I want you to know I am not ignorant of the mischief involved in Guild Pages with big crud on them, or starting a file download to induce lag in your camp for gosh knows what reason. But you could do that with a separate browser window just as easily, so there is no point in my worrying about it. Just be nice.
GEE, NO ONE commented on how groovy the 'right click to see who is on the server' list looks now. (Last release). That ragged edge bugged me, so now it is all neatly drawn and has colors and everything.

Anyway, I forgot to mention it for A62. Anyway, A63 has a similarly tiny change. I moved the Population column to the left of the Rules column. It just seems nicer to me that way. Also, if you refresh and then re-sort by the same column, it doesn't flip the order. (if you just resort WITHOUT refreshing, of course it still flips).

Small things, but attention to detail is where it's at.
FOR THE SUSPICIOUS PEOPLE OUT THERE who do't believe in the power of math. New slash command "/fail" will tell you how often your spell SHOULD be failing, and will then cast it for you 100 THOUSAND times and then report how many times it DID fail.

"With magic ratio 90%, casting Freeze, element Water (training 6.934) should succeed 99%.. actually failed 991 out of 100000 tries. (0%)"

This differs from a real cast in battle only by the amount you wait for the charge meter to charge. As you will recall, the charge meter works by giving you an effective boost (or diminishment) of your training. So if you wait for it to charge fully, you will actually have your spells fail a bit less as a result. The "/fail" command shows success with a 'neutral' charge. (about half-charge)

To use this command, press SPELLs button, pick a spell, then type "/fail"
On the EQUIP screen, you may now double-click on an entry in the list to equip it.
GOLDEN SOUL PERK.

Golden Souls can now petition to join a guild without having to be 20 hours old or achieveing level 20.

They can also create new guilds with 'young' characters, but must still have played WoS overall > 100 hours and the guildmeister character must still be level 60 or above.

To recap that, a golden soul may petition almost immediately, but is still restricted when it comes to creating a new guild. Just not *as* restricted.

Note: This change has no effect for non-Golden Souls, who have the same restrictions as before.
SIMPLE GENDER SUPPORT ADDED. A world designer may optionally include a "gender.ini" file which defines up to 4 genders for their world. A player's choice of gender can then be used to influence scripted dialog in quests.

Please see WoS\Worlds\Evergreen\gender.ini for details.
A SCRIPT CAN SET THE PLAYER GENDER by setting the #<g.num> cookie to 0, 1, 2, or 3.

e.g.

SET g.num, 1

Sets the scene host's gender to 1.
World Developers may now have invisible monster and/or actor skins, as they see fit. Only heroes are intended to not have invisible skins. Invisible includes "really dinky" by the way, so now you can have actors which are dinky.. say.. individual buzzing flies.
NEW SCRIPT COMMAND: "MENU"

This causes a popup menu to appear. You specify what text goes in the menu. You also provide a label to go to for each possible menu selection.

If the user dismisses the menu without choosing one of the menu choices, execution continues with the next line of the script.

Otherwise, the script does a GOTO to the selected label.

For example:

1: What is your favorite color?
WAIT 1
MENU "red=@pickedRed", "green=@pickedGreen"
1: What, you liked neither red nor green?
...
@pickedGreen
1: I like green, too!
...
@pickedRed
1: Red is the DEVIL's color!

The MENU command will not terminate until the user picks something from the menu, or dismisses it. It's possible that packet traffic is messed up during this time, as well... I hope not.

You can have up to.. oh.. 8.. oh 16.. oh 10.. oh 15.. oh.. some small number, of choices in the menu. Each choice is described by a quoted string, like:

"Hey Bob!=@pickedHeyBob",

Don't forget the quotes. The "=" in the middle separates the label "@pickedHeyBob" from the menu text "Hey Bob!"

With luck, cookies will work inside the menu text...

The menu appears wherever the mouse is at the time...

Maybe in A64 I'll let you include separators, checkmarks, and disabled menu entries by using funky labels.... maybe


* ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS, MARK I!

Perhaps there IS light at the end of the tunnel, Dorothy!

I am pleased to announce the very first asynchronous event:

@eventActorClickN

(Where N is replaced with an actor ID number)

The use of this is quite simple. Just add this label to your scene's script, and I will GOTO it automatically when the scene host RIGHT-CLICKS on the actor in question.

So, if the host RIGHT-CLICKS on actor 3, I will GOTO the label:

@eventActorClick3

If that label doesn't exist, then well.. I won't care. The right click will act like an old fashioned right-click and just make you walk there.

At this point, I lack the ability to give you a special cursor for when you are pointing at a right-clickable actor.

NOTE: Events only work after your script has ENDED (at least for now). So events "wake a dead script back up" and it jumps to the label specified, with all the actors, BGs, weather, etc right where it left it at the last END command.

You might do something like this (for example)

ACTOR 1, "Treasure Chest", ...
END

@eventActorClick1
N: You open the chest and find a pony!
...

And, when used with the MENU command, you could try various actions on the chest (pick lock, break lock, open, close, etc.)

You can have doors which can be opened by verb or right click (and which cause GOTO SCENE commands as suitable).

Lots of fun possibilities are yours at last.
SUMMON SPELLS

OK, this is sort of complicated... and at the same time, kinda unlimited. So tready carefully.

It is now possible to make spells which "summon" monsters (who then fight on behalf of the summoner).

See spells.txt for details, but basically you set it up like a disease spell. There are four magic numbers for the basic summons

SUMMON_SAME (summons another of whatever monster it is cast upon, and you can cast it on yourself, if you are a monster, I mean)

SUMMON_SAME_ELEMENT (summons a monster of the same element, but not necessarily the same monster. Level of summoned monster can be no higher than the lower of the levels of summoner and target)

SUMMON_RANDOM (summons any random monster whose level is not higher than the lowest of summoner and spell target.. can't summon un-tamable monsters)

SUMMON_SPECIFIC (the spell includes the ID of the monster to be summoned. No level limits imposed)

Ok, that's how you define the spell itself which does the summoning, but who can cast that spell?

1.) Any human who learns it. So you probably want to restrict how it is learned.

2.) Only monsters with the NEW MONSTER FLAG (4 - "Can cast summon spells") and those monsters are still restricted in the other ways by element, level etc as to whether or not a spell, in general, can be cast.)

Altogether this makes lots of ways to have it not work. So be patient. I am only enabling a single monster in evergreen to summon, and not enabling it for heroes at all.

What if you case SUMMON_SAME_X on a human? Well, nothing. You can try it, but no monster will appear.

Summoned monsters always appear on the right (sorry, but pretend they are sneaking up on you or something). They have a green shadow (like a pet) if they are fighting for you.

Frankly, I am not sure how a summoned monster will feel about other humans than you in the scene. I suspect they will obey the map flags, much as the pets do.

XP sharing is similar to sharing with pets. If a summoned monster helps out, you get less XP for yourself.
ELEMENTAL ARMOR

OK, all your EQUIPPED ITEMS have, as you know, A and/or D points associated with them. They also have an ELEMENT setting which up until now made no difference in defense. (though the element setting DOES make a difference in attack power, but that's old news)

The NEW news is that the D points are now also affected by your equipment's element.

It works like this:

Say you have a shield, and it has element of water and 45 D points. It has an additional, secret, *magical* 45 D points to offer you as well. But that is derated by the element of the attack.

So, if you get hit by non-magic, you get NO benefit.

If you get hit by FIRE magic (opposite of water), you get NO benefit. (water is weakest to fire)

But if you get hit by WATER magic, then you get all 45 extra Defense points.

If every piece of equipment you were wearing, were all WATER element, you would have effectively DOUBLE your normal D points when attacked by water.

You only get the benefit of magical armor for the 8 basic elements. For chaos elements you get no benefit.
MUSIC SHOULD NO LONGER RESTART WHEN CHANGING MAPS

I mean, if you step from map1 to map2 and the music is the same song for both maps, it should simply keep playing the music in progress.

Turns out I broke this when I added support for music in the THEME stuff.
SCENE HOST NAME BAR HAS ASTERISKS

Whoopdeedoo! If you are the host of the scene, then that little label above the health meter will have asterisks, as in:

* Emperor 99 *

It will also be in GOLD PRINT if you are a golden soul. Yet another amazing GS perk!
NEW READ-ONLY COOKIE: #<num.isPKAttack>

This cookie, which you probably only want to check in the 'standard camp scene' script, returns one of these values:

0 - this is not a PK attack fight scene
1 - I *am* the PK Attacker in this fight
2 - I am the VICTIM of a PK Attack, in this fight

The idea being that a carefully crafted standard fight scene could apply special temporary map flags if a PK Attack took place on a certain map or something.

Please note: PK Attacks use the STANDARD CAMP SCENE (not the standard fight scene).
NO MORE GHOST-HOPPING

Haunting someone and then returning to the well when they are in a place you haven't been yet (so to speak) does NOT cause you subsequent incarnation to go straight to that place.
CHARACTER CLASS MORPHING

This is probably opening a pandora's box of hacking but hey.. YOU ASKED FOR IT!

You can now change the scene host's character class by script, by setting the #<num.hostClass> cookie, as in:

SET num.hostClass, 3

He is now class 3! (and that is counting from ONE like all good class enumerations.)

Now, I suspect there are lots of bits of UI which won't really reflect the new class information until the next fight, or possibly even require a trip to the well.

There is also some chance this will set off one or more of my famous hack detectors... so I don't want to be the first to try this on a cherished character...

I did put in one limitation.. You can't morph to a class which has a different NO_GIFT setting, and you can't morph out of a class which has a no gold setting. Hence, you can't morp from scav to something easier, and then back to scav after eating a bunch of seeds. Technically it should be up to the world developer to implement such restrictions, but I felt evergreen was safer with this in place.

When you morph, your level might be changed (see HIDDEN_CLASS). You will definitely be reset to the new class's START_HAND, START_ELEMENT training levels, and will be handed the START_ITEMS, START_SPELLS, and START_TOKENS of the new class (without losing any old items, spells, or tokens)
New Character Class Thing: HIDDEN_CLASS

If this is set, then the class does not appear on the New Character dialog as an available class choice. (and hence the only way to achieve it is by the setting of a new class after the fact by script)

You can provide an optional argument with the HIDDEN_CLASS command, as in:

HIDDEN_CLASS 23

If present, then someone morphing to this class will be reduced to the specified level. You can only DEMOTE a level in this way, not PROMOTE one.
NEW SLASH COMMAND: /coord

This toggles a coordinate display in the upper right. As you point the mouse in the scene, the (x,y) coord of the mouse is shown in the upper right. In the 0-100 coord system of scenes, of course.
NEW ITEM CLASS - "HTML - 201"

This lets you bind a URL to an item, so that when you USE the item (on yourself), you are taken to a web page. (like the HTML script command, sort of)

The URL is tucked away into arg15, normally used for the SOUND EFFECT for the item. (It is a buffer of MAX_PATH in size, which is not super incredibly huge, so good luck cramming in a monster URL.

If the URL begins with "http" then it searches the real web, otherwise it looks for a local file in WoS\Worlds\WorldName\HTML (just like the quest language HTML command)

Note that you have to make the object a 'permanent quest object' if you don't want it to be consumed each time it is read.
NO MORE ESCAPING PK ATTACK BY SWITCHING TO WEB PANEL.

Much as I hate to admit it, Weasel was right. Gotta be a first time for everything, right? Seriously, thanks Weasel, and thanks Darangen for pointing out it happened with FIGHT2 as well (I was able to repeat it there.)
NEW MAP FLAG: 2048 - NO_REWARD

If this flag is in effect, then battles pay no reward to the surviving players. (no GP, no XP, and no Items Found).

The idea is to use the Quest FLAGs command to turn this on where you feel it is appropriate (the script will be giving some other reward).
NEW MAP FLAG: 4096 - NO_HEAL

Any use of healing potions or spells result in only 1 HP of health restoration (this was easier and funnier than 0). OK, due to a weird corner I painted myself into, healing spells will provide 2 HP of relief, while healing potions will provide 1 HP.

The idea is that you might use the FLAGS command in your standard CAMP scene to disable healing for PK Attack scenes (on some maps).

MP recharge is still allowed. (after all, mister sword user gets infinite bashes with his little sword).
NEW 'DISEASE': SUMMON ITEM

This one is a bit weird, and only works when cast on a human, not a monster. It causes an item to be used on the target.

Mainly this is for Darangen's requested "Use Ticket on Target" spell, but it has wider application (some less logical than others.)

This could, of course, be abused by the world developer to some degree (use seed, use html, etc.) so show proper restraint, please.

You know, those two bug me. I think I will disallow them.
NEW QUEST OPCODE: LOCK

This command lets you "lock" a scene, in the sense that newcomers can not enter it (at all).

The idea is to use this in the standard fight scene to lock a camp against latecomers in a PK Attack.

However, this does NOT prevent a 'party' of attackers to attack a 'party' of victims. Also, there is probably some lag time involved before the lock propagates, so people can probably get in if they are quick about it.

Frankly, the full power of the LOCK is not yet known, and will be tested in combat! I have it set up so as to maybe allow more complicated locks in the future, but for now:

LOCK 1 <-- locks the scene
LOCK 0 <-- unlocks the scene (I hope!)
PRIVATE ROOMS IN MACGUYVER CASTLE

More as a proof-of-concept than anything else, you will notice while camping in MacGuyver Castle that a little lock icon appears in the upper right of the scene.

The scene host can right-click on this to lock and unlock the camp.

see quest.txt for example script code (scene 2 - standard camp scene)
NEW COOKIE COUNTS ITEMS: #<num.itemNNN>

Sorry it took me so long to get around to this one. Frankly I don't know if this was already possible or not, via some weird SET command, but now you can just ask.

For example:

#<num.item44>

This will tell you how many of item 44 the scene host has in his or her pocket.
MONSTER ZERO

OK, you can now have a monster 0 in your monsters.txt file. If you do this, you aren't really creating a monster.

I use the numbers in this entry to act as "scaling percentages" for some of the algorithm values.

So, say you have a 75 in the 'xp' column of monster zero. This means ALL monsters will pay only 75% of 'normal XP' for their level (except those monsters whose XP you have set manually, of course).

You can thus tweak the algorithms for 10 different monster attributes. (see monsters.txt for details).
SPELL ZERO

Along the same line, you can add a ID#0 'spell' which really just tweaks the algorithms for ppCost, mpCost, and damage (painful spells only.) See spells.txt for details
NEW MAP FLAG: NO TICKETS (8192)

Tickets won't work when this flag is set.
NEW MAP FLAG: NO MINI MAP (16384)

The top right minimap is uninformative when this flag is set
NEW MAP FLAG: NO STUN (32768)

This makes some of the diseases stop working (stun, confuse, etc.) Well.. OK, this affects BUT the buff/debuff diseases.
NEW MAP FLAG: NO BUFF (65536)

This makes the buff/debuff disease spells stop working.
PK ATTACKS IN EVERGREEN ARE 'Honorable'

Yeah, well, we'll see I guess. Basically if a PK Attack takes place in Evergreen:

- no healing is allowed
- no tickets are allowed
- no diseases other than debuffs are allowed
- camp is locked (no newcomers) until fight is over.
- but people can still flee by regular PK rules.

I imagine this will need some tweaking to obtain maximum satisfaction. This is achieved via scripting, by the way, and does not affect other worlds.

UNless it all goes horribly wrong, of course..
KARST GETS A SUGGESTION IMPLEMENTED. SAP now works. Well, it doesn't do what I originally planned, but it *does* make sense all the same.

While you are "sapped" your spells all cost 3x as many magic points as normal to cast.

You do get one freebie though, since you can start the cast so long as you have enough 'normal MP' So, say you have 2 MP left and are sapped. You can still cast a 2 MP spell (which will then try to drain you of 6MP, leaving you just at zero).

It's a feature.
AND POISON WORKS, TOO. Oh you're going to hate being poisoned. While poisoned, it's just like MAP_FLAG_NO_HEAL (but just for you!)

Healing potions provide only 1HP, and Healing spells provide only 2HP, while you are poisoned.
ANTIDOTE CLASS WORKS. And what is poison without an antidote item, eh?

So, itemClass 2 is now a real class. I set it up (see items.txt for details) so that you bind the antidote item to the specific disease you need it to cure, hence you can cure any of the following:

Paralyze, 5 debuffs, poison, sap, stun, gag, numb, sleep, and confuse.

A 'cure' is the same as one application of the equivalent cure spell.

Now, I think some of these diseases prevent you from using items, so you can't cure them *with* an item. In such cases, your only hope is for a friend with the appropriate heal spell.

9/25/2001 ALPHA 62 INCLUDES:
* COMPATIBILITY: Excellent!
* [Bugfix] Returning to the well in the middle of a fight, left you in 'fight state' from which you could not 'flee' (or leave the game even).

Until A62, the work around is to not return to the well in the middle of a fight. If you get stuck, I *think* you can get unstuck by re-incarnating.
* NEW QUEST - The Pokegatchi Quest

This one starts and ends in the Westin Pokegatchi Arena. You MUST have a pet (you can buy one) since it must do all the fighting (you can use as many pets as you like.)

Let me know if this is challenging enough. You must collect the 10 badges (heh heh), after which you will get a suitable reward.
* NEW STOCK COOKIES.

Hopefully these will be self-evident, or understood by the documentation on the A62 Quest Lingo Dictionary (to be pushed with A62). These are all "read-only" cookies:

To save myself typing "hostAge" = #<num.hostAge>, OK?

hostAge, hostTotalAge, hostHP, hostMP, hostMaxHP, hostMaxMP, hostSTR, hostWIS, hostSTA, hostAGI, hostDEX, hostHandSkillN (N=0-7), hostElementSkillN (N=0-7), hostGP, hostPP, hostTNL, hostHaloPoints, hostPets, hostPetLevel, hostPKs, hostDeaths, hostKills, hostRating, hostHuntSkill, timeHour, timeMinute, timeMonth, timeDay, timeYear, timeDoW, mapFlags, and countDown.

Hopefully that's enough to choke on for this release.
* MUSIC CAN BE SINGLE-SHOT

The scene MUSIC command takes an optional second argument which, if 1, means "do not loop"

MUSIC "victory.mid", 1

I'm not sure how useful this will actually be, but hey, that's YOUR job
* ON-SCREEN ICON DURING 'ASK' COMMAND.

During a scene ASK command, this icon appears in the lower left of the scene to let you know that you really are expected to type something. Only the scene host will see it.

This is to help distinguish between REAL questions and RHETORICAL questions.

And, just for fun, I also play the sound effect "ask.wav" at the start of the question. This file is optional, however, and not currently present in Evergreen or the standard theme.

Note: this is NOT a popup dialog box. But just in case people confuse it with that, I guess I will make it a player option.
* DEVELOPERS REJOICE, PLAYERS PANIC.

Arguments 4 and 5 of the spells table are now under the developer's control.

Use '0' if you want an algorithmic value.

This could potentially break old worlds which were copied from Evergreen back before I changed all these arguments to 0 (quite awhile ago now).

Note that negative numbers have the same meaning as before, and that you cannot algorithmically set the 'damage' of an element 0 heal spell (i.e. works same as before, since you always had to come up with a value).
* HALF-HEARTED ATTEMPT AT LETTING DEVELOPERS MAKE AMBIENT SOUNDS.

The official "ambient sound generator" is just too darn sophisticated for its own good, so it is inconvenient for me to open the API completely.

Instead, I have more or less given you what you asked for.

SOUND "filename.wav"

plays a sound one time, as usual

SOUND "filename.wav", 1

causes the sound to loop forever (until end of scene or something else shuts down all sound)

SOUND "", 2

shuts down all looping sounds.

Now, these are REALLY looping. The sound repeats as soon as it finishes, so if you need a delay between repetitions, you have to add silence to the wav file (ick, ick, yuck) Luckily, true silence will compress well in the wave file, so it will not necessarily make your file much bigger. Still, it's icky.

And sorry for the inverse definitions of loop between MUSIC and SOUND, it's just that the default values (0) were opposite to begin with. Oh well.
* HIDDEN WEB PAGES ARE STOPPED.

When you press the "Return to Game" button from the embedded browser screen, I now issue a STOP command for you automatically, so any scripts, animated GIFs, banner fetches, etc. should stop. (instead of, for example, continuing to popup advertising windows)
* OK, OK, YOU CAN FORGET SPELLS NOW.

So long as they are learnable in the first place, you can now forget a spell you know (right-click on it and choose FORGET).

For example, you can NOT forget "Stun" since it is a quest prize and unavailable at the Spell Store (so to speak).

But I highly recommend setting your PC to a windows resolution greater than 640x480 (A dinky screen is about the only reason to forget a spell, IMHO)
* SCENE NARRATION

If your script says:

N: Then a knock was heard at the door

The sentence will appear as "Narration" (those lines of text which appear in the main scene window itself).

You can also say:

NARRATION Then a knock was heard at the door

But I doubt that will be as popular.
* QUICKY "REPLY" WHISPER

If you type:

/r this is a whispered message.

It will be whispered to whomever you have selected on the Player List (MAPS list). It doesn't alter your official whisper target, so it's a convenient way to whisper a quick reply to someone who has just whispered to you, but with whom you don't feel like opening an official IM.
* ITEMS CAN BE ASSOCIATED WITH MONSTER TYPES

Argument 13 of the items table (Find Probability) can now have an extra 'dotted' value, as in:

30.12

The first number is still the probability (weird probability math unchanged). The optional second number is a monster ID. If this is non-zero, then only that monster can drop that item.

So, you can ONLY find that item after killing that monster (in that scene). But you are not GUARANTEED to find that item each time you kill that monster.

(this is independent of whether you also choose to sell the item in a store, which would probably defeat the whole purpose.)
* LANGUAGE RATING ADDED TO MAP LIST

You can now see people's language rating (PG-13, R, G, XXX, etc.) in the far right column of the MAPs list.

There is also a right-click menu option in the chat window to automatically mute anyone above a certain rating.

Mothers rejoice!
* NEW CHARACTERS CAN BE GIVEN STARTING SPELLS

Each character class may now be given as many as 8 spells "at birth" via the "START_SPELLS" command in the LEVELS table.

World Developers rejoice!
* NEW SCRIPT COMMAND FOR HTML

Accepts either local or global arguments.

HTML "http://full.url/file.html"

or

HTML "myLocalPage.htm"

(determined by whether it begins with "http://")

Local pages are assumed to be in an option "HTML" folder of your world, as in:

c:\wos\worlds\YourWorld\HTML\page.htm

You can have sub-folders in the HTML folder, if you like. Whatever you type is assumed to come right after the "...\HTML\"

And it comes with a new option to turn it off, if you feel at all nervous about it.
* SERVER RULE CHANGES: noPK and allPK.

The noPK rule now simply means that you cannot incarnate with a PK character. To play on such a server, you will have to have a nonPK (yellow happy face) character

The allPK rule now means that you cannot incarnate with a nonPK character. To play n such a server, you will have to have a PK (red devil face) character.

This brings these rules more into alignment with the 'noMod' and 'noCheat' rules, which also simply prevent incarnation of inappropriate characters (as opposed to adjusting in-game limitations). It also allows detection of players who are mix-hacking. Feel free to report such players, as I would like to implement permanent banishment for all mix hackers.
* TABLE LINE PARSING ERROR CORRECTED. It turns out there was a significant weakness in the line parser. It was noticed as something odd in the Property Editor, but actually had other possible side effects (for example if you had a tab character AFTER the field, but BEFORE the following comma. Anyway, probably not worth documenting in detail.

The design goal for table parsing is that either a space, tab or comma can terminate a field, but only leading whitespace should be skipped at the front of the following field (it was also skipping "leading commas" which led to confusion when empty fields were present) I guess we didn't have that many empty fields lying around before the prop editor
* MONSTERS/PETS NO LONGER CAST ENCHANT/TAME.

It's not like it had any chance of working anyway :-)
* NEW TICKETS: to PK ARENA and PET ARENA.

And they're free. The mermaid gives you one on the way in, if you don't already have one.
* ELEMENT TRAINING CHANGE. You know how you get trained a bit in an element each time you cast a spell of that element? Well, now that bit of training is a bit more, depending on the level of the spell. Hence casting a level 9 spell will give you more training than casting a level 1 spell.

I should probably do something similar for hands, but they don't have the moral equivalent of spell levels.
* SPELLS TABLE ARG2 (ppCost) can now be set by world developer. (use -1 for can't be learned, 0 for 'set by algorithgm' or N>0 for the value you want to set manually.)
* Skin PAIN frame used during heal. (coz Josh said so. )
* PLAYER AND MONSTER SKINS CAN HAVE OPTIONAL "MAGIC" FRAME.

This OPTIONAL frame will be shown during magic attacks, if present. So if you want it to show up you need to have all these frames:

[map][ready][fight][pain][chat][credit][magic]

you MUST have all frames up to, and including, the magic frame. If you don't care, then leave your skin as it is and the [fight] frame will be shown for both physical and magical attacks, as always.

Currently, the Book of Skins is unable to preview the magic frame for you.

Again, this is OPTIONAL and does not affect existing skins, which continue to work as before.
* NEW MAP FLAG: 1024 (getting into the big numbers now!) "NO HIT"

This flag, when set, prevents a human from hitting any monster or pet (other than to heal it). When used in combination with flag 1, it makes a map where only pets can fight. (and where a player must depend on a pet to defend them)
* NEW SCRIPT OPCODE "FLAGS n"

This allows a scene to override the map flags for the duration of the scene. Whatever you use for 'n' will become the effective map flags for that scene. Setting "FLAGS 0" will restore the flags to the real map flags for the current map.

8/12/2001 ALPHA 61 INCLUDES:
* COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! But I had to change the packet format in an attempt to frustrate the recent rash of hackers, so A60 won't be compatible with earlier versions (your characters will be fine, you just won't be able to play with people running older versions).
* [bugfix] The "untamable" and "0% chance" warnings on spells should now only be seen by the person casting the spell.
* [bugfix] By george, I do believe I found the problem behind disappearing seeds (et al) and it only took about 8 hours and the consumption of 12,000 seeds to do it. Maybe more than 8 hours, come to think of it. Time flies when you're eating seeds.

Since this is probably the 10th time I have devoted a day to fixing the disappearing seed problem, I think this is officially the most horribly complicated-to-discover bug of all time, WoS-wise. Basically, in the end, it was the moral equivalent of a threading issue, only all the culprits were windows messages within a single thread. Let's hope this really is behind us now.

Second in line of horribility was the Disappearing buttons bug, which in the end I believe is due to the Windows function WritePrivateProfileString() disturbing the current directory on some versions of windows (but not all). Could well be an official bug (like the wacky versions of the rich edit control which were shipped with the early release of Windows 2000.) But I am now immune to such inconstancy on the part of Emperor Gates.
* Party members should no longer miss out on the early part of the scene. It used to be that a laggy connection could result in party followers not seeing the first few things which happened in a scripted scene when the leader entered it. This could be dialog, shop buttons, or even missing characters. This was due to some transport layer efficiencies (you don't get data for scenes you are not in, but there was a gray area from the moment YOU think you are in the scene, to the moment the MIX server thinks you are in, and packets during that window were never seen by the laggy client.)

Of course, it was great for bandwidth to not send you that data, so this is a small step backwards, bandwidth-savings-wise.
* new slash command "/clear" empties the chat window completely. Not a cheat. So finally you can gossip about the boss and delete it quickly :-) By the way, I increased the size of the scroll-back buffer a couple releases ago (so that all the data from the battle simulators could be seen). Hopefully this didn't create any new problems, but one must tread carefully with the rich edit control.
* 'confused' cheat/modders cannot accidentally hit/give to non-cheat players.
* Found some weird scene problems in parties (which seem to have appeared about the time I added cut scenes...) Anyway, I took the opportunity to address a lot of little party snafus (like making sure that scene clients see NPCs facing the same direction as the scene host... and other squirrely little facts). Please note: although never mentioned explicitly, it is a good idea to not have more than 32 frames (or so) in a monster/villager filmstrip.
* Bringing up a Web Panel no longer puts you into a weird unkillable mode, capable of soul capturing, etc. Park on a link or something before opening a web panel. The game continues beneath the panel.
* If you are on the web panel when someone PK attacks you, then the web panel will disappear automatically and you will be PK Attacked.
* However, if you are truly idle (haven't touched mouse or keyboard for a few minutes) you are still protected from being PK Attacked, as before.
* Character 'rating' now changes only if the fight occurs on a "ladder" map (Map flag "ladder", whether the server is a ladder server or not). In Evergreen, this means PK Arena)
* Cheat characters who accidentally summon pets while on-line will no longer lose their pet (they will just refuse to come out.) Freeing your pet, under such circumstances however, will cause it to be lost.
* %Rn macro no longer crashes with n=0 (which is a silly value to pick in the first place, of course..)
* Golden Souls No longer see Guilt Trip Page every 20 hours. They see it every 15 seconds! No.. just kidding, should be spared ever seeing it at all.
* If the person in question has disabled "send skins" you should no longer see the option to fetch their skin.
* Soul Diary Peppier, due to:

1.) Only loads full list of names the first time you use it. (d'oh!)

2.) Pops open immediately, showing old info about character, if any.

3.) When slow-pokey laggy ping response from character arrives, page updates with newest data. (this is most likely the delay you were most noticing before.)
* Failed spells are no longer ever magnificent
* You can no longer FLEE a fight until it is your move. The fleeing itself is still 100% effective. The message is the same as for a sticky fight scene: "you try to escape but are drawn back in.. blah blah blah"

This is an extremely gentle flee failure, but I expect to hear lots of bad things about it in any case.
7/23/2001 ALPHA 58 INCLUDES:
* COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! But all A57 Scavengers will be transformed into a new class called "x-treme!" (necessitated by the massive hacking of the original scavenger class). A *new* scavenger class is also provided for new characters to choose.
* [BUGFIX] The message "That would be a lag-kill" appears on some machines when you cast heal upon yourself (actually I would think when you did aything to a human, if it were going to happen to you at all.) Workaround seems to be to go to solo mode and cast heal on yourself and then return to multiplayer mode.
* [BUGFIX] I accidentally removed wisdom from your pet fleas... this sucks because even though I am re-enabling it, you probably had it drop all the way to zero and will have to re-learn it again from scratch. Sorry about that! This goes for several other very low level monsters (<10). On a related note, Goblin Catapaults were supposed to be untamable, and will be again....
* Error message when you try to tame the untamable. Also a 0% probability message if you have no chance of the spell working (the ones which fail on monsters above your level)
* Scavengers/Extremes (NO_GIFT classes, I mean) can give stuff to anyone they want, including pets. They just can't accept stuff from other players.
* SCENE STEPPER. Type "/stepper" to open the scene stepper (it will mark your character as a cheat, however). This lets you single-step through a scene, even setting breakpoints. It's a world developer thing. See more info in WorldDev forum.
* Miscellaneous Gratuitous Esthetic Changes.

For no real reason, I was suddenly motivated to clean up all the little window backgrounds. Josh might be pleased that I have gone in a very simple direction. On the other hand, it represents change, so it's bad, right?

I am tempted to include a "classic" theme for people who miss the old look too much.

Anyway, I just spent probably 12 hours re-doing the Soul Diary... again. And I am converting all the "books" to Yet Another Look. (Except Soul Diary and Book of Wisdom, which are jst wordpad and notepad respectively and will never look the same as everything else.).

You'll notice the Soul Diary is pretty different, and if you can't find the DELETE and SORT options, they are now hidden in a right-click popup menu.

Anyway, I think this is the definition of a thankless task, since NO one is happy in the end
* You can now EQUIP while the soul brother is jabbering away. You only have to wait for it to be your turn during an actual fight.
* CHARGE METERS RECHARGE FASTER BASED ON Strength and Wisdom. (wisdom speeds magic charge, strength speeds physical charge)
* NEW MONSTERS IN EVERGREEN. I added about 40 new monsters.. well maybe not quite that many, and re-placed almost all the maps using varying sized monster circles (new feature) and added terrain to some maps so as to encourage walking a path of increasing monster difficulty. Here is the 'suggested order' of maps, with their average monster levels

1.) Evergreen (1-50)
2.) Wyrm Cavern (30s)
3.) SpringWell (40s)
4.) Animal Kingdom (50s)
5.) Fort Rondtree (60s)
6.) Maze of Eternity (70s)
7.) Isle of Light (low 80s)
8.) Sea Kingdom (high 80s)
9.) Goblin Rock (90s)
10.) Rune Ruins (100s <-- new monsters)
11.) Inferno (110s <-- new monsters)

These are just averages as each map has a healthy range of monsters available with the easier ones closest to its doorway.

And you are, of course, free to play the maps in any order.

Anyway, I hope this is my LAST major revamping of monsters in Evergreen, and only minor tweaks from here on. I feel silly moving monsters around in the same world for a year, but this is really the first time they have been 'sensibly' laid out (mostly... there are still some flaws regarding things like ice creatures in Inferno...)

Anyway, the new monsters fill in all the missing monster levels, and add a bunch of new high-level monsters, so it's probably going to be a level-fest. Gob Cats are no longer top of your list, I imagine.
* NEW SILLY THING: HALOS. For people who just can't get enough of maxxing their characters, I present the "Halo"

Remember that little bouncing Halo on the Status Panel? That's real now. Click on it to open the Halo Point dialog, where you can buy ... Halo Points. (Each Halo Point costs 1,000 PP). Collect 1,000 Halo Points and you get a Halo.

Yes, that's right, a Halo costs 1,000,000 PP. One MILLION PP. And you can have up to TWO THOUSAND HALOS.

Is that enough maxxing for you?

No.. wait a minute... you can have up to two MILLION Halos. That's TWO THOUSAND BILLION PP. At 100 PP per monster bash, that's 20 billion bashes.

What's a halo good for? well, presently nothing but two things:

1.) Something to brag about.
2.) Something to cry over when your character breaks.

Well, OK

3.) Something to hack. Would it matter if I asked "please don't hack?"
* NEW MINI-QUEST. The Brother of the Gateway has a little job for you. It's baby's first quest
* MORE CLASS TUNING. Some hand/magic ratios have been fiddled to balance better, and the total HP has been increased to make PK battles last long enough to be interesting.
* HAND BONUS. You now will find that, all else bing equal, you wield more damage with a weapon of your class's hand (if any) than a weapon of a different sort. That is to say, a sword user will do better with the soul sword than with the soul bow, all else being equal. This also applies to enchanted weapons like staffs and books. A bow-user will do better with an enchanted bow than with an enchanted sword, all else being equal.
* Dying at level 100 (and dropping to level 99.9) should now update your max hitpoints correctly.
* Recovering 100 after dying to 99.9 should no longer give you a second crack at the ability point dialog. Actually, there is never an ability point dialog for 100-ness. 100 is a reward unto itself.
* Pet Needler is now available for sale from the Beastmaster in MacGuyver castle
* Color tables should no longer turn your pants invisible
* NEW FEATURE: Monsters can now be given a 'transparency' flag which makes them semi-transparenly ghosty ish. This is the 'unrealistic' technique of not drawing every other pixel of the skin.
* Book of Options lets you disable the deciLevel notifications if they bug you. (Remember, you're the only one who sees them anyway.)
* Battle Simulator is NOT broken, it just obeys the current map flags, so it won't work while on a noPK server unless you are in the arena. Go figger! Also a new battle command "/battle3" goes into more detail than you could ever hope for. The battle simulator might become a cheat command someday, so enjoy it while it's hot.
* Scavengers now start with equal training in all hands. x-tremes start at level 1 or so, new scavengers start at level 4 or so.
* COOKIE COMMANDS: SET, ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV, MOD now support %-macros. So you can say:

SET x, "%K2"
ADD x, "%K11"

and have it do the expected thing.
* No more WoS version hopping... I hope. In case you were never informed, this is considered 'hacking' albeit a pretty low-level form of it.
* Midget Monster scales sent to scene clients (now everyone can appreciate the midget eyebrawl)
* And hey, the Midget Eyebrawl can now be tamed. My gift to the masses.
* You *should* no longer lose a level 99 pet which you tamed while you were level 100 but can't control after you get killed down to 99.9 It won't battle for you (until you return to 100), but it won't run away either. This is untested, sadly, so my fingers are crossed.
* NEW SOUND EFFECTS. Theme designers will no doubt be both happy and sad that I have re-done a bunch of the sound effects. The good news is that you now have more control over theme sounds (since I don't use "sword5" for almost everything!) The bad news is you have to come up with some new sounds if you don't like my new ones:

FoundItem.wav <- when you find something
ListClick.wav <- click in list box
CloseDialog.wav <-- close most dialogs
OpenDialog.wav <-- open most dialogs
Disincarnate.wav <-- disincarnate
Incarnate.wav <-- incarnate
MessageBox.wav <-- most message boxes
ButtonClick.wav <-- main buttons along bottom

These next ones will be used if found, but I don't have any sounds for them yet (feel free to suggest)

pkattack.wav <-- when attack starts
camp.wav <-- when you camp
flee.wav <-- when you flee fight
fleeFailed.wav <-- if flee doesn't work
exit.wav <-- when you exit camp
walk.wav <-- when you click on map to move
fight.wav <-- when you fall into monster fight
link.wav <-- when you drop through link

In general, I replaced all those loud sword5 slashes with much softer and gentler sounds. I suppose I should make a 'classic' theme for people who were used to all that noise :-)

7/14/2001 ALPHA 57 INCLUDES:
* COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! However, if you are a world developer and ignored the warning last year to stop using 'joshTownies' and 'joshMiscellaneous0' in the MONSTERs folder (you should use 'joshTownsFolk' and 'joshMiscellaneous' instead).. well, today's the day your world gets broken. The patch will erase your copies of these files, so if you haven't already kept copies and placed them in your world's MONSTERS folder, then your world will not be showing the skins you expected.

Another compatibility issue is the moving of all your saved hero files. No longer will characters be stored in a "savedHeroes" folder inside of the world's folder. Instead, they will be saved inside a folder of the same name in a NEW WOS FOLDER: "save"

The first time you incarnate with A57, all your saved heroes for that world will get moved automatically to the new location (unless you tell me not to, in which case you're on your own!). No files will be deleted, and you really shouldn't have to do anything yourself. Just bear in mind that they live in a new home, and from now on it is the SAVE folder than you want to make backups of.

One more little thing. You will notice that your world diary will appear to have disappeared. You will find your original in your WoS folder "WoS\diary.doc" If you want to keep it, drag it to the new location, which would be: "WoS\Save\Evergreen\diary.doc" The change allows you to have a separate diary for each world.
* [BUGFIX] The %Cn command was printing the wrong class name. In that command a value of '1' should be the first class in your world's levels table (the class with the '100' prefix) Internally I count from 0, but I *try* to hide that from you here.

I also changed the little-known "/class n" command to use a value of n which was ones-based.
* [BUGFIX] Ooops. Turns out I was setting free some pets which didn't need to be set free. Ones that you had spent a long time on... Hope you kept backups...
* [BUGFIX] OK, now world developers really CAN set a monster's XP manually... honest you can! This time for sure!
* [BUGFIX] Should start playing proper music when you incarnate (used to always play main map music, no matter which map you incarnated onto.) I hope this doesn't break anyone.
* [BUGFIX] Eureka! I finally realized why the FIND button on the quest search dialog didn't seem to step to the next occurence each time it is pressed! (and it was suitable dumb, too!) So now those 4 buttons realize their full destiny. The first time you press, it starts from top of file, next time it starts from just after first hit. Unless you switch to a different one of the four buttons, in which case it starts from the top again. i.e. what I personally find convenient :-)
* [BUGFIX] Addressed Large Font Issues. There were some fonts which were not benefiting from my 'large font adaptation' code (I hate large fonts, and you should too). Anyway, hopefully fewer of my buttons will have text spilling out the top of them.
* [BUGFIX] It used to be that if your MIDI device was already in use by another application that WoS would keep trying to use it several times a second, resuling in a lot of lagginess (which would go away when you disabled music from the SOUNDs menu). Now it only checks back every 30 seconds or so. (so there will be that much delay before the music resumes once you shut down media player, or whatever was holding on to the MIDI device).
* NEW WORLD FEATURE: COLORED 'SNOW'

A57 includes 6 new weather types (as used in scenes and spells).

They are, in fact, the original 6 static and snow 'weathers' but with the ability to use any of the WoS 256 colors (instead of just white).

The new weathers are specified by a four digit number:

4xxx for light staticky snow
5xxx for med. staticky snow
6xxx for heavy staticky snow
7xxx for light snow
8xxx for med. snow
9xxx for heavy snow

where xxx = 000 - 255 and is a palette color index (one of the 256 'standard WoS colors).

(see World Dev Forum for example color indices) or click http://www.synthetic-reality.com/wosPalette.gif
* NEW WORLD_DEV FEATURE: Each world has a separate "World Diary" now. As a world designer, you should provide an initial diary for your players, even if it is blank. Use wordpad to make a file called "blank_diary.doc" and place it in your world's folder. It will then be used as the starting diary contents for a new player (not a new character.. diary is common to all characters used in a world).
* NEW WORLD DEV FEATURE: The HANDS table can now have an optional 3rd argument - a sound effect to be used as the default sound effect for all weapons of that hand. If you leave it blank it will pick a sound at random (as it used to do). If an item has a sound called out for it, the item's sound takes precedence, of course.
* NEW OPTION: "Hide spells I cannot learn"

This defaults to ON, so you'll have to turn it off to get back to the old behaviour. When on this hides all the red-X spells in the Learn Spell dialog. Good news is that there is less to scroll through. Bad news is you can't window-shop for future spells. It's your choice.
* NEW OPTION: "Confirm Link Images"

This is for world developers. (I default it to ON, since that seems to be the 'easiest' mode for a new developer. Old developers will have to turn it off if the new behaviour bugs them.) Basically, there was some confusion when adding links about the need to have opened and selected an OBJECT before actually clicking to add a link. With this option on (and in an emergency), I pop up a little object image chooser each time you click to add a link. It's actually kind of nice, so I think I will use the feature myself. It helps you ignore the OBJECT EDITOR a bit longer.
* PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT. Some background threads now consume less CPU than before. Perhaps you'll notice. Perhaps not.
* NEW % CODES IN CHAT.

These can be used in casual chatting, or with fancy cookie math.

%Rn generates a random number from 1 to n (where 'n' is between 1 and 30,000). So %R6 is the equivalent of rolling a single six-sided die, resulting in 1 through 6 as a result.

%En returns the item ID number of the piece of equipment equipped in that slot (using the class numbers from the items table, so:

%E10 yields ID number of current helmet

Since there are 8 different slots for the right-hand equipment, a special form is provided:

%E0 yields the ID number of the currently equipped right-hand item.

The %En macro is pretty unenlightening unless you use it with cookies, as in:

SET handItem, %E0
1: I see you are equipped with the %I#<handItem>
TAKE I#<handItem>
1: Not anymore!

I'll let you puzzle that out on your own. Hopefully it works
* HUNT COMMAND MADE COOLER: MONSTER RADAR

To soften the blow of making "/monster" a cheat, I have brought it back... a little. Instead of it being on constantly, it now pops on only while you are hunting. And instead of showing you everything, it shows you more information based on your hunting level and whether or not you have fought the monster in question in the past. By the time you reach hunting level ... 9 (I believe), you pretty much get what you had before (I mean the equivalent of "/monster") only you only see the information during the hunt itself.

So, the levels of hunting skill (without telling you the explicit numbers, since they might change are)

- see nothing
- see a question mark
- see just the monster skin
- see the monster skin and name
- see the monster skin, name, and level
- see all that and the range circle.

The monsters appear to walk around a bit which hides the true center of their range circle. The higher your hunt level, the smaller the radius of their wandering (by hunt level 9 they are pretty much right on top of their range-centers)

Also, the higher your hunt level, the further away you can see monsters while hunting.

I have to warn you that this feature is cool enough that I might be forced to make it a Golden Soul perk. I need money for rent, you know.
* NEW OPTION: Enable Monster Radar. On the off-chance that you hate monster radar, or it lags your PC to use it (or it has a horrible crashing bug), I have added an option to turn it off (in the Book of Options).
* PETS NEED LESS FOOD. I slowed down the rate at which food leaves the pet's tummy (by quite a lot, actually. A full tummy should last 4x longer as a result). Other qualities still age at the same rate. Hope that doesn't upset anyone. (also, your pets get a bit more exercise and happiness just from your calling them out in battle).
* SCENE COLOR TABLES. See description of color tables below, but you can also apply a color table to a scene (by adding an extra, optional, argument to the end of the SCENE command). It colors ALL characters in the scene (actors, monsters AND heroes), so you can darken characters in a cave scene, tint them in an underwater scene, etc.
* NEW QUEST COMMAND: COLOR <colorTable>

This changes the color table in the scene and applies to all characters already in the scene (people who drop in later will see the original scene color table though... sorry.)

The arguments are possibly confusing, so check this out:

COLOR 15 <-- set all characters to colorTable 15.

COLOR 1015 <-- apply colorTable 15 to existing colors... So, if you already dimmed them once, this will dim them some more.

COLOR 0 <-- restore character colors.

COLOR 2015 <-- Apply color change 15 to the background jpeg (and this almost never looks nice, by the way, but dimming isn't TOO bad.) And this is always 'another coat' as it were. So you can dim the background

COLOR 2000 <--- restore original background.

So, with these you can sort of do 'fades' in your CUT scenes.... sort of. fade outs at least.
* MONSTER/ACTOR COLOR TABLES.

Documented in monsters.txt, you can add Yet Another Dotted value to argument 3 which sets a monster's 'color translation table'

arg3 = 1.2.3 means scale 1, flags 2, colors 3

Each color table (0-255 possible, but only about 30 implemented) swaps around the order of the standard palette to achieve a color shift to an existing monster skin, without having to draw another skin file (thus saving 25K of download space, at the expense of artistry). However, most of these swaps look pretty good. It's up to the world designer to be prudent, of course.
* NEW SLASH COMMAND "/pal N" where N is 0-255 lets you try out a color table without restarting WoS or reloading the world. All new monsters and actors which enter the scene will be translated by the specified color. table 0 "/pal 0" returns you to the normal colors. Note this overrides any colorTable settings you have in your world and ALL actors/monsters will get this manually applied color table.
* NEW ARGUMENT TO ACTOR COMMAND: color Table is added just past the starting Y location. It's optional (and it's absence means 0, which means 'no translation of colors') so you can ignore it until you want it.
* NEW SLASH COMMAND "/dist N" intended to help world developers plan their monster placements. (though players could use it to check the hunting-areas of various monsters, I 'spose... I'd still like to have a nice GS feature on that subject someday...) Anyway, N is a map number (0- whatever), or -1 for all maps (be prepared to scroll). It just shows monster distribution by level and by element. It doesn't give you any position information (the monster placement editor already does that for World Developers). This command only works for 'placed' monsters, not monster groups or monsters in scenes.
* ONE-BUTTON WORLD PUBLISHING.

Well, really it's more than one button, but it's pretty slick. This is for world developers only and you access it by the "/version" command (you have to version your world first). If your world is "/versionned" then you can push the PUBLISH button on that same dialog. It automatically creates the ZIP and INFO files for your world, archives them to a folder based on the version number, and prints a page of instructions to follow to get your world published to the masses. It's cool.
* NEW QUEST COMMAND: 'HOST' or 'H:' lets the world designer put words in the mouth of the scene host, as in:

2: Hey, %1, I am actor 2.
2: %1, say 'Kick Me!'
H: Ok, um, Kick Me! <-- appears to come from host.
2: Don't mind if I do!
FIGHT 255, 255, 255
* FASTER MIX SERVER LISTS. If you are a server hopper, you should experience fewer delays now as you return repeatedly to the MIX server list screen.
* PK ATTACKERS START AT LEFT OF SCREEN. Or at least I hope they do. The goal being for the attacker and members of his or her party to appear on the left (like monsters) while the victim (and their party) appear on the right. This is tough to test in advance... my fingers are crossed.
* NEW QUEST LANGUAGE COOKIE MATH FUNCTIONS.

There are now several cookieMath commands which modify an existing cookie in some way:

ADD cookieName, "3" <-- add 3 to cookie
SUB cookieName, "5" <-- subtract 5 from cookie
MUL cookieName, "6" <-- multiply cookie by 6
DIV cookieName, "11" <-- divide cookie by 11
MOD cookieName, "10" <-- modulus operator (remainder from integer division)

And, oh heck, I will have these set the IFc result, as if you had followed each by a COMPARE #<cookieName>, "0"

So

SET A, "5"
SUB "5"
IF= @AisNowZero
IF> @AisNow>Zero
IF< @AisNow<Zero


* NEW QUEST LANGUAGE COMPARISON COMMANDS. Fairly simple and brain damaged, I document by example:

COMPARE A,B
IF= @theyAreEqual
IF> @AbiggerThanB
IF< @AlessThanB

The COMPARE command subtracts B from A and saves the result in a special place which doesn't get munged until the next time you use the COMPARE command (or one of the MATH commands: ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV or MOD.

The three IFx commands test that special result and jump to the label if the result was as indicated. So your IFx command doesn't HAVE to immediately follow the COMPARE command, though I suspect it generally will.

Arguments A and B are interpreted as signed decimal numbers. For now you are stuck with constants and cookies. So, you can do:

COMPARE #<cookie>, "2"
COMPARE #<cookie1>, #<cookie2>

etc.

But you can NOT (yet at least) say:

COMPARE I143, "3"

but I am walking slowly in that direction.
* NEW CHARACTER LEVEL OPTION: "START_ITEMS"

Details in "levels.txt" but this lets you give up to 8 items to a newly created character. (Each class can start with different items).
* NEW CHARACTER LEVEL OPTION: "START_TOKENS"

Details in "levels.txt" but this lets you give up to 8 tokens to a newly created character (each class can start with different tokens). These might be the tokens you use to lock links on a class-basis, for example.
* NEW QUEST LANGUAGE COMMAND: 'PARTY'

This command lets you define what an acceptable party member should look like, and causes players who do not match that condition to be kicked from the party. A world designer would use this command just before executing a GOTO LINK command where only qualified people were allowed to go.

As in:

PARTY "C5+T23"
GOTO LINK 2,3

This would kick anyone from the party who was not class 5 or did not possess token 23. The conditions are the same as for the IF command, but are evaluated AT THE CLIENT. (cool, huh?) I mean each individual player is checked for their OWN copy of token 23, rather than just riding along on the scene host's token 23 (as the IF command does).

To stay in the party, the condition must evaluate to TRUE for you. Note that if you don't use some command like GOTO LINK after this, you're sort of wasting it. It won't boot people from the scene who are not in the party after this, so unless the party moves on to a new location, you won't notice right away that anything happened.
* NEW DEATH BENEFITS. When you die, you still lose half your PP. However, you no longer lose half the XP earned To Next Level. Instead you lose *less* XP to drop you back to the beginning of your current deciLevel. deciLevels (described below) are 'safe' and (except for one case) you cannot drop down to a lower deciLevel.
* NEW MAX LEVEL - 100

Woo hoo, your character can now reach level 100 (100.0 to be exact). This level is unique however, in the sense that if you die at this level, you DO drop a deciLevel (to the start of 99.9) and you have to re-earn (from scratch - previously earned XP doesn't count) that final deciLevel. If nothing else, this gives highest-level players both something to do, and something to fear when entering into battle (it just wasn't right for them to have NO risk.)

Every other deciLevel is safe, however. (fingers crossed, at least!)
* NEW WORLD OPTION: Token-Locked Links. Hold on to your hat, the axis of the earth must have shifted! The link editor has a new option (I am documenting a bit in an advance here) so you can assign a token number to any link (0 means no token required, and is the default). Without that token, a character (or more accurately, the leader of the party) will not drop into the link. You CAN drag your friends through the link by leading the party. The link still shows up on the map, by the way (though I might change that, since you get absolutely no explanation as to why you can't drop through it without the token... Yeah... I think I'll make the link name and 'white box' invisible if you don't have the token. But the link itself will be visible... or will it? Oh decisions, decisions... and I don't want to provide all 16 option combinations.)
* NEW MONSTER OPTION: Alignment. This is no doubt going to confuse the world, either with its subtlety or its inadequacy . You can optionally append an alignment (name, not number) to the monster's ELEMENT (argument 4 of the MONSTERS table)

For Example:

"3" <-- monster is of element 3
"3.evil" <-- monster is of element 3, alignment 'evil'

As a world designer, your alignments can be anything you like (ascii only, less than 15 characters, no spaces or punctuation, please).

Exactly how alignments will be used is a little in the air, but to meet what I think is Merlin's big need at the moment, I will update at least one cookie with the alignment in it. For example, in this case, a cookie would be created called:

#<KM.evil>

And it would automatically be incremented each time you killed a monster of alignment 'evil'

Some of your monsters might be 'evil', some might be 'tasty' and some might be 'goofy' while the rest are not assigned (no cookie generated for the unassigned ones).

#<KM.evil> would be the sum of ALL monsters killed of alignment 'evil' (e.g. 3 BWs + 6 Imps = 9 total)

* NEW ITEM OPTION: Token Required To Equip. Details in the ITEMS.TXT file (argument 5, minimum level required). You can now optionally add a token requirement, hence:

"12.45"

Means "must be at least level 12 AND in possession of token 45" before you can EQUIP this. (and, I hope, before you can use it on yourself as well, so maybe it will work on potions, too.)

This obviously has many uses, and I don't know why I resisted it for so long. (Loric gets the 'last straw' award). If you give each of your character classes a unique token, you could then make some items only equipable by those classes. Or.. if you set all the 'wooden' armor to require one token and all the 'metal' armor to require another, you could then pass those tokens between your classes such that some guys could only use wood, others both, etc.

See the START_TOKENS and START_ITEMS features for getting your classes off to a good start.
* [CRASS $ THING] Another minor Golden Soul Perk, the list of MIX servers now supports right-clicking on server names to pop up a little menu of options. It only works with the new version of the MIX server that ships with A57 though. I hesitate to say what is in that menu, lest you think it is cooler than it really is. But one thing you can do is 'rate' servers (no rating, love it, like it, and hate it) and get a little icon next to the name of any server started on that same PC. Again, a little perk of golden-ness.
* [CRASS $ THING] Yet another GS perk to be announced after A57 is released. Sort of cool, but not critical for the enjoyment of the game. I'd document it now, but it might turn out to not work until A58. But it's something people have asked for, so I hope to sell at least 2 GS's off of it
* [CRASS $ THING] CHATTING WITH PETS. Golden souls will now be able to have small conversations with their pets. With emphasis on 'small.' Stating your pet's name, while in a scene, will call that pet into your scene. As in:

"Bitey!"
"Bitey"
"Bitey, help me!"

Your pet's name must be the FIRST text on the line, so:

"Help me, Bitey!"

Will have no effect. If you follow the name with a comma, then the rest of the line is interpreted as a command (the 'come into the scene please' command is inferred and all commands will draw the pet into the scene)

The only real *command* at present is:

"Porky, run!"

Which tells your pet to run away. (Porky being an example pet name of course). Everything else you say to your pet just calms it and makes it a bit smarter. Also, if you're in a scene and you type your pet's name, it will try its best to enter the scene with you (even if only to run away because it is mad at you, so watch out!)

You can go ahead and call a new pet into the scene without making the first one leave (it will leave automatically).

I think I might let pets with enough wisdom talk back in english occasionally, depending on their mood...

"Bitey: quit bossing me around, you %3!"
"Porky: I love you, %1!"

But, for now, they only growl a little in response to your talking to them.

Anyway, this meets my criteria of being of no real use to the player (hence a non-golden-soul hasn't really lost out), but is slightly entertaining and new. Plus it's probably all buggy! So it's a perfect perk of Golden Soulness

Oh, talking to your pet calms it, and makes it a little less stupid (like playing frisbee with it.) Summoning it to battle exercises it (a lot more than before), and the pet will now talk back to you a little, though not as wonderfully as I would like. (secret plan: put in an 'eliza' program for pets with high wisdom)

In general, I would have to say pets are more easily cared for in A57.
* [CRASS $ THING] The slash command "/monster" is now a cheat... unless you have a Golden Soul. Sorry, it was just too tempting to resist.
* NEW CHARACTER CLASS OPTIONS. Details in levels.txt comments, but these can be set on a per class basis:

NO_GIFTS - means class cannot accept items or gold pieces from other players (but can get them from scripts)

MAX_WALLET nn - sets the most this character's wallet can EVER carry. This only lets you lower the normal game maximums. It's a flat limit which affects all levels. Set it to 0 (zero) to deny the class the use of gold. (no shopping!)
* EVERGREEN HAS TWO NEW CLASSES: Beggars and Scavengers (aka Spartans). Scavengers cannot use money, and cannot accept gifts. Beggars can carry a few GP at a time (a couple hundred), but can accept regular item gifts.

If you throw more money than a character can hold, the excess is simply lost.

Scavengers have a fairly high ratio for both hand and magic (since they really have to work hard), while beggars have a 50/50 split.

These are 'novelty classes' and not to be considered 'balanced' relative to the other classes. It is expected that they will be weaker than the other classes, though a Spartan might be pretty tough if he or she manages to find some good equipment lying around. Please note that without money, your access to seeds is very limited.

You can thank (or blame) F'nok for this concept.
* NEW CHARACTER CREATION USES BOOK OF SKINS.

As promised, the book of skins is now the ONLY way to pick a skin for your character. The only noticeable side effect of this is that you auto-incarnate right after completing your new character definition. I suspect this is a good thing in general, though it defers understanding of the INCARNATE button until the second time you play, which will probably confuse a couple people... But overall, I suspect fewer people will be confused in the long run.
* NEW CRASH PROTECTION

If a world designer's ACTOR command points to a missing skin file, or refers to a pose number not present in that file, the engine will substitute something legal instead of showing nothing (or crashing). So worlds depending on 'joshTownies' should still work, in general.. you'll just see a lot of ghouls.
* NEW OPTION: Remember Window Positions.

This defaults to ON which is life as usual (windows pop up with the size and position you last set them to). Turn it OFF (and then restart the game) and windows will appear with their default size and position the next time you invoke them. This is mainly to help you recover from weird window size changes.

I also changed the way window size restorations were handled, so hopefully these snafus will no longer occur in the first place.
* PETS KNOW VENGEANCE.

A released pet (or one that escapes into the scene, when called while cranky enough) now remembers who enslaved it and exclusively battles that player. Such a monster also pays no XP or GP reward when killed.
* NEW PET!

Josh has provided us with another excellent pet, as well as a few more perfect pixels in all the other skins :-)
* NEW MUSIC.

Orbmaster has contributed another four wooooonderful original composition MIDI files. Very atmospheric. Thanks to all the contributions, every map of Evergreen now has its own original composition. Amazing! Thanks! Also I switched to the 'new music.ini' technology (now a year old, of course!) so I don't have to rename the midis to the name of the world, hence you get the glory of the author's file name, PLUS the installer is smaller because I have no duplicate files with different names...
* COOKIES (string variables for world developers).

These are variables stored in a hero's .INI file. Only the scene host's cookies are used (so a SET command only sets a cookie for the host).

To set a cookie, say:

SET cookieName, "cookie string"

To use the contents of a cookie, say:

#<cookieName>

To add a number to a cookie, say:

ADD cookieName, "amount to add"

For example:

SET insult, "%3"
SET info, "I am a level %V, %C"
1: Hey, #<insult>, you said: #<info>
SET loop, "5"
ADD loop, "-1"

The #<cookie> things are 'expressed' before the script command line in processed, and can be present in any script command argument

SET itemNumber, "45"
1: This is item %I#<itemNumber>

which 'expresses' to:

1: This is item %I45

cookie names must be alphanumeric only, with no spaces or punctuation in them. While they are not expressed recursively, you can do some basic indirection, as in:

SET cookieName, "favoriteColor"
SET #<cookieName>, "Blue"

1: your favorite color is #<favoriteColor>

becomes:

1: your favorite color is Blue
* DECI-LEVELS

I have added a single extra digit of precision to your level. So now you go from level 1 to level 1.1 to 1.2 etc up to 100.0 (not 100.9) - yes, level 100 at last. Did you feel the earth move?

You only see your deciLevel when looking at the STATS panel for your own character. You have no idea as to the deciLevels of other players.

Only your whole level changes really do anything, so the situation is pretty much identical to before where that goes. For example, you only get Ability Points when achieving a whole level, you only announce to other players on the server when you get a whole level. Only your whole level is used to meet level limit requirements on weapons and such.

The TNL meter still shows XP required till next whole level.

It's sort of like a little kid wanting to say "but I am eight AND A HALF."

You do get a little message and sound effect locally when you go up one or more deciLevels (which is the whole idea.. a little reward feedback in the middle of the doldrums.)

When you die, rather than losing half the XP earned to your next whole level, you instead drop down to the start of your current deciLevel. (But you do still lose half your PP.)

In general, when you die, you now lose LESS xp than before. And rez-killing can only knock you to the start of your deciLevel (not all the way back to your whole level).

The only exception to this is level 100.0 (the shiny new super cool level). Dying while 100.0 will drop you to 99.9 So a top level player now faces a modicum of risk. 99.9 is 'safe' however, so the risk ain't much.
* ADVERTISING CHANGES. Well, the BAD news is that you will now see that stupid ad of mine every TWENTY hours instead of every FIFTY hours. But the GOOD news is that if you get a GOLDEN SOUL, you won't have to see it all those 'catch up' times. I mean, if you already have a thousand hours, you'll only have to see it once to get caught up (and then again every 20 hours after that). Of course, if you don't have a golden soul, and you have a thousand hours, then you're going to be seriously bugged catching up on your ads. This is another good reason not to use speedHack, by the way
* NEW MIX SERVER (1.10) with several enhancements, including:

> Password Protected Servers (you can use this either as an actual password, or as a "please say YES if you are over 18" sort of thing.) The player must, in any case, type what you set as the password, before they can interact on your server. Presently you won't know a PW is required until you connect to the server (obviously, it would be better to be able to filter locked servers from the main list)

> Generally more attractive button layout. I had been trying to keep the window super small before and got in the habit of cramming buttons in willy-nilly. The buttons are still teensy, but slightly less hard to find.

> New option: Sernum Required. In case someone connects without a sernum... well, they can't interact.

> Option settings are now remembered for the next time you run your server.

> 'Ban Browser' lets you see who all you have banned in the past (and forgive them without having to remember their soul ID). This was actually quite nice as it made it easy to purge about a hundred expired banishments which were just clogging things up.

> 'expert IP thingy' helps people with multiple network cards publish the proper IP address. You still can't simply enter the IP address of your choice (after all, you are not really the one in control of that, according to mister Internet, and the point is to let people find you.) However, you might have both a modem dialup connection AND a lan-based connection to the internet, with two different IP addresses. MIX might be guessing incorrectly from your point of view (left to its druthers, MIX will always choose the 'newest' interface, which usually is the modem, since it generally gets dialed after the lan interface has already been established. SO, what do you do?

1.) Let it fail first, make sure you have a problem. Look at the IP address that MIX claims to be "listening at", say it shows "100.200.50.10" (four numbers separated by 3 periods. Ignore the colon and port number bit at the end).

2.) Make a command decision: "I *know* that's not the right address!"

3.) look in your MIX folder (for most of you, that's inside your WoS folder) for a file called "preferences.ini" open it with WordPad.

4.) Re-read my instructions, I said WORDpad, not NOTEpad. Notepad is confused by the line feeds.

5.) Look, how many times do I have to say it? do NOT use NOTEPAD for this, OK?

6.) Anyway, I told you this was an expert feature, so here goes... add, if necessary a new section called [wrongIPs] and then add your known-to-be-the-wrong-one IP address and set it equal to "1" as in:

[wrongIPs]
100.200.50.10 = 1

7.) If you are a world-class nerd with lots of interfaces, you can add additional known-to-be-wrong IPs to this list (though I strongly suggest that you let MIX display an IP address before you bother to disqualify it.)

8.) If you are clueless and try to disqualify the only interface you've got, I will patronizingly ignore your request and use it anyway. This is the big EXPERT feature (i.e. no tech support). Good luck, brave code-warrior!
* NO REWARD FOR CORD-PULLING. If you lose your connection in multiplayer mode, you stop being able to target other human players. So if you pull your modem out of the wall to trap the soul of another player in your scene, you can no longer earn rating points for killing the ghost that doesn't fight back.

At least that's the theory.

And sorry it took me so long to understand this (I don't have a modem, that's my excuse! and I would never think to pull my DSL cable!)

Now, if the other guy pulls HIS cable, then you can still pound on him, probably. Which is to say the situation there is the same as before, whatever that means. No improvement, but not worse than it was.
* MONSTER PHYSICAL ATTACKS NUDGED UP A BIT. They are still weaker than their magical attacks, but a bit stronger. You will notice it most as a 'naked' level one player where the monster attacks will be significantly higher. But once you put on some clothing it doesn't look all THAT different and the difference tends to get less the higher you go. I plan to raise it more over the next few releases until everyone screams uncle! Uncle Dan! Make it stop!
* FASTER WORLD MENU SCROLLING. Well, the number of available worlds is increasing, so scrolling through them one at a time has become tedious (especially once Evergreen is no longer on the first page of worlds!). Anyway, so now I step through them 3 at a time. I mean I show 4 at a time, but when you push to scroll I move 3 up/down the list instead of just one.
* GOOFY MENU CHANGES. Probably the less said about this the better. I don't need your abuse!
* IMPORT ZIP FILE ENHANCED. We have a growing problem with hosting world files on free web servers. They don't like WoS fetching the ZIP file automatically because they think you aren't seeing their advertising (of course, generally you ARE seeing their ad, but they don't know that). So they add extra javascript stuff (slowing down everything) to make sure you can only fetch a file by clicking manually on one of their links. When WoS tries to fetch automatically, instead I get a little HTML error message file.

So, in A57 I 'detect' this has happened (not very sophisticatedly, I admit. I just assume it failed if the file I get is too small to realistically be a world ZIP file). If I think this is what happened, I pop up a message explaining what you need to do, which is:

1.) read the web page you are looking at and click on the "download the ZIP" link which the world designer will have placed there, knowing that their web host has this issue.

2.) let the browser download and save the ZIP file to disk (while you look at the advertising).

3.) REMEMBER WHERE IT SAVED IT (Desktop is always nice)

4.) Push the IMPORT button WoS is showing you all this time. And tell WoS where you saved the ZIP file. (WoS will prompt you for the file path, but if you leave that blank it will bring up a windows file browser instead)
* NEW SLASH COMMAND "/mags" This calls the "magnificent attack" routine one MILLION times and then tells you how many mag hits you got. You should see about one in 50. This is for you math-skeptics, though I doubt it will convince you: "But I got heads 4 times in a row, that PROVES heads are more likely than tails!"
* NEW SLASH COMMAND "/pwd" This tells you your 'current working diectory' and is intended to be used by people with disappearing buttons. It should show the path to your WoS folder and my theory is that when your buttons disappear it will instead show the path to somewhere else, and you'll recognize that path and tell me and then we'll know what is changing the path. But since this version also no longer depends on that path (for the most part), you may never see your buttons disappear again, so this command might not be useful. Well, it will still be good to know, so after your buttons WOULD have disappeared, see if the path has changed anyway :-)
* NEW WORLD DEVELOPER FEATURE "START_LOCATION"

This is an attribute for character classes. This lets you set the 'first incarnation' location on a per class basis (so all your elf class characters start off in Elf Town, etc.) It's optional (otherwise everyone starts at link 0 of map 0) and having multiple start points puts the onus on you for those start points to exist and make sense. A new player generally needs access to informatin and resources which you will need to provide at several locations (possibly) to make it make sense. If you specify a map or link which doesn't exist, I don't promise to behave gracefully. In fact, I will probably crash. Documentation is in "levels.txt" But basically you just add something like:

START_LOCATION 5, 12

(start on link 12 of map 5) in the front of each character class you don't want to be born at (0,0).

This only affects the first incarnation, of course. subsequent incarnations take you to wherever you left off (last link visited).

And I still lack the ability to incarnate into a scene, so you'll appear on top of the link specified.

5/29/2001 ALPHA 56 INCLUDES:
* 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.
5/22/2001 ALPHA 55 INCLUDES:
* 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.
4/30/2001 ALPHA 54 INCLUDES:
COMPATIBILITY: Excellent!. Will even keep running past may 1st, 2001 even :)
* [BUGFIX] Turns out it had been ignoring the minLevel field of the ITEM table when you went to use an item on yourself. Most noticably the use of seed by players below level 35. Geeee, I *wonder* why no one pointed this out before :-) (cact pointed it out, so blame him some more)
* [BUGFIX] the chat messages "X has incarnated" were printing golden soul ids in hex (I want the goldens to be in decimal for no particularly justifiable reason other than my general idiocy and willingness to make things a lot harder than they need to be.)
* [BUGFIX] The "TAKE" opcode was actually giving, in the case where the item was a pet. This is no longer the case. However, you still can't take a pet from someone by
using this command.
* [BUGFIX] The "GOTO SCENE" command, if it sends you to the surface of another map (not if it drops you into a scene on the new map) should now change the music to the new map's music.
* SERVER RULE: noPK now allows PKing on 'dangerous' maps (map flag 4). So, on a noPK server, you should only be able to PK on a map with this flag set. For example, PK Arena in Evergreen. In the case of Evergreen, it's pretty easy to avoid accidentally visiting that map :-)
* NEW SERVER RULE: "allPK" is the opposite of "noPK" sort of, only there are no safe areas at all. This is the "snert magnet" rule :-) All maps are dangerous. See, the great and wise Samsyn meets the needs of all his children. (if you set both rules, by the way, noPK wins).
* IMPROVED RANDOMNESS OF 'FOUND' ITEMS (I hope.)
* YET MORE IF CONDITIONAL KILL TESTING:
KM23 killed monster 23 at least once
KM23.5 killed monster 23 at least 5x
KB15 killed by monster 15 at least 1x
KB15.4 killed by monster 15 at least 4x
KM0 Has killed at least one monster (of any kind)
KM0.5 Has killed at least 5 monsters (of any kind)
KB0 Has died at least once (for any reason)
KB0.5 Has died at least 5 times (for any reason)
* AFK HOURS NO LONGER COUNTED FOR CHARACTER AGE. Um, this is 'truly idle hours' I mean. You can still age while "manually AFK" just not if you actually walk away from your pooter. Oh, also, running the HalfLife clock accelerator is now a 'hack' so don't.
* SHAPESHIFTER MONSTERS AVAILABLE. If a world designer sets a monsters skin name to "mirror" then that monster will appear with the same skin as the player. (in some cases this will mean every player in the scene sees themselves, in others it will mean everyone sees a copy of the scene host's scene. I am unwilling to predict which at this time :-)
* GUILD HALL MAINTAINS ENEMY/ALLY UNIFORM LISTS. You can see where I am headed here (another case of my almost listening to the masses ) Be sure to make these just comma separated lists of guild Uniforms. If you put other words in these lists.. well.. who knows what you'll get. So, Allies might be: "WoS, CoS, LoH" and Enemies might be "SoV, FBI, FoS" Avoid the temptation to say "and" etc. Eventually the game will read these when you put on a uniform and then some game features will react. There IS a maximum length to this string, so don't get wacky on me, OK? You don't HAVE to have an opinion of EVERY guild... Also, your minions will only see the current list when they don their uniform, so if you have an active hatred matrix, get your members to change their uniforms frequently... um, you don't have to actually CHANGE your uniform, just select the UNIFORM option from the guild list, that freshens the list automatically even if you CANCEL the actual uniform change.
* GUILD UNIFORMS COLORED IN MAP LIST. Uniforms will now be white, if of no particular interest, green if same guild as you (what you are wearing right now), yellow-green if an allies guild (at time of last Uniform check) and red if an enemies guild.
* FULL SERVER REJECTION RETURNS YOU TO MAIN MENU. You also get to watch it say "Scanning.." but that is a cool feature, not a bug.
* MORE FIND PROBABILITY CHANGES. IN addition to minimizing duplication of discovered items (I hope) (and thanks, LGH for noticing), I fiddled with the interaction of the GP and FP fields of the item table to give more possible combinations of losable quest items. See the new items.txt for details.

4/17/2001 ALPHA 52 INCLUDES:

• * GUILT COMES TO WOS. Yes, WoS will now nag you to make a $10 donation every 50 hours or so. It checks every time you return to the well (while online). Please note that if you already had, say, 250 hours of play time, you will see the begging message EVERY visit to the well for the next 5 visits (250/50 = 5) at which point you will be caught up and not be nagged again for another 50 hours. (50 hours of total gameplay time, by the way, afk or not). I had 8000 hours. Imagine my thrill :-)
  I seriously encourage anyone who *can* donate $10 with a credit card (and who wants WoS to continue) do so. If you're poor, credit-less, or don't like WoS, then don't worry about it.
  And I apologize for being reduced to begging in-game.
• * [BUGFIX] Link Names were not being remembered correctly on the main map during your first incarnation of the day. (The truth is a bit too complicated to describe). I believe you would have seen something similar had you returned to the well and then incarnated in a different character which happened to be on the same map. Once you travelled through a submap, however, you should have been ok when returning to the main map.
• * [BUGFIX] Fixed a problem with the character level parsing for max training.
• * [BUGFIX] Official Ladder score reports should get reported with less hassle to you, the player.
• * MP/HP METERS LARGER. Well, if your screen is larger, so are they :-)
• * NEW MONSTER FLAG - SAME_ELEMENT_ONLY (value is 2) If you set this flag for one of your monsters, it is limited to only casting spells in its very own element. (I have also made a half-hearted attempt to let you assign unusual element values to monsters as well. But I don't guarantee it works, and it will most likely lead to crashes down the line. In theory, you can use elements 0-255 now. In theory.)
• * WELL NOW.. OK.. Maybe I was overly pessimistic. I just made the forest wyrm an element '100' (Chaos) creature, and created a single element '100' spell "Wyrm Breath" which only the Forest Wyrm can cast.
  And it appears to work, at least in solo mode. (oh, I also used the new 'same element' flag, of course).
• * CAN NO LONGER DISABLE ATTACK ANIMATIONS. So now the pain won't seem so delayed :-)
• * MINIMUM TIME BETWEEN HUNT STARTS IS FIVE SECONDS. Previous build required five seconds from END of one hunt to start of next, which wasn't what I intended. (you people are in *such* a hurry!)
• * NEW MAP FLAG (64) SUPPRESSES SHADOWS. So heroes and monsters have no shadows on such a map (nor in scenes on that map). Good for space worlds, and maybe underwater worlds as well. Though a really clever programmer would have made the scene shadows controlled by the scene and not the map flag.
• * UDP PORT SELECTION OPTION. There is a button "Network Settings" (or something like that) on the "Where do you want to play today" dialog. It has a new option "UDP Port" which defaults to zero (meaning, let windows choose the next available port). If your firewall blocks UDP traffic and you need a known range of UDP ports to unblock, then set this value to the first port of that range. So, if ports 8000-8099 are unblocked, set this to "8000" (and I will use 8000 first, then 8001, then 8002..) I will always start with 8000 each time you run the program, so if you run two copies of WoS or WoS and arcadia and rocket club at the same time, they will conflict. So don't do that. If you don't have a firewall problem, leave this set to zero.
• * FROM THE "What was I THINKING file": The "/fight N" command no longer works in multiplayer mode. Its purpose was to aid world developers, not to allow cheat characters to attack non-cheat characters with Black Wraths. I was so focussed on how I removed the ability to earn experience from such monsters, that I neglected the hassle factor. I wonder how many "Hacked Pet" reports were really just this...
• * THREE SECOND RULE IS NOW THE TWO SECOND RULE. Now everyone has 2 seconds to place their next move before the first guy can place a new move. The world evolves and reacts. And I believe I mentioned that I fixed the five second rule.
• * ADDITIONAL HACKER CHECKS. I check a couple more places for inappropriate modifications of memory. If you have slipped into the habit of memory modifying, I encourage you to slip out of it, lest you trigger mister hack detector. Thanks to Odie and LoveSquall for pointing this one out.
• * FIGHT OPCODE LETS YOU BRING IN 'BUDDY MONSTERS' Yes, samsyn listens! Basically, when you make a list of monsters, use negative numbers for monsters you want to fight for you. For example:
  FIGHT 1, 2, 3, 4, -4
  This would bring in four 'bad' monsters, and one 'good' monster (of id 4. still has to be defined in the monster table).
  SO, if you define a 'mercenary' as a monster in the table (and then carefully avoid actually placing any mercenary monsters on the map), then in a scripted scene you can have that mercenary appear and help you out.
  The merc will have a green shadow, and enter the scene from the same side as you (i.e. yes, he's really a pet. just a pet who belongs to no one.)
  I tested this only to the slightest and teensiest degree.
  And yes, in SOLO mode, as a cheater, you can "/fight -255" to get a BW to help you out in battle. But "/fight" no longer works in multiplayer mode, so you can't use it to attack nonPKers.
  And it looks like you can kill a mercenary if you like and s/he won't fight back (nor can the script engine detect it and punish you for it.... oh.. hmm... I wonder... hopefully you won't earn any XP or PP for killing a friendly merc. Hopefully a merc won't kill other humans in the scene who aren't on your team. (probably will). Hopefully mercs work in multiplayer (might not). Man, what a sloppily introduced feature! World designers: Use it sparingly.
  In case, I was unclear, even though you use a negative number in the FIGHT opcode, they monster ID is the positive version of that number. Don't go adding negative monster IDs to the monster table or the world will end as you know it. So.. monster ID 5 in the monster table, will fight FOR you if you say -5 in the FIGHT opcode. Usually, a good mercenary 'monster' would not also be placed on the map as a regular monster, right? You'd want "Pirate Steve" to only show up in certain scenes, right?
• * NEW SERVER RULE: "noEavesdrop." This disables the eavesdrop feature (which lets you hear everyone on the server, no matter how 'far away' they are. With this rule on, you will only hear people who are 'near you' (visible on the same map with you, in the same scene with you, in your party, or who address you by name, or who shout.) Um, you can still 'eavesdrop on all heart buddies' so it isn't a 'privacy' feature, just a 'chat encapsulation' feature.
  My guess: this will lead to more shouting on ALL servers (by the very people you hoped it would filter out) "Idiot shouts HEY WILL SOME1 LEVEL ME THE BLEEP UP!!!!".
• * GOLDEN SOULS FOR SALE. Another cheap gimmick to try to earn enough money to cover my WoS bills... A52 will give you the option of buying a "Golden Soul Activation Code."
  Once you have one of these, you enter it into your copy of WoS (via the Help About.. panel) and thereafter all characters on your PC show up as "Golden Souls."
  This will also change your soul ID to the one embedded in your activation code, so your buddies will have to re-hat you.
  However, you will NOT lose control over your existing characters, even though your soul ID changed. Coz Golden Soul Computers don't hassle you about that. (of course, moving a golden soul character to a non-golden soul computer will trigger the modder thing, so either enter the same activation code into both computers, or buy a second one.)
  As to sharing Golden Soul Activation Codes... well, each computer still needs a unique soul ID to play in the same game, so use your own judgement (i.e. the only sanctioned reason for doing this is to move characters between two of your own computers).
  Even Golden Souls can be gagged, muted, banned, etc. No amount of cash buys you the freedom to be a snert :-)
  What, you ask, are the benfits of being a Golden Soul?
  1.) Your name will appear in Gold, not white, in the MAPs player list.
  2.) You get a slightly different little icon (and I mean slightly)
  3.) Everyone will know that I like you better than everyone else :-)
  4.) You get the 'relaxed rules' for moving characters between golden computers. (Plus you can recover from a crashed hard drive)
  A pleasant side effect of this change is that you (everyone with A52) can click in any column of the player list to select a line (instead of having to scroll back to the left to do it.) I have NO idea why the behaviour of the list control changes in this way, but I'm happy all the same.
• * NEW 'IF' CONDITIONAL: Check if item is EQUIPPED.
  So, like this:
  . IF E45, @item45IsEquipped
  As opposed to:
  . IF I45, @hasAtLeastOneOfItem45
  And, as usual, it is only checking the scene host's equipment and items.
• * NEW 'IF' CONDITIONAL: Checks how many times you have killed this monster, or been killed by it. This has an optional second argument if you include a decimal point. I will document by example:
  IF KM23, @hasKilledAtLeastOneMonster23
  IF KB23, @hasBeenKilledAtLeastOnceByMonster23
  IF KM23.4, @hasKilledAtLeastFourMonster23s
  IF KB23.4, @monster23KilledHimAtLEast4Times
  Hope that makes sense. And I haven't tested this at all!
• * SPELLS CAN NOW BE LIMITED BY CHARACTER LEVEL AS WELL AS ELEMENT TRAINING LEVEL. This feature is crammed into argument six of the spells table. For example:
  5.0.32
  Means "must be trained to level 5 in element, flags are 0 (no flags), character level must be 32 or above).
  Unlike most other spell restrictions, the character level restrictin makes the spell NOT EVEN APPEAR in the "learn spells" dialog until they reach that level.
  If you leave this off, as in:
  5.0
  or even, the lowly
  5
  Then it is assumed anyone of level 0 or above can learn the spell if they meet the other criteria.
• * CHEAT CHARACTERS CAN NO LONGER PK ATTACK. You'll just have to camp with each other if you want to duke out a couple of cheat characters.
• * PETS ARE NO LONGER PERMANENTLY STUPID unless their 'base monster' has zero wisdom. So, if you negligently allow a wise pet to drop to 0 wisdom, you can bring it back from stupidity.
• * NEW OPTION IN THE BOOK OF OPTIONS: "Don't let me use cheat codes." (and this defaults to ON). Until you turn this off, your requests to use cheat codes will be ignored (well, actually you get a popup explaining you need to turn this option off before you can use cheat codes). Once you have already tagged your character as a cheater, this won't prevent you from using additional cheats.
• * NEW QUEST (don't get your hopes up, it's only one scene long, and it isn't really a quest, and I stole the idea from LGH. And it is a *teensy* bit mean-spirited, though I like to think of it as being a *tutorial*)

3/17/2001 ALPHA 51 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Excellent!.
• * [BUGFIX] Modem Mode play should no longer say "lost network connection" (and hopefully this will apply to null-modem as well in advance of anyone actually trying it...) Of course, I didn't test this (I no longer have modems!)
• * MONSTER ALGORITHMS NO LONGER FORCED. World designers can now control the XP and GP of their monsters. Setting these values to 0 will force the use of the algorithms.
  I reserve the right to take this back if it becomes a game-destroying problem.
• * VOLUME CONTROLS FOR DIFFERENT SOUND CLASSES. There is a new option in the SOUND menu which brings up a volume control panel. You can micro adjust the various sound effect classes - miscellaneous, environmental, screams, attacks, and events.
• * MAGIC USERS ARE YET ANOTHER TEENSY INSIGNIFICANT BIT MORE POWERFUL than before.
• * MINOR ITEM CHANGES. There were more 'special deals' for HP than MP, so a couple silly items (mulled port and pizza) now boost MP instead. Also, the 'find probability is computed slightly differently, so I hope you might have more variety there as well.
• * ALL IF CONDITIONS DOCUMENTED. The quest.txt file was a little behind in is coverage of all the available IF conditions. I added a new one as well:
  
  IF Mnn, @label
  
  This will go to the label if the current map has map_flag nn set.
  
  Also this one:
  
  IF Hnn, @label
  
  This tests how old the character is (in HOURS) and goes to the label if they are at least nn hours old. a CHARACTER test (not a player test).
  
  and this one:
  
  IF XP, @label
  
  This tests if the COUNTDOWN TIMER has expired. It goes to the label if you are "too late"
• * NEW OPCODE: COUNTDOWN nn This is a new command which starts a countdown timer (the user sees this in the main window as long as it is active.) It counts down to zero. For example, you might have a scene which asks the user to collect 4 flags and return withint 20 seconds. clear 4 tokens and start the timer. Then give the flag tokens in 4 other scenes. When returning to the original scene, test if all 4 flags are present and the counter has not yet expired.
  
  Note: leaving the game resets the timer (you lose), so this isn't to be used for anything which might take days to accomplish. And there is only one countdown timer available, so structure your quests to not need it for several things at the same time.
  
  Also, only the scene host actually sees the countdown. It's sort of a solo mode sort of thing, really, I guess. I mean everyone has their own timer. But if you go into a scene as a party, only the leader will see the timer.
• * NEW PET! "Forest Wyrm" which I know is going to be popular. It's wicked looking. Thanks to Josh, as usual!
• * CHEATER CHARACTERS CAN USE PETS AGAIN.. but only in solo mode. If you use one in multiplayer mode it will just run away. This is to let world designers test their pets. Plus, why not? little harm done.
• * LINK NAMES NO LONGER SHOWN ON MAP.. unless you have visited that link before. The exceptions to this are: 1.) link zero on every map is always shown, and 2.) maps using the new MAP FLAG (32) will have all names shown just like in the old days. The idea is to be more like other RPGs which hide the names of towns (etc) until you visit them for the first time. I hope this doesn't mess up any existing worlds, but I don't THINK it will.
• * MONSTERS NOT SHOWN IN BOOK OF DEMONS until after you have met them in battle once. The exception here is for cheat characters which get to see the full list (mainly to help world designers). Also, when using the book of demons, there is a reminder for each monster as to which map you saw them on most recently. ("Last seen: Goblin Rock" for example). Maybe someday I will have a monster 'compass needle' for you (like the hero finder).
• * PK ATTACK VICTIM CAN NO LONGER FLEE BY LEAVING WORLD OR CLOSING PROGRAM. Which is to say, these commands are disabled for the same period of time that the scene exit/flee commands are disabled. And actually it applies to both victim and attacker. If you know of any other way of fleeing inappropriately, please let me know as soon as possible. Nothing I can do about turning off the PC, but that would leave their ghost in your scene, right? Perhaps that is punishment enough.
• * PK ATTACKER (scene host) does not get an immediate turn. IN a perfect world, the host's turn would not start until the clients were all ready to go. This is not yet that perfect world. But it is a tiny step towards that world.
• * 3 SECOND TURN LIMIT ENFORCED. Ok, if you were to ask me how often a player could attack, I would have said "no sooner than 3 seconds from last attack." But in fact this wasn't true. A scene host could attack as fast as his or her attack animation would complete. Now the good news is that now that it works like I thought it was working all along, it should be less likely for a pk scene host to be able to bash you forty times to your one. However, it also means you can NEVER bash 60 times a minute, which you have probably gotten used to when battling monsters. So there will be people who are upset that now the attacks are 'all laggy' and the PKers won't feel it is enough of a change to balance a true lag fight. Anyway, since the PKers are the squeaky wheel at the moment, we'll let them show their ingratitude first before I change it back. (I was bein' *sarcastic*, LP)
  
  This also applies to bringing pets in and out of battle, by the way, since that takes your 'move' as well.
• * ONLY 'REAL' SPELLS CAN FIZZLE. A spell must be of one of the normal 8 elements to have a chance of fizzling. The funky spells hardwired to book class items, for example, will not fizzle. (enchanted items, however, like a staff bound to a normal elemental spell, will fizzle). Fizzling is based on your character's magic ratio.
• * ACTIVE PKER CANNOT FLEE period increased to 24 hours. (and is more binding in general.) I mean, if you PK Attack someone, then for the next 24 hours of real-time, you cannot quick-flee someone else's attack (you will be stuck for at least 30 seconds in each attack).
• * HAND/ELEMENT TRAINING ABOVE 9.995 was, in fact, causing a math overflow. Such training is now limited to 9.99 (and I no longer show 3 digits of precision past the decimal point, so you're not encouraged to get higher than that). Going above 9.99 never made any real difference in your performance (other than via the bug, I mean) and encouraged people to do weird things (like investing 20 million PP) Your digits will be 'repaired' the next time you use them, so you should get your punch power back on the second hit in A51.
• * ADDED A DELETE BUTTON to the Book of Skins. Of course, if you delete a skin and then run into someone wearing it, you'll have to download it again. But I have picked up hundreds of skins which I know I will never see anyone wear (because they are so awful :-) and now I have a few Meg more bytes free on my disk drive after deleting them. Of course, you'll still want to drop into DOS to delete "vegeta*.bmp"
• * NO MORE INFINITE TICKETS HOME? I changed the script for the Gateway to not bother giving you another ticket home if you already had one. In theory this makes no difference unless you're in the habit of sharing them. In practice, I still seem to be able to accumulate more than one of them, so go figger. But if you already have 50, it looks like you'll keep 50 forever. You know, that so makes no sense. I should probably check that some more.
• * BY GOLLY WHAT LUCK I CHECKED :-) Turns out there has been a bug in the IF conditional checking since the beginning of time. It would have made testing for the presence of ITEMS in general extremely chaotic, especially if you tested for several conditions at once. Silly me.
• * MIX SERVER LIST IS SORTABLE BY COLUMN. A minor pleasantry, more important now that there are more than a couple servers around most of the time. I was coding this when the Seattle earthquake hit.
• * MIX SERVER LIST HAS NEW COLUMN: 'Playing' This is where I stick the world name, if one has been picked. (or the toy name, in the case of Arcadia - which is why I didn't label the column "World") Anyway, this removes the ugly [world=xxxx] from the server name and just generally makes the list prettier. (plus you can sort by world name and LGH will be glad to notice that "Aerianeelll" comes before "Evergreeen" (click again to reverse order) )

2/19/2001 ALPHA 50 INCLUDES:

• * 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)

2/5/2001 ALPHA 49 INCLUDES:

• * [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.

12/21/2000 ALPHA 48 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! (World designers should read about the change to the "effects.bmp" file (and backup their originals before upgrading)).
  Also, be sure to type the command:
  /compress
  once after upgrading. It converts some files from the old way to the new way (saving tons of disk space). Details below. If you do NOT give this command, you will notice missing buddy/soul info until you do.
  
• * [BUGFIX] 'disable music' setting is remembered again.
• * HACKER CHECK PAUSES reduced a little. I have on rather vigorous hacker scan which takes a noticeable amount of time on slower machines. Now it should be considerably less noticeable. Blame Mister Hacker, please. Use this to hate him even more.
• * LOTS OF NEW ANIMATIONS FROM JOSH. (more things to throw, more sparkly magic effects), plus artistic tweaks of pixels in existing skins (Josh is a perfectionist, you know )
• * NEW MIX SERVER SUPPORTS 'RULES' A48 ships with a new MIX server which lets the admin specify the following rules which apply to players ON THAT SERVER (i.e. these are server-specific). Each rule is OPTIONAL and its absence can be assumed to mean no restriction applies. You set the rules using the MSG button on the MIX dialog, which has a third edit box. Into that you type your rules in the form:
  a=1, b=2, c=3, etc.
  The actual rules are given here with typical values. You can actually abbreviate the rule name to its first few characters if it is unique.. You can leave off the '=value' if the rule is 'binary' (on or off). Just don't include the rules you don't want to have apply.
  
• *maxPlayers=32
  Past that don't get allowed on server. Pick a number which meets your needs (my own server lags horribly at 32 people)
• *maxAFK=10
  
  After this many minutes AFK the player is booted (to make room for someone else). Note that '0' is not a legal value for ANY server rule (turns the rule off), so you have to give them at LEAST a minute of AFK time. Give them a chance to go to the bathroom at least.
• *minVersion=A48
  
  Players with older versions than this not allowed. Don't bother setting it to anything less than A48. Also, don't set it higher than the currently available version or no one will be able to play on your server at all.
• *ladder=1
  
  Only Ladder#1 is supported for now. It's the Evergreen PK Arena tournament. If you want fights on your server to be reported to the ladder, you'll need to set this rule.
• *world=Evergreen
  
  Won't let people use anything but this world. Be sure to spell the world name correctly or no one will be able to play on your server at all. Do NOT use quotes in the name or around the name, or at all. I trim leading and trailing spaces, but you can have a space or two in the middle.
• *noBleep
  
  This means you don't want people to swear on your server. If they do, they are auto-gagged until they disconnect and reconnect.
• *noCheat
  
  Won't let people incarnate with a cheat character.
• *noMod
  
  Won't let people incarnate with a modder character (note: this is DIFFERENT from someone who appears as having a 'mod' in the case where they have a different, but official, version than you do.
• *noPK
  
  Makes all maps 'safe' from attack by PKer. Makes your server a kinder, gentler place. And unappealing for PKers. You can incarnate with a PK character, you just can't PK.
• * BROKEN WEB SERVER SHOULD NOT BLOCK GAME. If, on the extremely rare chance, my bleeping web server goes down, the game will now try to use the 'last known' master server (which 99% of the time will still be correct). Of course, winsock might wait a long time before deciding the web server is down. But this should be a teensy bit better.
• * RENAMED POKEDEX TO "BOOK OF DEMONS" (You know I had to do this someday...)
• * RENAMED "QUEST HISTORY" TO "DIARY" (now everything is either a book or a diary, with a diary sort of being something you fill in as you go along being the idea, though not entirely general.
• * OBSERVATION ABOUT WORLD DIARY. World Authors get to include a ... Oh, I see where I blew it. OK... note to myself: make the diary come from the world, not universal to the game. Silly me. Anyway, AFTER I make that change, world designer's should provide the file "Blank_diary.doc" which will have any preloaded info they want. (only first time users of the world will see this, then it gets copied to their own diary.doc file and cannot be subsequently overwritten by the world designer. (otherwise people's notes to themselves disappear with every upgrade)
• * CHANGES TO QUEST DIARY. I'm fiddling with the HTML which is used to generate the quest diary to make it look prettier (I hope), and it suddenly occurs to me that the TOKEN entries in the quest files can actually have HTML in them if you like... I mean, in all versions of WoS, not just A48. So if you say:
  
  TOKEN 15, "<B>King Felafel</B> is pleased with you."
  
  The name will then be in bold when seen in the quest diary. In fact, if you want to be super cool about it, you could have hyperlinks in the tokens such that people from the soul diary can link to your web site (maybe read the backstory about king felafel or something!) Anyway, that's for hard-working ambitious world designers only. If your HTML requires quotes (like around the URL in the HREF tag), use single-quotes instead of double quotes.
  
  Also, if you use the %Tn directive to print a token name in the chat window, you'll see the whole thing, HTML and all. I mean in that context the HTML will be raw, not interpreted. I'm probably the only one who ever used %Tn, but consider yourself warned.
• * SPLASH SCREEN DURING MAIN MAP LOAD. A perversion of a suggestion by Josh, you may now include a file called "splash.jpg" in your world or theme folder. It is shown more or less instantly when you select the world, and stays on screen until the main world map has been loaded. Thus, on MY machine it appears so briefly you don't see it, while on YOUR machine it stays there for an hour - JUST LIKE EVERQUEST!
  
  Once the map loads, you finally get to see the scrolling story line. So, what you get in A48 is:
  
  1.) World Selection Screen (click on 'Evergreen')
  2.) Display switches instantly to splash.jpg from the ART folder of the world or game.
  3.) Time goes by while the huge maps are loaded into memory.
  4.) Display switches to zooming map with backstory scrolling over it.
  
  Hence, just like before only you get to see splash.jpg in step 2 instead of a big black screen.
• * MAGIC EFFECTS FILE FORMAT CHANGE. This might affect you if you have customized the file "effects.bmp" in your own world. (If you modified the copy that comes with the game then you already know it made you unpatchable, so I don't care ). Instead of a single file called "effects.bmp" (now gone), there are multiple files: "effects00.bmp", "effects01.bmp", ... "effects19.bmp" where each file holds only ten rows of effects (instead of 32). In the SPELL table you still call out a row number, but now it can go from 0 to 199. row 53, for example, is offset 3 of the file "effects05.bmp" This is the same technique as for attack path images.
  
  And, as before, files 10-19 are reserved for world designers, while 00-09 will change with the game itself (so put your work in 10-19)
• * OBNOXIOUS "Listen!" SOUND EFFECT REDUCED IN FREQUENCY. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this to me before. Anyway, that little pixie voice (me on helium) saying "Listen" every time someone types something in chat no longer occurs every time. Now it only happens if this is the first line of chat in 30 seconds (drawing your attention if the chat had gone quiet and is now resuming) OR if the line of chat has your name in it (your ears are burning).
• * NEW MAP FLAG - LADDER (16). World Designers can tag individual maps as being 'ladder' maps. Only fights which take place on ladder maps are reported to the tournament server. Note that just tagging the map is not quite enough yet to establish a tournament. But it is a necessary pre-requisite.
• * LIMITED LADDER SUPPORT IN A48. Nothing fancy. If a server has the rule "Ladder=1" it means that registered maps report their score results to ladder number 1. For now, ladder #1 is the Evergreen PK Arena map and any fighting on that map will result in scores being posted both to the individual and to their guild, if any. Don't expect fireworks. If you are on a 'ranked' map you will see a little ladder icon (cool, huh?) on the mini-map. If you think you ought to see a ladder but don't, remember that the server has to have the rule set, plus you can't be a cheater or a modder.
  
  Your 'rating' is computed using a modified chess rating algorithm. It rewards you for beating a higher RATED opponent (doesn't care about levels). There is no reward for beating a sufficiently lower rated opponent.
• * TICKETS CANNOT BE USED DURING PK ATTACK SCENE TIMEOUT. so, during the 30 second 'post-hit-freeze-thing' you can't use a ticket to run back to the well.
• * WELL BUTTON WON'T WORK DURING PK ATTACK SCENE TIMEOUT. Ditto for the 'return to Well' button.
• * On-Screen "tell-tale" during skin xfers. I suppose this is a mood-killer, but I put a little text in the upper right "[skin xfer]" whenever you are in the middle of one or more skin transfers. This should help you distinguish one sort of lag from another. If you're sending your skin to 30 people, you will presumably feel it as major lag.
• * THE LURCH FEATURE. This one's for you, L! There is a new command, which you should only need to use once (unless you downgrade, which I keep telling you is a Very Bad Idea (tm))
  
  /compress
  
  this command recovers quite a bit of wasted disk space (130 meg in my case) from the sloppy way I record information about other players. I'm still sloppy, but about 10 times less so. Perhaps more will be done in the future.
  
  Note: you MUST give this command once to convert your old style info to the new style. So if you seem to have lost all your buddy info, you probably haven't issued this command yet.
• * WOS JOINS THE CHESS FEDERATION! Well, not really. BUt now your character gets a numeric 'rating' based on the same algorithm as used in chess. You will initially be given a starting rating based on your level. After that your rating goes up and down as a result of PK fighting (non-PKs will stay with a fixed rating.. actually maybe I will suppress the number there to avoid undue competitive feelings).
  
  Anyway, the way chess ratings work is you get more points by beating a powerful opponent. So pounding newbies won't raise your score as much as fighting an equal, or a superior, will.
  
  The goal of this is to re-focus PK goals. To get a big score, you have to leave the newbies alone. Woo hoo! positive feedback!
  
  Note that this is NOT the honor system and a 'win' can never make your total score go DOWN. A win will always raise your score a smidgeon. A loss will always lower your score a smidgeon. The size of the smidgeon is based on the relative player ratings.
  
  And yeah, I put this in here coz I am doing it in synChess.
• * NEW SERVER RULE. If you set this rule in your server:
  
  noBleep=1
  
  Then any use of a 'hardcore' bleep (the default bleeper list of the game) will trigger an auto-gag on the player for that server (they can chat elsewhere, but are muted for the remainder of their visit to your server).
  
  No, you can't have a custom bleeper list per server, sorry.
  
  My hope is that some people will choose to run 'free speech' servers where people can be as blue as they like, while others run 'child-friendly' servers.
  
  And yes, someday I will add filters to the MIX server list so you can select from servers which meet certain criteria (ping time, rule set, player count, etc.). But probably not until there are always more than 10 servers around. Should that day ever arrive.
• * POKEDEX, I MEAN BOOK OF DEMONS, IS SORTABLE. As a small gift for Josh, and world designers in general, I suppose, I made the BoD sortable by name, element/level, and ID.
  
  I also default to the un-zoomed monster skin image, to spare Josh's sensitive eyes from the "big pixels" You may or may not have known that clicking on the image toggles between two sizes (if possible) and plays the GROWL sound effect when the monster gets BIG and the PAIN sound effect when the monster gets SMALL.
• * NEW IF CONDITIONAL "#" tests current map number. As in:
  
  IF #3,@weAreOnMap3
  
  Where the map number matches the index in the quest files MAP table. This is useful if you have some scene which you use in more than one spot (for example, as a ticket). Well, maybe it isn't useful at all.
• * NEW OPTION: Quick NPC Bubble Pops. In the book of options you can now elect to have the Non-Player character's speech bubbles pop more quickly. When this is engaged, bubbles pop more quickly when they have less text in them. (note: if you miss a line of dialog, it is, of course, in the chat window, for your reviewing pleasure).
  
  OK OK... I apologize for dragging my feet on this one, it makes the scenes a lot more fun. I am even defaulting it to ON, so you'll have to turn it off if you want the old 10 second bubbles to return.
• * NEW QUEST TABLE: "EQUIP" Check out quest.txt for the details, but this OPTIONAL table lets you override the equipment category names "Helmet", "Boots", etc for your world. If you don't HAVE this table, you will get the default values. Note that the HANDs are defined in a separate table.
• * NOTIFICATION ON DISCONNECT. While not 100% guaranteed, you are now quite likely to get an official error message whenever you lose your connection to a server. (without having to wait several minutes for a series of 'everybody else has disappeared' messages.) With such baby steps do we march towards progress.
• * TICKETS CAN NOW BE BOUND TO SCENES. I imagine there will be some odd side effects to this, and you need to consult items.txt in A48 for the complete documentation, but if you add YET ANOTHER dot-arg to the end of the previous lengthy list of arguments, it will be seen as a scene number, and attempting to use the ticket outside of that scene will fail.
  But if the ticket itself starts a scene (dream sequence) that new scene will then be the current scene number, and what happens if you try to use the ticket there is anyone's guess!
• * NEW BACKGROUND IMAGE OPTIONS: bkEquip.jpg and bkDemons.jpg, in the ART folder of your world or theme, will be used as the background images of the EQUIP and Book of Demons screens (instead of re-using bkSpells.jpg for all three).
  Please note: I do NOT guarantee that the information displayed on top of these backgrounds will never move around (it almost always moves a little from one version to the next). Hence if you try to get all clever with your custom background, be prepared to have to re-do it periodically.
• * MINOR PK ATTACK CHANGE. Maybe if I bury this down here no one will notice Basically, if you have declared yourself AFK you cannot initiate an attack. Also, if you are truly AFK you cannot be PK Attacked. Note that just declaring yourself AFK does not protect you, but actually leaving the room for a bit does. It's magic.
  Now, if I can only figger a way to have it impossible to get rezzed when you are truly AFK, it will solve several nasty problems at once. Perhaps this needs to be a personal preference however.... the goal is to protect you from multiple death/rez/death events while you aren't around.
• * SEEDS ARE NOW LEVEL 35 ITEMS (instead of level 0). In Evergreen, at least. Until I have the ability to make seeds cost exponentially more, or require increasing levels, this seems like the easiest way to cut down on level 5 seed abuse. Trust me, it's MUCH easier to level up than to toss millions of GP back and forth.
  

10/11/2000 ALPHA 47 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! (Be sure to delete any hacked characters you have - using them in A47 might trigger the hack detector even if you don't actually hack while running A47.)
• * [BUGFIX] Distance calculation in PK Attack is same for attacker and victim
• * [BUGFIX] Missing "adventurer.bmp" file should no longer cause a system crash. But it would be nice to understand why a couple of you didn't have this file after applying the patch.
• * [BUGFIX] Gaiea location and current uniform reported correctly to everyone (I hope).
• * [BUGFIX] Now only requires 100 hours on your character before you can create a guild (instead of 320!). (both a bugfix AND a feature change)
• * [BUGFIX] You can no longer petition to join a guild while in the well, unincarnated.
• * [BUGFIX] The exit/flee button will hopefully make more sense (was saying FLEE in camps and stores!)
• * [BUGFIX] For arcane reasons, the Guild Uniform Dialog would fail if you had never downloaded different world than Evergreen. (or something else I forgot.)
• * [BUGFIX] Found and repaired a resource leak (those little equipment icons on the equip and store screen were getting leaked each time you changed from one map to another. It really added up.
• * PK ATTACK change. Both the attacker AND the victim are stuck in the PK ATTACK scene for AT LEAST 20 seconds. The victim only has the right to immediately flee if they have not themselves used the PK ATTACK feature recently. (measured in hours). Killing another player also makes you unable to flee from subsequent attacks.
• * PK ATTACK DISTANCE INCREASED. You can now initiate a PK Attack from a more reasonable distance from the target. (2.5 times farther than ever before!)
• * PK Safety cap is now level 30, not level 40. So as soon as you hit 30 you are no longer protected by the must-hit-first if 10 levels below rule. I'm gonna phase that out over the next few releases.
• * HACKER BAN MESSAGE INCLUDES REASON CODE. So when you say you were banned for no reason, you can tell me the code and I can nod sagely and better decide whether or not I believe you. (And, in general, I *do* believe you. But by A50 I probably won't believe you any more).
• * VERSION OUT OF DATE MESSAGES now give you a yes/no button pair and YES will shut down wos and launch your external browser to open the wos download page. Hopefully this will help people to not be running wos when they apply the patch :-)
• * NEW ITEM TYPE: TICKET. (Thanks to LGH for lighting the fire under me for this.) These are for 'wing of the wyvern' type items which, once consumed, take you somewhere. Basically it uses the same technology as the scene GOTO command, so you have the same abilities. Go to a link on a map, go THROUGH a link on a map, play out a scene where you stand, etc. Still can't handle "exit dungeon" sort of action (return to outside of current "building") since it has to take you to a specific numbered destination.
  I stuck a "ticket home" into evergreen. The soul brother at the gateway will give you one every visit, so you'll end up with a zillion of these.

10/8/2000 ALPHA 46 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! (changes to the book of options means you will get reset to default options so check them and reset them as you like)
• * HACKER SUSPENSION. If the game detects you using a memory hacker/trainer (for example, to set your Attack points to a huge value), it will place you on suspension and you will lose the ability to play over the Internet until the suspension wears off. Continued hacking will increased the suspension duration exponentially, resulting quickly in AN INFINITE SUSPENSION. There is no reprieve from suspension, so please stop using gamehack et al. Don't let your little sister use a hack either. I don't distinguish who used the hack and it affects the entire game, NOT just the character you were using. You do NOT want to be suspended. PLEASE heed this warning. I don't want to have to reply to people who feel they didn't understand, or they only hacked once, or a friend hacked for them. It doesn't matter. Use a hack, go to jail. Three strikes you're out! (actually you get more than 3 strikes, but not a lot more).
• * LAG-O-METER. typing the command "/lag" opens a floating dialog which shows any skin xfers in progress plus a graph of bandwidth usage. If you dial in your modem speed it will show how much of your modem is 'left over', if any. (measures WoS usage only, of course). Probably pretty useless, but fun in its own way.
• * WILL REUSE SKIN XFER SLOTS AS NEEDED. There is a built-in limit of 10 skin transfers at a time (presumably that would mean lag-city, and I doubt it happens TOO often, but the lag-o-meter will let you know). Anyway, often a skin transfer will abort due to packet loss, but will optimistically leave a receive channel open all the same (you see this as the lag-o-meter showing ever more pending skin xfers with no actual data going by). It used to be that if you left the program running long enough you would allocate all 10 slots and then no more skin xfers could occur until one of those slots completed (or you restarted the game). Now, I will give up on the 'oldest' such slot and redirect it to a new skin request as needed. Net result: being AFK for a long time will successfully collect more skins. Or it will crash. Who knows. Life is a mystery.
• * DIRECT SKIN XFER. Well, I only call it that since people expect it to have that name (all skin xfers are 'direct' anyway). What this is, is a way (via the right-click MAPS menu) of saying "I want this guy's skin right now please" This will restart a xfer which might have been aborted for data loss. It won't let you ask for a skin you already have, however. And you can only ask for skins, you can't cram them down someone else's throat. They can still refuse to send by turning off "send skins when asked" in the FILE menu.
• * PKER ATTACK COMMAND. The right-click MAPS menu has a new command "ATTACK PLAYER" which challenges that player to a fight. I haven't completely finished this yet, but my plan is: 1.) only PKers can attack other PKers (except on 'dangerous' maps where anyone can attack anyone). 2.) PKers cannot refuse such an attack. 3.) It basically just makes the attacker 'camp' and pulls the target into the camp. 4.) You have to be a party leader (or not in a party) to challenge. 5.) If the target is in a party, his whole party is challenged. (parties might have non-PKers in them, and they would be summoned into the camp, but would be protected by the normal rules about that sort of thing).
  This also means that in general, you are no longer pulled into nearby camps or fights unless you have been specifically challenged. One thing I haven't finished is the way to intentionally enter an existing camp or fight (obviously I want that to be as simple as clicking on it - as distinguished from its suddenly appearing beneath you). Also, I need to make sure that scene lock works properly for non PKers (PKers cannot lock their scene).
  I tried to think ahead to support varying sorts of challenges, but for now this is all you will see.
  Again: the ATTACK PLAYER option just drags your target into the scene (and they must be close enough, etc.) The actual fighting in the scene follows the same rules as before.
• * PKER RULES SEEM TO WORK. The rules outlined above are now fully implemented. It's cool. You'll like it. I command you to like it. No, now you must LOVE it! You love it so much you will buy a mug! Two mugs! Your brother in law needs a mouse pad! Buy! buy! buy!
• * ENTERING AN 'OLD' SCENE SHOWS PLAYERS AT THE CURRENT LOCATION. So, if you come into a battle already in progress, you are more likely to see people standing around than suddenly walking onto the screen along with you. This probably has some sort of strategic impact, but overall I think it makes the lag less unbearable.
• * REMOVED A CHUNK O' LAG. While nothing will make actual lag your friend, I found a spot where you were being forced to wait an extra second or two when you entered someone's scene before you saw the monsters. So, this might seem nice to you now. But if you were seeing a six second lag, this is only going to cut a second or two of that.
• * PEOPLE WHO DISAPPEAR LEAVE SCENE. If someone leaves the game gracelessly (i.e. they crash or pull the plug), their character should disappear from the scene as soon as you notice they are gone. Also, if they were hosting the scene, you should pop out of it. Also, if they come back into the game before you noticed they disappeared, you should also pop out of their old scene (and not suddenly see their well scene on top of your current scene or something goofy like that). This goes for parties, as well. When they disappear, you should no longer be in their party.
• * POINTING TO SOMEONE ON MAP ONLY HIGLIGHTS ONE PLAYER. So, I try to figure out the player you are pointing the 'closest to' (aim for the center of their shadow on the map). It used to be pointing at a group of people clustered together would light up all their names in an unrecognizable splat. Since the right-click on map menu kinda depends on selecting exactly one person, this seemed like the right thing to do.
• * NO LONGER STUCK IN WALLS. Thanks to Chuck P. sending me a copy of his goliath character, I believe A46 will no longer have the problem of your character appearing in the middle of the map [(128,128) to be exact] and then be stuck if that happens to be impassable terrain. Also, if you DO get stuck in the terrain (take off your water boots, for example), you should no longer be treated to an infinite loop system freeze when you try to walk out.
  You'll have to wait for A46 to be able to recover your stuck characters 'gently' (the deleting/renaming of the .ter file will still work as an emergency fix until then, but is a bit dicey if you don't get the file back exactly right before the next patch)
  Anyway, analysis of 'goliath' showed HOW it was stuck and allowed me to have an auto-fix for that condition, but it didn't explain WHY it was stuck. There is some sequence of events which leads to the problem in the first place and I am still looking for that.
• * FIXES BROKEN PET STATES WHEN YOU INCARNATE. Just in case your pets were in a funky state when you left (as was Az's case)
• * PREVENTS A FEW MORE HACKS. By no means all, but a couple of the more popular memory hacks should stop working.
• * EVEN NEWER ATTACK PATHS. Josh has drawn a bunch of attack cartoons, I broke it up into multiple files so world designers could make their own and still use defaults. Animation timing is improved for appearance. STAB attack delays ATTACK pose until src is near target (i.e. run up to monster, THEN swish sword). lunges always face monster. leaps face monster during attack and turn away during retreat. New syntax for specifying attack paths: path.image.flags.weather.fx, as in "1.2.3.4.5" means path=1, image=2, flags=3, weather=4, and fx=5. So if you ran off and added paths to yout world files, you are all screwed! I suspect I'm the only one with a lot of work to do :-(
  Oh, also the "/paths" command is gone (use the book of options instead). And a confusingly new command is added:
  "/path p.i.f.w.x" sets the 'override attack path' to the specified value. This then becomes the ONLY attack path used in the game until you set it to something else (or restart WoS). It's for world designers to try out path values before putting them into the MONSTERS or ITEMS tables.
  Since you can now have up to 200 animations (A45 limited you to 32), they are now stored in 20 files, 10 animations per file. So animation 146 is at offset 6 of the file "attack14.bmp" in the ART folder. You can override individual files in your WORLD or THEME art folder. In general, the game engine will provide defaults in the 0-99 range with world designer unique creations expected to be in the 100-199 range.
  The new ITEMS.TXT file in Evergreen should document how this works. If it doesn't, remind me :-) (NOTE: this format is CHANGED between A45 and A46, so I mean A46 will document it, and I propose world designers wait for A46)
• * SIGNIFICANT PACKET REDUCTION. I found a way to significantly reduce the size of a couple packets which are sent frequently. (yay). Unfortunately, to see the improvement, everyone has to be running the new version. I think I came up with a reasonably clever way of having this remain compatible with older versions and yet benefit new players, but remember: a single old player in the game will disable the new feature for everyone.
• * FIXED MULTI-STAGE FIGHT PET BUG. I think I fixed it, at least. I was able to see why your still-alive pet was being removed from the scene after you beat a stage. Now that pet remains until it dies or you recall it.
• * MODDING IS CHEATING. It looks like the mod detection circuitry is working well enough, so I have added the bit where a modded character is treated like a cheat character in battle (i.e. cannot give stuff or hit first). Continue to pay attention to any warnings you see about "this will mark your character as a cheater". Those warnings are now completely true.
• * NEW BOOK OF OPTIONS. You know how I love to spend 8 hours totally re-writing something which already works just to do the same thing in a slightly different way and possibly add some bugs in the process? Well, I guess it only took an hour but I re-did the Book of Options so that now the options appear in a (scrolling) list box. he idea is that now I can add more options without having to worry if they fit on the dialog or not. You now have to DOUBLE-click an option to toggle it, however. Past experience tells me that now that I have 'done it right' I will never add another option, so it will be a totally pointless exercise. Still, the code is somewhat prettier as a result.
• * STUPID PETS STAY STUPID. I imagine there will be two schools of thought here, but now a pet with 0 wisdom will NOT gain wisdom, even if you try to train it (it will appear to be getting smarter but then snap back to stupidity). The GOOD news is that you can train up a stupid monster to a high level and be sure it will always use a physical attack. The BAD news is that stupid pets are a bit crankier than wise pets and will be quicker to turn wild on you. Note that pets you already have are not affected by this change.
• * STORE HAS CORRECT 'EQUIP' GLYPHS. I hope. If you went through all the work of customizing the equipment icons used on the EQUIP screen, they will now appear in the store as well. I hope.
• * GUILD DIARY REPLACED BY "SOUL DIARY" In preparation for the integrated guild stuff (first cut in A47, could it be?!?) and due to a general lack of enthusiasm for the old name, I have renamed the window to "Soul Diary" (and no, I haven't updated the help file). But I also added some features to it, such as:
  - can now sort by alpha or by sernum
  - shows last known skin
  - shows a teensy bit more info
  - nicer layout in general
  For the most part it looks the same as before, and the new info for other players won't appear until the next time you scan them. But overall, I think it's a step forward.
• * NEW BOOK: "Book of Gaiea". Well, this one is pretty silly, but I always wanted to do this so bear with me. This opens a floating dialog with a map of the earth in it (the real planet earth). On this map you see some dots representing where the players are. Left-clicking zooms IN and right-clicking zooms OUT. SHIFT-clicking sets your own location. Clicking on a name in the MAPS list highlights than spot on the earth map. I just thought it would be cool since we're such a hip international crowd.
• * ALL SOUL ITEMS AVAILABLE (+stuff). Either via a quest, or back at the cheaty Rune Ruins, you should be able to pick up all soul items now. All soul items are now level 99 (or is that old news?) Soul items have been given attack paths which make them slightly more interesting to use. New gregorian chants for book spells, Gob catapault throws gobs, "Basil," Soul Boots are fast like cowboy boots, Springwell frog no longer gives frog boots, Warpath is level 97
• * MONSTER SPELL-PICKER UPGRADED. You should see more variety in spells cast by high-wisdom monsters now - not just nova nova nova.
• * NEW SCRIPT OPCODE: "GOTO EXIT". This just boots you out of the scene and back to the map (as if you pressed the EXIT button in the scene).
• * NEW MENU: GUILDS. Yep, it looks like the integrated guild stuff is more or less completely functional in this version after all! What a surprise! There are three things in the GUILDS menu:
  - Guild Hall (shows list of current guilds)
  - Create Guild (lets you make a new one)
  - Change Uniform (your character can belong to multiple guilds, but can only 'play on the behalf of' one guild at a time. This lets you change guild 'uniforms' (a uniform is just the guilds acronym - "LoD" "WoS" etc, which now appears next to your name in the MAPS list (no more making a new character with an acronym built into the name!)
  Guild membership is OPTIONAL!
  Don't freak when you see the old guilds aren't on the new list. And the list will probably be a little shakey as bugs are found. Go ahead and create guilds as you see fit, with the understanding I might delete one or all without notice just because I can.. I mean because I had to for development reasons.
  When you right-click on a player who is wearing a uniform, you'll see two new options:
  - Read about Guild XXX
  - Petition to join guild XXX
  If you petition to join a guild, you will appear on its 'Petitioners list' The guild meister for that guild will have to edit your record and give you an official title in the guild (no limits on titles other than they be alphanumeric). If they set your title to anything other than "Petitioner" or "Reject" then you are IN the guild and can wear the uniform.
  I hope you enjoy this feature, as it was a long time coming.
• * CHEAT CHARACTERS CANNOT RELEASE PETS INTO SCENE. They can still use them in battle, but if they 'free' the pet it just runs away (instead of attacking everyone in the scene or, more importantly, becoming available to be captured by someone else in the scene - who then benefits from a potentially hacked pet)
• * MAX MONSTER LIMIT FOR PETS ENFORCED. If you have a pet X whose 'natural level' exceeds yours, it will escape you if you try to use it. This means no more pet Black Wraths (unless you keep them in your pocket, I suppose)
• * NEW CHAT COMMANDS TO OPEN WEB PAGES. To facilitate viewing pages you can now type the URL into the chat window by preceding it with a slash. As in:
  /http://blah
  or
  /www.blah
  The url MUST start with 'http' or 'www'
• * NEW PERCENT SIGN KEYWORDS. Much as "%3" will be replaced by a random insult, two new commands are available which I will describe by example:
  %L level name of scene host ("emperor")
  %C class name of scene host ("magic-user")
  if not in a scene, these use YOUR info.
  %Cn class name of class n (1-whatever)
  %Ln level name of level n of scene host's class.
  %L-1 the scene hosts NUMERIC level ("99")
• * NO MORE PP 'FARMING'. I could have sworn I already cut this out (getting PP for healing monsters) but it looks like I missed it. Anyway, you can still heal a monster and then bash it for awhile, so it's not impossible to stretch a monster out for awhile. It's just hard to do that with a jelly since you tend to squash it with your weakest weapon.
• * PK TIMEOUT RULES IMPLEMENTED. These affect the new PK ATTACK command only. (right-click on someone and select PK attack to start a battle with them. that makes YOU the attacker and them the victim).
  1.) if either side uses a weapon, their FLEE button is disabled for 30 seconds. So if you want to flee, you have to let the other guy pound you for 30 seconds first.
  2.) the ATTACKER is stuck in the scene for 30 seconds in any case, even if the victim flees before fighting.
  3.) You have to wait a bit before using PK ATTACK again. If you do it too much, the time you have to wait increases. If you do it seldom, the wait time decreases. Once a minute is considered "pretty darn frequent" just to set your expectations. If you and a pal want to do a million PK Attacks in a row, you might just take turns being the attacker. That should take a minute of your life easily
• * NEW SPELL TABLE FLAGS. Hidden in the "minimum required level" field is now a 'flags' field (using the new 'dot' trick), so level = "1" still means "level 1" but level = "1.1" means Level 1 with flag 1.
  flag 1 means "Monsters cannot use this spell" (pets neither).
  flag 2 means "Heroes cannot use this spell" (actually it just means it won't appear in the Learn Spells list. You could give the spell as a quest item if you wanted your hero to visit the King Slobber and learn a mystical slobber spell not normally known to humans.)
• * NEW MONSTER TABLE FLAGS. Read the bit about spell flags to get an idea of how it works, but same deal for monsters, only instead of the LEVEL, it is built into the SCALE argument (just after the skin name of the monster)
  - scale = "0" means normal scale
  - scale = "0.1" means normal scale and FLAG 1
  Flag 1 means "Not Tamable" (cannot be tamed no way and no how). Josh asked for it. Blame him! :-) This is how a world designer makes some creature with a low level and yet still not let it be tamed. Now, you don't get any feedback for this, so it just adds to the world's mystery.
• * NEW SCRIPT "IF" CONDITIONS. You can now test a couple new things, which I will describe by example:
  IF P, @isAPKer
  IF Pn, @hasPKedNTimesOrMore
  note that the PK count isn't working yet, so this is a heads up. P by itself should work (just tests if they are a PK character)
  IF M, @isACheater
  IF M1, @hasPlayedVersionedCopy
  IF M2, @hasPlayedModifiedCopy
  IF M4, @hasDisabledAVoidMods
  The only ones which I expect to make sense are "M" (is a cheater) and "M2" (has modded).
• * [BUGFIX] Fixes a round-off error which occured in the yield calculation on your stock portfolio when you reached around 20 million GP total equity (2 to the 31st power, divided by 100 to be exact 21.474 million). We should all be so lucky. I did NOT switch to the new yield calculation math since to do so would render everyone's portfolio corrupt. (sigh). And it's not worth causing that kind of pain for the improvement. However, this fix should keep you set until yo have 2.14 BILLION gp in the bank. then you're screwed :-) That will be a lesson in greed.

9/8/2000 ALPHA 45 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! (Predominantly bug fixes from previous release)
• * [bugfix] Fixed the A44 crash which happened when the person who was the target of a physical attack left the scene before the attack was complete.
• * [bugfix] Fixed the A44 bug where feeding armor to your pet, or healing your pet, didn't "stick" once the pet was returned to the pet pen. It had some other side effects like the RECALL button sticking. I still don't know if I have fixed the bug with regards to the multi-stage fight scenes (and pets).
• * ATTACK FRAMES DRAWN FROM RIGHT TO LEFT. No one but JOsh cares about this yet, but I reversed the order of animation of the 8 cell film strip used in "attacks.bmp" so now the FAR RIGHT frame is drawn FIRST (instead of last). The 'arrow' should still point to the left...
• * PACKET REDUCTION CHANGE. IN an effort to remove lag wherever possible I changed a very low level packet thingy. Frankly that stuff is so complicated I have no idea if I have created a huge bug or not. Overall I think I have reduced a packet swarm which occurs when someone new joins the game (most swarms happen then since the new guy has to get synched up).
• * [BUGFIX] LEGOCIDE NO LONGER LEGAL. I think, but when you get 4 seconds of lag, who knows what will happen.
• * IM POPUPS ONLY POPUP IF MINIMIZED. If you formally CLOSE an IM popup, it will stay closed even if that person sends another line of text. If you MINIMIZE it instead, it will pop back open on the next incoming line.
• * [BUGFIX] BOOK OF COLORS RESTORES FONT, SIZE, AND BG COLOR. That is to say, it really should take you back to factory settings now.
• * [COSMETIC] MOUSE CURSOR DOESN'T GET FUNKY ON STATS, MAGIC, OR ITEM PANELS. You may have noticed that if you moved the mouse quickly you could manage to have a wacky 'splitter' cursor while pointing to the top half of these panels.
• * [NEW OPTIONS] DISABLE ACTION PATHS. The Book of Options lets you permanently disable action paths (and the setting is remembered) just in case there remains another crashing bug. IN the long run, I hope action paths are cool enough that no one wants to turn them off, but in the short term I don't mind letting you apply your own critical judgement (I'm not establishing a precedent here, of course, it's still up to the world designer to choose...)
• * SKIN FILE NAME CHANGES. While a skin is in the process of being transferred, I used to add the extension ".tmp" to the end. Lurch seems to feel that Windows will freak if a directory contains too many files with that extension (and I don't doubt him - I can just see the chain of logic leading to that). Anyway, to be safe I now append ".xfr" (transfer) instead. What this means to you is that any .tmp files in your skin directory are now junk and you should delete them. I'd do it for you, but I have this thing against having code in my programs which deletes a bunch of files at once. Creeps me out just thinking about it. So open your WoS\Skins folder, sort by 'type' and delete all the TEMP files. (um, do this AFTER upgrading to A45 of course).

9/3/2000 ALPHA 44 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Some new features require all players to upgrade. (for example, guild diary indicates play in "modified versioned world")
• * REMEMBER: If you want to modify a world to experiment with the engine - MAKE A COPY of the world and modify that instead. Modifying someone else's world will make it a modified world and mark your character as a modder for playing in it.
• * MAGIC HURTS. Coe et al will be glad to see that 'humans' are now hurt by magic wherease before they were fairly immune, at least relative to sword blows. A level 99 PK slug fest between a magician and a sword user will deliver equivalently sized blows.
  Note that this means a monsters magical attack upon a human will be similarly more powerful!
  The vacation is over, prepare to die.
• * REMEMBERS MOST WINDOW POSITIONS. Some windows I still like to have appear as centered dialogs, but others I make an effort to remember your favorite size and position. Especially for the world editor windows, which I also changed a bit in shape so that they can 'tile' better.
  I think it is conceivable that you could paint yourself into a corner by dragging an important window to the lower right and then resizing your desktop to a smaller resolution so that window was now offscreen.
  If you think that has happened, use regedit and explore:
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\synthetic reality\souls\WINDOW_POSITIONS and just delete the value in question (while WoS isn't running, of course).
• * WORLD EDITOR TWEAKS. Nothing major, just minor convenience items. The main edit dialog now has a more useful button bar (HELP, LINKS, OBJECTS, POKEDEX, SKINS, and something else). Also, in addition to the world name, and map name combo boxes, theres a third combo box on that screen which enumerates ALL the .TXT files in your world's main directory (i.e. items.txt, monsters.txt, etc) and there is a new EDIT button which instead of always opening quest.txt, opens the currently selected file in that new combo box. I find this quite convenient.
• THE BAD NEWS is that I can still only edit one file at a time, so when you open monsters.txt, it will close whatever file you had open. My excuse is that this is all tied into the 'dirty, requires reload' processing, but really I just didn't think ahead when I wrote my little text editor in the first place.
• I find the following 'tiling' to be comfortable for me (screen res is 1152 x 864 on my machine)
  1.) open the world editor and drag the main function bar to the extreme top left
  2.) resize the WoS window so that its left edge aligns with right edge of main function bar and otherwise fills the screen
  3.) click on LINKS on the function bar and then position the link editor window on top of the chat area of the main WoS window
  4.) click on a link in the table, bringing the scene PREVIEW window up and position it on the left just below the main function bar
  5.) click on OBJECTS and place the object editor just below the the scene preview (these three windows are now all the same width by default - function bar/preview/object editor)
  6.) re-select LINKS and then press the TERRAIN ad MONSTER checkboxes and position their 'palette' windows over on the right, just below the minimap
  7.) press the SKINS button on the function bar and position the 'villager editor, just above the link editor.
  (and now you see why I added the window placement memory :-) I got tired of doing this again every time)
  Overall, this works for me and I can place links and edit scripts pretty much all at the same time. I minimize the link editor when I am not actively working with links and then I can easily type chat commands like "/reload" and "/scene N" to test script changes.
  But really, once you have placed your links, it is probably easier to develop scripts while actually playing the game, since that way you can be incarnated and the script tokens will have a home.
  Anyway, I am unduly influenced by my workspace, so I am pleased with these micro-improvements. I also added support for the arrow keys in the OBJECT and LINK editors, so now you can clik up and down the list instead of clicking on each item in turn. A surprising advantage.
• * SOMEONE REMIND ME.. Who was it that felt the preferences for "don't pick up trash" were NOT being remembered. They appear OK to me. I'm hoping you just were confused by the default values. Anyway, I added "seance" to the remembered preferences, for those who prefer to see ghosts all the time.
• * FINISHED QUEST 7. There are actually more than seven quests already, but the numbering system was a little goofy (go figger). Anyway, quest 7 starts with the dolphins in Westin, so return to them to kick it off. It will make more sense if you don't already have the rubber boots or the water boots (both of which you now get officially from quest 7). Officially, you won't be able to visit the Sea Grotto until you get into quest 7, though that certainly won't be the case for pre-existing characters.
• * NEW WORLD DESIGNER COMMAND: "/version". This opens the world version dialog which lets you 'stamp' your world with an official version number. Avoid the temptation to stamp other people's worlds with new version numbers - you'll get a cheap thrill right away, and a corrupted character later on.
• * VERSIONED WORLDS SUPPORTED. This is a super big deal, and I hope I don't have any show-stopping bugs in it. If a world is VERSIONED (only evergreen will be versioned at first) then you will get marked as a modder if you play any deviation. So, if you make a trivial change to quest.txt, you're a modder. If you play with someone else with a different mod than your official version, then you're a modder (even they have an official version, just different from yours). You are locked into playing ONLY your current official version. Anything else makes you a modder. You can get a newer official version and you will NOT be a modder. There are a zillion warning dialogs so you have no excuse to get accidentally marked a modder. Do NOT turn off "avoid modified quest files" or you WILL be a modder.
  World designers will absolutely HAVE to have some 'modder' characters to use while developing their world.
  I suggest World designers do NOT run off and version their worlds immediately as soon as they get A44. Let's see if it breaks Evergreen first...
  Yes, I'm a little nervous . Another side effect of this is that the "/reload" command is now a cheat. So world designers will need to use "cheating modder" characters to get any work done. And once you DO version your world, be sure to version it again with every release. (otherwise you will be shipping a MOD and everyone will have to become a modder to play it). I figure I will forget to re-version future releases of Evergreen, so let me apologize in advance.
  If you version your world, you will need to maintain a backup of your world's PASSWORD and your personal PUBLISHING CENTER. If you lose either you will be unable to issue additional official versions of your world. You can share your publishing center and password with co-designers if you like (though I recommend against it, frankly - it's best if you always officially publish from a single computer). But you can move your publishing center to a new computer if you upgrade your PC or something. But only if you remember your password and backup your publishing center...
• * LIFE MONSTERS NO LONGER HEAL GHOSTS. A small achievement. They also won't bother resurrecting fellow monsters, but I think I mentioned that already.
• * PETS AND MONSTERS NO LONGER DOUBLE-PAY FOR SPELLS. Which means their MP will effectively last twice as long. Thanks, um, uh, (sorry) for pointing this out. (DS?)
• * VARIOUS ADDITIONAL HACKER DETECTORS. We'll see how effective they are at shutting down the 'one hit wonders.' Fixed an obvious way of preventing your mod count from showing all mods traveled.
• * NEW COMMAND: "/tile"
  This sets up your world editor windows the way I like to have them set up. You are free to disagree. Note: you have to be in world editor mode to give this command. It positions the editor, link editor, object editor, scene preview, and monster skin selector windows (but doesn't display them if they are hidden at the time)
• * WORLD EDITOR REFINEMENTS.
  Some simple changes. While editing the world you are semi-incarnated in a character called "TestCharacter" who knows all the spells and has all the items. This lets you use the ITEM/EQUIP/SPELLS buttons to see a list of all available things. I find this a convenient way to look up id numbers while editing a quest file. (the ID number is also shown while in world edit mode)
  The MAP button is now a lot like the old 'test' button used to be, and will hide the link edit window when you click it (I mean it will flip you back to map mode where you might try walking and camping and /scene-ing without leaving the world editor.
• * FIXED A BAD BUG. I think. That is to say, I lost all my evergreen links, just like some of YOU have reported doing! I believe it occurred when I pressed "NO" (this will revert your changes) after switching maps without saving first. Anyway, that whole revert and cancel thing was wrong wrong wrong. Now you just get asked if you want to save the links or not.
• You can no longer use the HUNT or WELL button while in the world editor (and man were you an idiot if you did that before!)
• When you first enter the world editor, I stick some helpful hints in the chat window.
• * INSTANT MESSAGE POPUP WINDOWS (OPTIONAL). I got tired of the overhead when you have 3 people whispering at you at the same time. So now you can OPTIONALLY open a floating window for individual whisper or gossip channels. Anything typed in a popup only goes to one person (a whisper) or one channel (a gossip). Note that just because YOU opened a popup window doesn't mean the other folks did. It's still the same old whisper and gossip technology and appears in the regular chat window as well. It just saves you the hassle of typing leading characters, changing your whisper target, etc.
  I repeat: Whisper and Gossip still work the same as before, this is an OPTIONAL way of simplifying multiple channel use.
  You open a window by one of these commands:
  "/im 42" (opens a GOSSIP popup for channel 42)
  "/im samsyn" (opens a WHISPER popup to samsyn)
  <right-click on map list> (has IM option which does same as "/im samsyn" without having to type the name.
• * BOOK OF COLORS has more options. Specifically you can now set the background color of the chat window to anything you like (and which is supported by your desktop). You are responsible for ensuring a legible contrast between each of the text colors and the background you select.
  Also, you can now pick the font, size, and italic/bold you find most appealing for chat. Originally I was going to let you select this individually for all text 'colors' but it turns out that is not particularly easy the way I have things set up. So, no cacaphony of fonts allowed.
  Note: these only affect what YOU see, not what other people see.
• * MAX FRAME RATE LIMITS. Now that I have a super fast PC, I could see where the game was running at an unbridled speed... this sort of thing makes a game unplayable after a few generations (for example, like Wing Commander I became unplayable by the time of the 486/66). Anyway, in the case of WoS I now limit you to 40 fps in the mini-games (and pet dialog). This further gets cut to 10 fps if you have a modal dialog up.
• * PK/MONSTER STATISTICS KEPT. No, this is not a drawer full of the ears of everyone you have PKed. But now when you open the GUILD DIARY on someone, you will see the total number of times they have killed you and you have killed them. This is based on your current characters. So just cause I killed you as samsyn doesn't mean I have killed you as cheeta.
  Likewise the pokedex now keeps track of how many times you have killed (and been killed by) each monster type. Originally I was going to hide info about a monster until after you had killed one first. I could now do that if I still wanted to. But I no longer want to.
  Please note that only you see these counters - they aren't shared with others. So hacking your files will only be in order to lie to yourself :-) (and the file in question is easy to hack)
• * [bugfix] CORRECT PET EATS ARMOR. I think I fixed the bug where if you had two pets of the same type, I wouldn't always give armor and points to the right one. Hopefully I didn't break pets in general.
• * [bugfix] OBJECT EDITOR NO LONGER CRASHES when you scroll up to the top of the object map. I don't know how long this bug has been there, but I suspect for awhile. I don't think it crashed on my old computer, so this might have plaqued lots of you.
• * MISC. ESTHETIC CHANGES. I changed the odd thing here and there for no real reason. You might notice that the restore soul and pick skin for new soul windows have a different background (some pebbles). The big change there is the way I stretch the art, so people making themes can have a pretty picture there. I did some other silly things like that here and there, as well.
• * CHANGES TO GETTING SUCKED INTO FIGHTS. I know I said I was going to add a "map flag" which would let the world designer allow/prevent your getting sucked into 'nearby fights' but it turns out that is trickier than I thought (without losing the ability to do it on purpose). So I am at this time just fixing a little asymmetry. If you lock your party (even if you are in a party of only one), then you will neither suck in people nor be sucked in. In prior versions you could still be sucked in, even if you were locked. So, PK dueling requires unlocking yourself... additional refinements are possible and will likely occur... as in no locking while a PKer maybe (or reduced locking privileges in any case).
• * PP ONLY FROM MONSTERS! This is a pretty major change (though easy to implement). You no longer earn PP from bashing other players. I know there still needs to be some 'reward' from PK fights (please see the PK stats feature added this version), but I have been convinced that earning PP from other players only enables lazy PP accumulation and its removal doesn't seriously diminish the joy of PKing.
• * MORE DEFAULT MAP OBJECTS. I sampled some more villages and trees and such for use on your own maps.
• * SPECIALTY PET STORE. I added a pet store to the pokegatchi arena with four 'new' pets (now play nice!)
• * NEW FOOD ITEMS. You asked for pizza, you got it and a couple other things, including a plug for the WoS Mead Mug (use it in the game, then buy one for your real world desk!) I also added the WoS mouse pad as an item coz I am a big goof!
• * HUNTING 'ANIMATION' NOW SCALES to match your skin's shadow size. Not that I want to reward people with huge skins.... (the day may come...)
• * HOTKEYS NO LONGER ACTIVE WHILE WEB BROWSING. Pressing F2 when the browser is up will no longer bring the EQUIP screen on top of the web panel, for example.
• * NEW CHAT BUBBLE SHAPE. Whoopee. Slightly more compact and readable.
• * NEW RIGHT-CLICK MENU ON MAIN MAP. This is the same menu you get when right-clicking in the MAPS list, but now you can rightclick on someone on the map itself (not in a scene). This is a precursor to adding a formal 'attack PKer' command.
• * ATTACK PATHS FOR MONSTERS AND RIGHT-HAND WEAPONS. (Also, you now walk twice as fast while in a scene, which is still a bit slow, but only half as much so :-)
  Now world designers can assign an "Attack Path" (previously known as action path) to ITEMS and MONSTERS. These paths control additional animation during a PHYSICAL (non-magical) attack. For the most part they make the attack move in some way (leap onto the target, for example). The actual list of attack paths is in flux, so I refer you to the ITEMS table documentation for the available paths.
• * ATTACK PATH IMAGES. Some attack paths add an additional thingy to the screen. For example the ARROW paths draw a weapon in transit from the source to the target. The weapon in question is NOT the image of the specific weapon, but an 8 frame animation from a new file ATTACKS.BMP which can be extended by world designers. So you can draw 8 frame animations of ninja stars, throwing knives, arrows, rocks, etc. You are limited to 32 such animations at this time, however. The 'visual' paths basically let you specify straight line, arced, etc and how fast the motion is, then the image to be associated with it. It's pretty simple and described in the ITEMS table documentation.
• * EMERGENCY SHUT-OFF SWITCH FOR ATTACK PATHS. For now, you can toggle this feature off and on via the slash command "/paths" just in case it causes some horrible problem.
• * SOUL EQUIPMENT IS LEVEL 99. And as powerful as anything will ever be. So no more whining about having to carry around useless soul equipment! This means the final quest will require level 99, but that doesn't seem to be a big problem, after all.

7/7/2000 ALPHA43 INCLUDES:

• Remind me never to rush out new versions.
• This fixes a terrible "no one can fight but the scene server" bug introduced in A42
• It also strengthens magic a teensy bit, but magic is still about two-fold too weak, so expect more in 44.

7/7/2000 ALPHA 42 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! I'm sorry to ship a THIRD version in almost as many days, but I am just too impatient to wait because I want to see how the lag reduction stuff works. I'm thinking it will make a big difference. I hope I'm not wrong!
• * BUGFIX: Fixed the problem where the incoming text wouldn't stay 'scrolled back' if you had clicked in the top of the chat control (i.e. if it had the focus, and was showing the blinking text caret). Note that selecting text in the top half is a different story, there it tries to keep showing you that text.
• * MORE LAG REDUCTION. The success of the A41 reduction enables me to make a further reduction in A42. This removes yet another packet swarm surrounding the arrival of a new player. This will probably be the first reduction that you actually notice in game play (as opposed to just making my histograms look nicer :-) I mean A41 made a huge improvement, but I'm not convinced the individual user sees it, since this other swarm will still inject several seconds of delay now and then.
• * UPDATED HELP FILE. I actually had a newer help file around since I added pets, but I forgot to include it in the distribution... ooops. Anyway, between that and whatshisfaces demands (heh heh), I've brought it fairly up to date and will actually include it in A42.
• * ADDED POKEGATCHI OWNERS MANUAL button to the pokegatchi training center. It just opens the help file to the section talking about pets.
• * LIFE ELEMENT MONSTERS/PETS no longer will try to resurrect fellow monsters (impossible since the dead monsters disappear immediately) and will only rez humans on their team.
  

7/5/2000 ALPHA 41 INCLUDES:

• I am releasing this on the heels of A40 so as to repair the modal dialog bug as soon as possible.
• * COMPATIBILITY: Excellent! Though world designers who rushed right out and implemented the A40 map flags will need to re-read the flag definitions. Flag 1 is a bit different, though fundamentally the same.
• * BUGFIX: It was possible for a party follower to see inaccurate level and class info for the party leader just after the end of a fight. I'm sure this can still happen, but now there is one less way.
• * BUGFIX: Monsters will no longer cast an ineffective disease on you (resulting in 0 hit points) when out of MP. It was actually a mis-checked return value which might even have led to a crash in some cases, so thanks to lurch and xxElderxxx for their persistence in working this out.
• * BUGFIX: Pet levelups now get the same maxMP as regular monsters get. (which means pets now get a bunch more.)
• * FIDDLED WITH TIMING AGAIN. (Sigh) I had to put one windows timer back in, so that things wouldn't come to a halt when you opened a modal dialog like the Book of Colors or the Learn Spell dialog. So now it will probably crash on the level up Ability Dialog again for some users. I also played with the idle loop handling so that when WoS is not the most important window on the desktop, it gives some CPU power back to other apps which want it.
• * SERVER LOAD ENHANCEMENT. I found a way to cut down a flurry of packets sent when someone new entered the server. Silly me, I should have done this ages ago. This is probably the primary source of lag on my server today. Should be a good improvement. It motivates me to push an A41 fairly soon. (i'll try to wait a few more days though for any amazing bugs to be discovered...]
• * FIGHT PARTICIPANTS NOW FIGHT FOR THEIR TEAM. (and 'ALL' spells are team-based). The team is the serial number of the leader of the party. (so everyone in a party, and their pets, are playing for the leader's team). If not in a party you play for your own team (your serial number) and your pet plays for your team. Monsters play for the monster team.
  If you cast an 'ALL' spell on someone, it applies to everyone on their team. (for example, everyone in your party and all their pets get HEAL ALL applied to them if you direct it to any one of them or yourself.) Where this will seem weird to you is in a scene with 3 players who are NOT in a party (therefore they represent 3 unique teams) casting an ALL spell on one will only affect that one (and their pet, if any).
  So, in PK Arena, for example, each guild could form a party and then enter a common scene. casting an 'all' spell against one guild member would target the whole guild, and their pets. You could have a 3way battle, 5way, whatever.
  Someday in the future I will let you specify a party is to be reserved for a single guild, or perhaps a list of guilds.
  This affects a LARGE number of combinations of fight configurations. Ben helped me test most of them, but I imagine some will have slipped through the cracks. Still, the code is quite clean now, so mission accomplished from that perspective.
• * NEW DESIGNER COMMAND "/class N". World designers might find this a convenient way to check their character classes. It lists the most important aspects of the specified class, including the per-level maxHP and maxMP which are tedious to compute manually.
• * CHARM DONE RIGHT (I HOPE). In a rare fit of non-laziness, I made it so charm works as you might expect. The monster remembers the last person to charm it, and fights for that player's team. (come to think of it, I don't know if that makes it a recipient of a team HEAL ALL or not...)

6/30/2000 ALPHA 40 INCLUDES:

• * 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.
• * 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.
  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.

5/19/2000 ALPHA 39 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Reasonable. Be sure to check your setting of "Avoid Modified Quest Files" (in the FILE menu) You want to be sure to have that turned ON so you don't get marked a cheater in the NEXT version release.
  NOTE: Skin transfers are not fully compatible with older versions.
• * MONSTERS NO LONGER CAST BOOK SPELLS. There are these 'extra spells' which are only used on spellbound items and not intended for regular spellcasters. I accidentally let the monsters cast them and am withdrawing that.
• * SERVER LOAD ENHANCEMENTS. I Dream of the day when 32 people can play on my server without the lag being TOO horrible. We're actually getting close to that now. The biggest bandwidth consumer is all that quick-clicking in the same spot to stimulate a monster attack. I still hope to convince the masses to embrace a different metaphor (f'nok is writing up a suggestion at this very moment), but I am also putting in a little kludge. This kludge just puts a limit on how many of those quick clicks get sent to the other players. You still see all the clicks on your own screen. Other people don't see you click more than once every 2 seconds. Which makes things look 'laggy' to them even when they aren't. Which is sort of ironic in a way.
• * LURCH BROTHERS ARE NO LONGER CALLED THAT. I think they are now "the masters" or something like that. My apologies to Lurch for bringing other player's antagonism to him. That wasn't my intention.
• * PET DEATHS PAY PROPER XP. 'nuff said.
• * CURSOR DOESN'T GO WACKY ON BUTTON BAR. The button bar alng the bottom of the screen didn't used to have a default cursor, so if you moved from a special cursor to that region the special cursor stayed.
• * MAP WINDOW HAS SPECIAL "NO WALK" CURSOR. When you are pointing at terrain which you cannot walk on with your current boots, you get a special 'X' cursor. Also, I added range checking in another routine which needed it (which would have contributed to getting stuck in walls, as it were)
• * CLICKS ON IMPASSABLE TERRAIN ARE IGNORED. I don't bother putting you into motion if you click while the special X cursor is up.
• * TAME IS MORE EFFECTIVE. Your chance success now increases by 5% per level (up from 3% per level), so you are 100% effective when you are only 20 levels above target.
• * DEBUFF SPELLS MORE RELIABLE. Your chance is now 75% effective against an opponent at the same level for the spells: POISON, SAP, CONFUSE, CHARM, PARALYZE, WISDOM, STRENGTH, STAMINA, AGILITY AND DEXTERITY (up from 40% before) with a 3% per level increase. (25 levels above you is 0% ineffective)
• * JEDI MIND TRICKS MORE RELIABLE. Your chance is now 60% effective (up from 40%) against an opponent at the same level fot the spells: STUN, GAG, NUMB, SLEEP. (20 levels above you is still immune) with 3% per level enhancement.
• * ADDED A STERN WARNING ABOUT AVOIDING MODIFIED QUEST FILES. I'm just preparing the way here. Pretty soon it will mark your character as a cheater THE INSTANT YOU DISABLE "avoid modified quest files" Not this version, but soon. So, to play together without being marked as cheaters, you will need to have the same version of the world in question. This would be a good time to turn this feature back on... (I mean, you should be running in "avoid" mode all the time, unless you are developing your own world)
• * NO LONGER SAYS "ghost leaves your party" WHEN GHOST STOPS HAUNTING YOU. I wonder how long it was doing that, anyway?
• * FOUR NEW BUDDY HATS. Thanks to LGH for a gentle nag and some good ideas (none of which I was able to do justice to), there are four new buddy categories (these don't have any special chat FX, they mean whatever you want them to mean): Moon (a half moon), Topper (a top hat - sort of), Flower (a daisy), and Cipher (a question mark). Enjoy. That's probably all the hats I can support, by the way (eight total - well nine if you include bare-headed!).
• * SKIN XFER IS DIFFERENT. Partially in preparation for a possible skin server, I changed the protocol a bit. You won't be able to share skins with people running older versions. (although they might be able to get a copy of YOUR skin... no promises)

5/11/2000 ALPHA 38 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Spellbound items (like staves) will behave oddly (wrong spells) when playing with people with earlier versions. But they were already messed up before this, so you might not notice. Pets are not guaranteed, as usual, to survive the upgrade.
• * NOTE ABOUT SAVEDHEROES. When you 'backup' a hero file (.her) from your "savedHeroes" folder (if you do that, ever). Be sure to save the .POR and .PET files which go with your hero, as well. These three files (.HER, .POR, .PET) must be a *matched set* or you will lose data in one way or another.
• * Pets are no longer inherited by the next hero you create (same world or other)
• * I split the quest.txt file into several pieces (a la Aerianell, but not quite so religiously). There are advantages and disadvantages to this, so I expect varying degrees of bemoanment .
  (tip: The command "/q items.txt" will open the file 'items.txt' instead of 'quest.txt')
• * SPELLBOUND ITEMS SHOULD ANIMATE CORRECTLY. It turns out this was worse than I thought. It wasn't that they were animating incorrectly, it was the 'item number' being truncated to 2 digits when it needed four. So any item above 255 (pretty much everything you had in the way of staves and other spellbound items) was actually getting perverted so that the actual thing you used was something else entirely. Usually an illegal value which defaulted to 'sword' There will be some incompatibility until everyone is using A38.
• * dangit, I made a bunch of changes during the network outage and therefor didn't get to document them right away and now... I forgot!
• * Monsters are now honest in their MP usage. No one noticed how I was cheating before (monsters could cast magic all day with 0 MP in their pocket) until pets exposed my dirty secret. So, now MP gets consumed by pets and monsters. Which means I had to redo the tables so monsters would have meaningful amounts of MP to use (most only had 8 or 12 MP max).
• * After hassling with it for awhile I finally gave up. All monsters have a 100% hand ratio and a 100% magic ratio. So whichever they use, it will be as effective as it can be. Of course, only monsters with wisdom can cast spells (and the highest spell they can cast is based on their level, divided by ten)
• * YOU CAN NO LONGER HURT YOURSELF WITH AN 'ALL' SPELL. So in a PKer battle, you can use your most powerful spells again. They will still make you flicker in pain, but no actual damage will result. HEAL ALL will still benefit the caster, of course.
• * PETS ENTER SCENE ON THE HERO SIDE. I actually had them on the monster side for a reason, but that results too often in them and a monster walking off the screen together. It's nicer this way. (actually there is a little randomness here, but that makes it more interesting... keep telling yourself that)
• * CHEAT CODES DOCUMENTED ON WEB SITE. I documented all current cheat codes on the web site (go to WoS home page, look for cheat codes on left). In fact, most of them aren't cheat codes at all, just undocumented features.
• * FIXED /HELP COMMAND. It wasn't picking up the keyword very well.
• * UPDATED HELP FILE. Not sure if I will include this in a patch or not, though I suppose I have no choice the way the patcher works. Maybe it won't be as big as I thought. If so, I will defer to a later release.
• * USER INTERFACE THEMES. I made a change in the folder layout here. Nothing too awful and I suspect it doesn't affect anyone yet, but now there are sub-folders in your theme folder for ART, SFX, and MIDI. Pretty much any file in the stock SFX, ART, or MIDI files can be overridden by files in your WORLD's or THEME's matching folders. World gets highest priority, then theme, then 'stock.'
• * DISEASES DON'T ALWAYS WORK. I fixed the old "tamed/tame failed" bug the RIGHT way instead of the hacked way. This should fix several glitches (like other people in the scene not seeing the tamed pet disappear.. incorrect chat notifications, etc.)
  The second half of this fix is that now ALL disease spells (stun, gag, poison) are UNRELIABLE. The rules can be varied by disease, but right now I only have two flavors: TAME (must be below your level, hits 100% when you are 30 levels higher than target -3% per level), and ALL ELSE (must be no higher than 20 levels above you, still reaches 100% when 30 levels below you -2% per level).
  This works out to about a 40% chance of successfully STUNning someone at your same level. Note this means you can no longer reasonably expect to stun a black wrath before it kills you. neener neener! I imagine we will negotiate the actual percentages over the next few releases.
• * PETS NO LONGER GET SLEEPY IN BATTLE. For as long as your pet is in the scene with you, it will not get sleepier. It finds you an exciting and vibrant companion! (which also means you have to put it back in the pen to recharge).
• * "PET HAS GAINED ONE STRENGTH POINT (NOW 48)". I liked this suggestion.. um.. GJ.
• * SLEEPY PETS WILL NO LONGER EXERCISE FOR YOU. Clicking in the pen will have no effect if the current pet is asleep. You must wake the pet first.
• * POKING YOUR PET IN THE FACE WILL WAKE IT UP. Another good suggestion.
• * WASHING PET MAKES HIM SLEEPY. This is a little ornate. Things flying in his face wake him up, so he wakes up as the soap approaches, but then calms down as he is scrubbed. Poking him in the face wakes him abruptly, waving the mouse around in general wakes him gently.
• * YOU CAN NOW RECALL PETS. The "Call Pet" button on the EQUIP screen now turns into a "Recall Pet" button while your pet is in the scene (alive) with you. This is a huge change to the original crappy code, so there are probably a billion buglets. Pet XP is shared between all pets which took part in the scene (and didn't die).
  You can bring the same pet back out several times (assuming it doesn't die), but you can't train it again until you leave the scene (so no pulling the pet into the pen, training it, and then putting it back in scene.)
• * PETS STOP EVOLVING AS SOON AS YOU RETURN TO WELL. And new characters no longer inherit previous characters pets. I notice no one mentioned that new characters also inherited old character's stock portfolios :-) That is also fixed. I lost my level 30 green jelly while testing this, sob!
• * RETURNING TO WELL CLOSES CURRENT POPUP WINDOW. I can visualize some circumstances where it might leave one open, but for normal operations they should get cleaned up now.
• * CALL/RECALL PET IS NOW A 'MOVE.' That is to say you can't do it until it is your turn. (i.e. until your cursor is smoking) and it uses up the move you otherwise would have had (sword, spell, etc.) That seems fair, doesn't it?
• * MOVED OPTIONS TO BOOK OF OPTIONS. Specifically: Show Hotkeys, Enable map smoothing, Enable hi-res maps, enable news reports and a new one: Enable Spell Names. I was just being lazy having these in the FILE menu. I did leave a few file-related options in the FILE menu just to have my signature defiance of convention. (and because I thought people might freak out).
  The new option enables a display of the name of each spell cast in your scene ("Samsyn casts Black Friday on the Green Jelly") (See, GJ, I listen to all suggestions)
• * YOU CAN NOW THROW HEALTH POTIONS TO A PET (OR MONSTER). And it will receive healing from it. Note that throwing anything else will just be throwing the item away. Pets will make no use of shields, etc. ALSO YOU CANNOT RESTORE MP THIS WAY. This only works for HP (and in theory you could have negative HP items).
  NOTE TO WORLD DESIGNERS. It doesn't check the item type, so if you set the 'hp' value for some right-hand weapon (say, a ninja star) you will be able to 'toss' these to monsters with that many hit points when they catch them. But this won't work on heroes as they will simply catch your stars and keep them in their own inventory. Kinda weird, but perhaps useful.
• * ALL SOUND EFFECTS CAN BE OVERRIDDEN BY WORLD AND THEME. "All" is a pretty big word there, but I do believe it's true.
• * REWORKED DIRECTSOUND BUFFERS. OK, in an effort to make it so switching worlds and themes really WOULD pick up the overridden sound files, I had to fiddle with my core sound engine. So, expect some crashes as a result (sigh.. the things I do). But frankly, I think I was leaking DirectSound buffers before whenever you were 'disabling all sound' Or maybe more often than that even.
  Also, this might release the sound card more effectively for you people who needed that.
• * NEW SOUND EFFECTS. I added about 40 new sound effect files which you can use in your new worlds (royalty free, of course!) I boosted the number of sounds used in magic and monster growls and pain (though I am so used to the old sounds that the new ones sound really odd.)
  A GOOD world designer will manually assign appropriate sounds to every monster and spell. A LAZY world designer (like me) will just live the the randomly-assigned sounds. Also, I added SFX for the various pokegatchi activities. The modified sound engine so far feels pretty robust, fingers crossed.
• * WORLD DESIGNERS MAY NOW CUSTOMIZE THE SMALL ICONS SHOWN IN THE EQUIP LIST. You know those little teensy images of swords and fists which might not make sense with your actual right-hand types? Well now you can make your VERY OWN "equipIcons.bmp" file and stick it in your world (or theme) ART folder.
  Please see the stock file (in A38) for layout details. It is a filmstrip of images, 16x16 pixels each. They MUST be in the same order as the stock file, and can only use the STANDARD SIXTEEN WINDOWS COLORS (not the full 256 color WoS palette). The aqua color is transparent (RGB(0,128,128)) Do not include guidelines. Do NOT expect the order to make sense. Just work out the layout by comparing the stock bitmap to the way you know evergreen works and then modify it to suit your own world.
• * FIXED A PET SECURITY BUG. MasterChoe showed me how to get a pet BlackWrath "without cheating" (thanks, MC) and I believe I have plugged that hole. (and people who try it will be in for a small surprise :-)
• * FOUND SOURCE OF DISTURBING 'POP' IN SOUND. This was most noticeable when you moved your mouse over the various rows of the "hand training" dialog. This was because I was commanding a directsound buffer to "play" a sound when one was already in progress IN THAT SAME BUFFER. This caused it to reset immediately to the front of the buffer (maybe even something worse, i dunno, the pops were pretty loud). Anyway, it turns out if you politely 'stop' the buffer first before 'play'ing it again, directsound is smart enough to wait for a zero crossing or something. This removes several crackly areas in the sound.
• * CUSTOM SOUNDS FOR WEAPONS AND MONSTERS. I'm in the middle of this right now. I keep saying "World designers can apply custom sounds to this and that" but if I don't do it in Evergreen, then what does that make me, huh? Lazy! So, since my idealized self-image is NOT lazy (in spite of what I constantly say, I actually work pretty hard on this junk), I thought this was a good time (since I wa reworking the sound engine anyway) to make the SFX something to be proud of. So, I want lots of praise on this - no honest opinions, now!
• * MORE SOUND CHANGES (MUSIC THIS TIME). As you know, I was working on the sound engine even BEFORE I was prodded today by LGH in her relentless pursuit of.. well.. perfection isn't right since that's a doomed quest in the world of WoS. pursuit of less aggravation, I guess . Anyway, everything you know is wrong, but you might not notice the difference anyway. There is a new file in town (found in a world's main folder) called "music.ini" and it includes various instructions regarding the use of MIDI files by the game. If this file is missing, it is somewhat business as usual, so old worlds should still work.
  If this file is present, it lets you bind specific MIDI files to specific maps. (without having to rename the MIDI file to be the name of the map, which tends to obliterate the composer's name, which was bad, so this is better if only for that reason)
  At present it gives you only two bindings per map: the MIDI to play in general fight scenes on that map, and the MIDI to play as the background music while on that map (OR WHEN CAMPING ON THAT MAP)
  And that raises the most notable difference. It used to be that when you camped, the music changed to something set by the link editor. Right now that field of the link editor is somewhat up in the air. LGH raised some valid concerns with regards to the music changing too frequently (such that you never heard more than the start of the song).
  So, my new philosophy is: A map has a song. While you are on the map you hear that song. If you CAMP manually, you continue to hear that song. It's the song for that map, and you are still on the map. If you change maps, you can hear a different song. So, the music is more continuous just from that. (also, fewer song changes mean fewer delays since MIDI files can take a half second to start up (on my machine at least))
  Now, it would be a very boring world if that was really the ONLY song you heard, so the exceptions are:
  1.) when you are pulled into a fight, you hear a fight song (controlled by music.ini). After the fight you hear a victory song or a dirge. But then the map song starts up again, even if you don't leave the scene after the fight.
  2.) specially scripted scenes can have any music they want, via the MUSIC command. This is how to handle big bosses, etc. A corrolary to this is the 'stock scene 2 prototype' in the quest.txt file no longer calls out a specific song (it used to always start the mortal kombat song)
  There are a couple magical song names which you can use in various contexts (link editor, script commands, music.ini file) which are: "#nochange" and "#silence" which have the effect I hope you expect.
  Getting back to the link editor, I am not sure what purpose the music specified there will have, if any. Don't go erasing your work so far.
  In general, the music stuff is more streamlined, but possibly less functional now. Having played it for awhile, I think it sounds better this way.
  LGH also suggested (I know others have as well) "play lists" so that a map would have up to N midi files associated with it, and rather than simply looping on one, it could loop between N (round robin or shuffle play, I imagine). There is a technical snag in implementing this right now, so stop drooling. Also, this only works for world designers. it doesn't let joe user muck with the midis legally (doing so in evergreen will mess up your ability to be patched)
  Anyway, I have a nagging feeling that with a little more thought I can use the link editor and the music.ini file together to both have music for 'regions' of a map, as well as music which changes based on tokens (so the music can be sad when you visit Stonetree *after* it has been sacked by the visigoths.) Again, stop drooling.
• * SOUL BROTHER NOW ASKS FOR YOUR PROMISE TO FOLLOW THE GOLDEN RULE. You know how a lot of online games make you say "yes" to a complicated legal agreement before letting you play? Well, you should assume that WoS demands all the same stuff of you, but to add an element of that to the game, I have the soul brother in the gateway ask you to follow the golden rule with regards to other players. Until you say "yes" he will refuse to resurrect/heal you. cool huh? So expect to have to answer his question once per each character you have. (he stops asking once you say yes). Not a meaningful restraint, but I thought it was sort of cute. Forgive me.
  In theory, I could have him administer an oath that you would have to type back in accurately... might make a cute quest thing.
  Oh, speaking of that, I am tempted to add an auto-filter of all those 'yes' lines typed to scripted characters. The goal would be to sense when what you were typing was meant for an NPC and then to only share it with other people in your scene. The hard part is being sure you meant it for the NPC, without forcing you to add the NPC name to the front of your sentence (or something like that). I don't think the world will come to an end if I get it wrong now and then. So, world designers, basically I am saying that during the ASK command, the next line of text from the scene host would be seen only by people in the same scene.
  Is it my imagination, or are these notes getting wordier! On the other hand, they sort of track the number of hours spent coding the change. I guess.
• * PETS WILL NOW TURN WILD ON YOU. If you let your wild meter get too high, your pet may (some randomness here) turn wild the next time you call it to battle. The "Your pet is unhappy" notification now has several levels: unhappy, very unhappy, etc, and is also shown on the pet training screen. The pet's 'angry' meter is now shown as well. Anger is increased by poking, and by boredom. It is decreased by various soothing activities. And the eyelid changes were ALREADY PLANNED, so nobody gets credit but me. nobody!
• * CHARISMA/HONOR. Speaking of things which I have talked a lot about in the past and hence find myself rudely unwilling to share credit for (I'm so bad!), I didn't actually add charisma/honor yet, but I took a baby step. Each hero now maintains a value, which is shared with the other players. It just doesn't get displayed or updated yet. nor does it have any effect. My thought is to get this propagation into A38, then add a little more in each release. First I would work on "what modifies these fields" (not a trivial task, and the main reason I have only been talking about this for so long, instead of doing something about it.), Then I would add some display of current values, and finally I would add the limitations/benefits you incur based on these. So everyone will have plenty of a chance to help tweak the system before it starts encroaching on what they can do. This is probably a six release development plan :-)
• * NEWLY CAUGHT PETS HAVE A LITTLE FOOD IN THEM. I've learned never to ignore the whining of the masses. (I haven't learned to not whine back, of course ) So, your new pets no longer start off with a totally empty intestine - but they haven't been eating very healthfully, either.
• * AUTOMATIC AFK AFTER 10 MINUTES. If you don't type, move the mouse, or click on something for ten minutes, the game will now automatically mark you AFK (as if you typed "/afk" and thereby recycling your most recent afk message). This isn't meant as a punishment, it's so your pets stop evolving if you wander off. But it's a nice thing, I think. Of course, just because your NOT afk doesn't mean you're really all there .
• * MIX HAS MESSAGE OF THE DAY. You guys asked for it, I poo-pooed it. But now it's done. If you run a MIX server, you get to set a cheerful message (perhaps giving your email address? maybe telling your expectations for behaviour?) which is seen each time people log on. Of course, only I will have the power to do this for awhile.
• * MIX ACCEPTS SYSOP QUESTIONS. Your bandwidth is limited, but A38 lets you send remarks up to the MIX sysop (who can ignore them since they just get logged). You might use this to fink on scoundrels. It is NOT a chat window to the sysop, however. More of a problem report sort of thingy.
• * MIX 1.08 HAS COOL NEW FEATURES. Which I think I won't describe since you won't be seeing it for awhile.
• * EXPERIMENT: SLOW FRAME RATE ON PET DIALOG. Initial experiments imply this might occur when you are sending your skin to another player. If you feel you can regularly make this framerate problem occur, please try the experiment of turning off the option "send skins when asked" and then restarting WoS. I hav evidence which suggests that winsock is ignoring my requests to mark a socket as 'nonblocking' or otherwise not returning to me for a couple milliseconds each time I send a packet (and probably a lot longer if you are on a modem). Since I do that from within the main thread, this would block the message pump and result in the observed sluggish behavior. If this turns out to be the case (and if I can wrestle winsock into submission), it might make a nice improvement to the 'feel' of the game (though it won't actually make your packets go any faster, it might remove ugly pauses in the UI). Also, in A38 I have added some numbers to the "/phist" command showing the average number of microseconds used to send each packet type. Once I push A38, I would like to hear from some modem users as to what they see for those values.
• * ANSWERS TO NPC QUESTIONS ARE NOT BROADCAST TO EVERYONE. Once everyone is using A38, you should no longer see those messages out of the blue along the lines of "yes, yes, no, no, no, yes, size 18, yes". World Designers take note: the next line of text typed by the scene host during an ASK command is what doesn't get sent to people outside that scene.
• * MACGUYVER CASTLE INCLUDES BASIC TUTORIALS ON ITEMS, FIGHTING, SPELLS, AND PETS. Many thanks to Lurch for his efforts in this context.
• * NEW OPTION: SHOW CHAT BUBBLES IN SCENES. "/bubble" has been promoted to a full-fledged option. Note this only affects player bubbles. NPC bubbles cannot be disabled.
• * FIGHT OPCODE IN SCRIPTS NO LONGER INHERITS OLD MONSTERS. It used to be that if you died during a FIGHT command in a script, and then were given a second FIGHT command (without leaving scene, I mean), the remaining monsters from the first fight would show up in the second. Perhaps you never even noticed. The "/fight n" cheat still works as before, however.
• * EQUIP SCREEN NOW HAS 'SELECTORS' (LIKE SPELLS). I hope this will solve the underlying problem which usually raises the complaint "Why can't I dump my useless soul equipment?" (you still can't, and never will!) Clicking on one of the equipment categories (the shield, for example) will then filter the list to show only that sort of thing. There is a new little button called ALL to show all classes again.
• * EQUIP SCREEN HAS 'BEST' BUTTON. This one is sort of cool. Independently of the category filters described above, this filters all items unless they are EQUIPPED or would make you stronger (green plus sign). Of course, you'll want to toggle this off when you visit mister shopkeeper to sell the useless stuff. I expect most of the "why can't I dump soul equipment" people will leave this on all the time. (and no, I don't remember your last setting - mainly cause I am afraid you'll forget about the button when you need it most)
• * PETS AND MONSTERS PICK SPELLS BETTER. This is, of course, a matter of opinion. Before, a monster would pick only a spell in its own element, the highest spell it could know at its level. No one much complained until pets (with their elemental defenses) made it obvious that no thought was given to picking a suitable element. Well no more is that the case! While monsters/pets will still not pick the absolute guaranteed best spell (where would be the fun in that?) the more wisdom the monster/pet has, the more variety of spells will it consider (and then pick the most powerful of those). Higher wisdom means both higher spell level AND broader element selection. Basically if "distance" is a number from 0 to 4 relating to how far an element is from the monster's native element, the highest spell in that element which can be cast is:
  maxSpellLevel = wisdom/(8*(distance+1))
  So at wisdom 255, a monster can cast a level SIX spell in the OPPOSITE element of its birth (that's pretty good!)
  At wisdom 100, however, it can only handle level 2 in the opposing element and level 4 in the 'right-angle' elements.
  Actually, there is a secondary limit on distance such that a monster has to be wisdom 160 or higher to cast in its opposing element. So at wisdom 100 it can't cast that level 2 opposing element after all, though it could manage the right-angle element by that point.
  Now, since they are so freaking smart about it, they tend to pick the same spell over and over for the same opponent, which is a bit boring.
  And no, they won't accidentally cast heal on you (I hope).
  Disease spells are selected differently, by the way.
• * NO MORE WEAPONS SLEIGHT OF HAND. The fix for this was a bit elusive until I thought "when life hands you lemons, add lemonade as a feature to the game!" So, henceforth, you can no longer EQUIP any time while in a fight. Only when it is your turn, and it uses up that turn. Cool, huh? How game-like! The side effect is that your current turn gets to complete before you can switch weapons.
• *MUTE/BUDDY SETTINGS CHANGED. I found a little snafu about how I was saving this information (basic problem is that .INI files are limited to 64K each, which doesn't let me use a single file for everything...) Anyway, I made an effort to upgrade your existing settings so you PROBABLY won't notice any difference in normal operations.

4/15/2000 ALPHA 37 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Excellent :-) Although your existing pets might disappear (also, old pets which do not disappear will have inaccurate experience and level information).
• * ALPHA 36 was skipped (it had a bug which prevented you from getting any PP)
• * CHANGED PET CANDY COLOR TO BLUE. This makes the color mixing game more fun. I have given each element a 'perfect diet color' (I paint the emotion-o-meter with that face color). Your job is then to keep the stomach full of a mixture of meat/veggie/candy to match that color. As it passes through the system, the total amount of food controls 'hungry' while the quality of the food in the colon controls 'sickly'
  Sickly influences changes in stamina, while hungry influences changes in strength. It's actually kind of fun... everybody loves color mixing games, right?
• * ALL THE LITTLE METERS WORK. (On the Pokegatchi Training Screen, I mean). The stomach and colon work, ability points come and go, and a new button "WASH PET" lets you reduce dirtyness. Please see the POKEGATCHI DEVELOPMENT NOTES for a recent screenshot and manual of operations.
• * NEW PET TOOLS: WASH AND PLAY. Wash has a little cartoon of soap bubbles, and play is a little cartoon of a frisbee. Wash lowers your pet's DIRTY score, while play lowers STUPIDITY.
• * PETS NOW LEVEL UP. XP is now meaningful to your pet. Works pretty much like for heroes (lose half when you die, etc.). XP change points follow the hero class 0 (sword-user in Evergreen). I have a functioning level 20 green jelly. He's a bad-*** m*******r. Don't you be messin' with my jelly!
  By the way, this has me thinking it is a mistake to let you tame a high level creature in the first place, and that maybe pets should have to start out weak and be trained to high levels. Ask yourself honestly which has the better 'game play value
  Oh, on the off chance that your pets survive the A37 upgrade (doubtful, but who knows), the 'old' pets will be starting with 0 XP and will take forever to level up to their starting levels (and will drop to level 1 or whatever on their first fight). New pets will start life with a more appropriate base XP.
• * NEW MINIGAME - QUADRIS.
• * Changes to current pet's ability points are logged in chat trail
• * You get a warning when a pet reached 50% "wild"
• * Pets do not 'grow' while AFK
• * 'goto scene' should leave your cursor at a reasonable setting (wand, sword, etc.).
• * Pet's grow/shrink in ability, based upon these meters:
  HUNGER affects STRENGTH
  STUPIDITY affects WISDOM
  SICKLY affects STAMINA
  LAZY affects AGILITY
  DIRTY affects DEXTERITY
• * Pet's must be cared for in the following ways:
  HUNGER is managed by keeping stomach/colon full of food (MEAT/VEGGIE/BERRIES)
  STUPIDITY is managed by PLAY GAME (frisbee)
  SICKLY is managed by keeping colon food of the correct color (matching element 'face' color)
  LAZY is managed by selecting pet and then clicking in the 'pet corral' to make it exercise
  DIRTY is managed by WASH PET.
• Miscellaneous bug fixes

4/9/2000 ALPHA 35 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Excellent :-) Although your existing pets will disappear (expect that for the next few releases, as the dust settles on this major new feature).
• * NOTE ABOUT A34 - I released A34 a bit prematurely in an experiment to get info about the new installer. To get patch A35 you will HAVE to have gotten the A34 full base version, but you might want to wait for other people to put in their opinion on the quality of the installer.
• * BUGFIX: Stock market dialog remembers the last page selected.

• * BUGFIX: Various pet invocation errors.
• * BUGFIX: Selling more shares than you own doesn't leave your portfolio all weird any more. Also, the total ROI calculation is a bit better (though since I don't keep complete records of all transactions, this is not entirely informative)
• * PETS PAY NO PP, XP, or GP. Since they are just sitting there, letting you bash them without fighting back, it isn't fair to pay you for it, so I don't. This also goes for a charmed monster in general. If it is still charmed at the moment of death, it pays no reward. If a pet goes wild, then it isn't a pet any more and killing it will pay off.
• * BLACKJACK TABLE HAS A LIMIT. Well, I wanted it to be unlimited, but there are some practical reasons to limit it a little. I chose 100K per bet as the limit, so you should still be able to play the "double your bet when you lose" trick and come out ahead, most of the time.
• * "ALL" Spells affect pets as if they were humans, not monsters. There are probably many more such things to be fixed as the notion of a team is brand new.. (and will need to be fixed again probably, though I am trying to lay the ground work for generic teams.. For example, an "all" spell that hits everyone in the same guild as the targeted player - but that will come much later)
• * PET SKINS RELOAD WHEN CHANGING CHARACTERS. So when you switch between characters, the pet skins don't get 'stuck' on the previous set.
• * YOU CAN NO LONGER SUMMON PETS FROM THE GRAVE. Heh, thanks for noticing. Dead players cannot summon pets. But if your pet already in battle lives, it can fight on for your honor.
• * You can ONLY tame creatures BELOW your level, and the closer they are TO your level, the less likely you are to succeed. (sorry, I don't think you can have BWs any more).. And if your pets level up above you, watch out (well, in theory).. current math is you will be 100% successful catching pets which are 30 levels below you (or more) and 0% in catching pets at your level, with a linear distribution between (3% for one level below you...) And, of course, you have to catch them before the charm wears off.
• * FIGHT SCENE DOESN'T END TILL ALL MONSTERS DEAD. Which is to say, a CHARMED monster is still a threat, but a PET is not.
• * YOU CANNOT TAME A CHEATED MONSTER. If the monster arrived via the /fight command, you cannot tame it. Sorry. Not even if you are a cheat character. Makes it too messy to keep fair.
• * YOU CAN NOW RELEASE PET BACK TO WILD. It disappears from your pen and appears in the scene with you, and it is always mad at you.
• * ENOUGH BUGS ARE PRESENT IN A34 TO JUSTIFY AN IMMEDIATE A35. So, I will be pushing A35 tonight and A36 becomes the official pokegatchi release.

4/8/2000 ALPHA 34 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: If you are equipped with a shield above level 40, you might notice it jump up 10 levels on you.
• * BUGFIX: Miscellaneous Blackjack Fixes
• * BUGFIX: Miscellaneous fixes for problems discovered while bringing LG's great new world on line. (Import world.zip, Import http:/world, Handles HTTP redirection (usually), Spell 1 no longer freaks out if #include used for spell table), Shield table renumbered correctly.
• * BUGFIX: Various embarassing BlackJack bugs
• * TUNING: YOU MIGHT BE WEAKER. Level 99 sword users were a bit too strong versus level 99 magic users, so I made the following tweaks: 1.) Increasing your wisdom does not increase your magic attack AS MUCH. (it still increases it, but it was working at a much higher rate than STR was boosting sword use). 2.) All human players (sword and magic) are somewhat more sensitive to magical attacks than they were (monsters are the same as before). Both of these changes were most obvious in the case where you had consumed a lot of seeds. Overall, the monsters should now be slightly harder to kill, and magical monsters should be a little more dangerous to you. PK battles should be a little more balanced. We'll see what the next set of complaints are. Thanks to Coeus for the most recent set of numbers.
• * CHARACTER CLASS AND LEVEL SHOWN ON HEALTH BAR. Much as monsters show their element and level above their health bar when you point at them, now 'players' show a little info as well ("Necromancer 99" for example - techinically it is your LEVEL name, not your CLASS name which I show)
• * NEW "IF CONDITIONALS". Quest authors can now have a couple more tests, as in:
• IF C3, @characterClassIsThree
  IF V4, @characterLevelIsFourOrHigher
• And, of course, you can combine them, as in, perhaps:
• IF C3+V4-V10, @label
• Which would go to label if the player who is the scene HOST is of character class 3, and has a level of 4 or higher, but less than 10. (4-9).
• * NEW BOOK: OF OPTIONS. I finally made an options dialog where all those things in the FILE menu really belong. I'm not in a big hurry to move them, but that would be the logical thing to do.
• * CUSTOM UI THEMES. You might think of this as the 'lurch feature.' It allows very basic customization of the user interface. Basically there is a new folder, called THEMES, and within that folder is a folder for each custom theme, say 'diablo' Inside the diablo folder would then be replacement bitmap files for many of the UI elements of the game (mainly the buttons and framing elements). Unlike other implementations I have done of this functionality, there are no sub-folders in a theme. Likewise, there is no micro-positioning of bitmaps, resizing, etc. It's REALLY BASIC, and please don't ask for fancier treatments as I probably will never enhance it beyond this (well, other than adding WAV support). Heck, most of the bitmaps even require you to re-run the game after changing themes before they will take effect - it's just that basic!
• * FUNPAK IS BACK. Type "/funpak" to open the funky diagnostic window. This will log situations of interest to world designers (broken syntax in the quest file, duplicate map entries, etc).
• * FIRST CUT POKEGATCHI PEN. This isn't much to look at yet. Type "/pet" to open it. Watch the Homer Simpson O' Meter showing your pet's internal mental and digestive state.
• * USING AN ITEM NO LONGER RESORTS ITEM LIST. Only the info about that item is updated. Which is not to say it will NEVER re-sort when you didn't want it too, just that it now does it less.
• * TELEPORTATION COMMANDS IN QUEST SCRIPT. I'm calling these 'teleportation' since so many people asked for that and this way maybe they think I did it. But REALLY this is a feature which lets you have token-locked links. So some link points won't work until you have the right stuff. BUT, rather than make a special token-lock in the link editor (ack), I am making it a script command, so the actual test can be as complicated as you like.
• For example, you have a link on the main map called "Dragon's Lair" It is actually linked to a SCENE. That scene checks your current tokens and if you don't have the right stuff, it just appears as a regular scene (with maybe some guards telling you to shove off or whatever). But if you DO have what it takes, answer the right question, or whatever, then it used the new GOTO LINK command to take you to a different link point (on the same or a different map). You have the option of just moving to the link point, or actually dropping into it. (Even I have a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around that at times, so I hope it's not overly confusing to the world designer.)
• While I was at it, I added a GOTO SCENE x command which lets you jump from the current scene to a different one (but doesn't actually change your map position). It's not clear this is all that much different from just using the existing commands to change backgrounds and such, but it was easy to add and looks purty.
• These commands considerably increase the power of quests (which means lots of new bugs probably). Here is the documentation from the new quest.txt file:
• ;-----------
  ; GOTO SCENE <scene number>
  ;
  ; This command lets you jump the player from the current scene into a new scene (which then starts
  ; at its beginning.)
  ;
  ; However, when you exit the scene, you will be at your original location (the place where you
  ; dropped into the original scene). This command never changes your current map.
  ;
  ; Jumping to a non-existent scene number may not fail gracefully.
  ;
  ;-----------
  ; GOTO LINK <map number>, <link number>, <dropin code>
  ;
  ; This command actually moves the character to a position just above the specified link on the specified map.
  ; For example:
  ;
  ; GOTO LINK 0,0
  ;
  ; On evergreen, this would take you on top of the gateway link on the main map.
  ;
  ; The third argument (dropin code), if present and non-zero, causes the player to drop 'into' the link
  ; after arriving. What happens after that is a function of the link in question (might do nothing, might
  ; go into a scene, might link to a whole different map)
  ;
  ; So:
  ;
  ; GOTO LINK 0,0,1
  ;
  ; On evergreen, this would move the player to just above the gateway link on the main map, and then drop the
  ; player INTO the gateway (scene). When the player exited that scene, they would be on the main map just
  ; above the gateway.
  ;
• By the way, in theory, the bridging scene (the one which will contain the GOTO LINK command in it) doesn't necessarily HAVE to appear... except that the engine WILL flash the background for a moment. But if you make a background which is all black, I think no one will notice.
• Anyway, I hope everyone is excited about this, and thanks for all the cool suggestions which ultimately led to this particular implementation. I had wanted token-locked links forever, but had always thought in terms of adding a token entry to the link editor and I knew that was going to drive me crazy. Even so, this implementation requires that you know your map and link numbers, but that's life.
• And I'm still thinking about how I want to implement my 'wing of the wyvern' equivalent (item or spell which lets you go back to towns you have visited in the past). This has been blocked so far by the 'remembering what towns I have visited' element. (I know, sounds simple, and it is, just a bit of a headache in a hero-dependent, upwards compatible, multiplayer sense. But the work I just did in GOTO LINK will simplify it.. so one step at a time) Anyway, I appreciate the recent suggestion of a item/spell to specifically record a place you would like to return to (like the Everquest bind, sort of, but with more entries.. say 10) So, it will probably work along those lines. Travel somewhere, 'bind it' later on open your "book of bindings" and spend some MP/PP to get back.
• * NEW MINI-GAME: Big Ol' Space Rocks. See, Tleil, sometimes you get to name stuff after all! I couldn't resist the urge to splurge 10 hours of my life implementing a clone of a classic game, even though how it relates to WoS is dubious, at best. It's like, totally disconnected. You don't win GP, doesn't cost PP. Just a way to waste time while you're waiting for someone to join your party or something. Please forgive me.
• * NEW MINI-GAME: STOCK MARKET. You asked for a bank, and I said "NO!" But that doesn't mean I don't love you any more. Here's something to rid you of those million dollar blues. It's kind of LIKE a bank, but you buy stock shares instead. You can only have a million GP in your POCKET, but you can have as much as you LIKE in the stock market. Of course, its value will fluctuate with market conditions. World designers can define up to 100 stock 'companies' to go with their world (or just use the game defaults).
• * CHARM SPELLS NOW WORK. Okay, in evergreen, the charm spell is currently called "Enchant" and has been there forever (spirit element). Anyway, now it works. While a monster is charmed, it will fight for the 'human' team and select monster targets (even other charmed monsters, though). It will NOT fight itself however (the CONFUSE spells will let it do that).
• 
  * SKIN CENSOR. Borrowing an idea of Lurch's, I have added a skin censor which lets you tag individual skins as being inappropriate for your own eyes. (it doesn't affect what other players see). You can either right-click on a name in the MAP list, or use the Book Of Skins to toggle the censored status. A censored skin will appear as the standard adventurer (I didn't want to implement Lurch's full master plan for world skin domination).
• * FIXED BUG IN PK CAP which allowed you to cast 'disease' spells against a higher level PKer without triggering the "you hit first" rule.
• * NEW INSTALLER/PATCHER. Lurch found a nice (free) installer/patcher program, so I am taking the opportunity immediately of trying it out. In that spirit, I am releasing A34 prematurely (from the pokegatchi perspective - A34 has lots of other new features) with the idea of testing the installer. Then I will release soon a patch A35 which will be what I expected to release in A34. Confused? Me too.

3/24/2000 ALPHA 33 INCLUDES:

• * COMPATIBILITY: Incredibly compatible - your life mate. Well... actually, as of this version, you can no longer interact with players who have a version below the current 'minimum' which shall begin with A31. So, you will not be able to interact with players using version A30 and below (they will probably still see you and your chat, but you won't see them). This is to protect the newer versions from being crashed by older protocols, when and if they occur. Just thinkin' ahead a little.
• * EXISTING WORLD COMPATIBILITIES. World Designers take note. A33 should not require a complete rework of your world (though you will probably want to use the new monster placement techniques, they are not mandatory). HOWEVER, if you had a monster group '1' (one), it will no longer work, and it will be interpreted instead as meaning "There are absolutely no monsters near this link point"
• * BUGFIX: CAN NO LONGER LOSE YOUR STAR. If you set your own 'hat' in A32, you were stuck with it forever. ooops.
• * BUGFIX: While sitting idle, you no longer appear to disappear whenever someone enters that needs a copy of your skin.
• * BUGFIX: You can now reliably delete entries from the Guild Diary (plus it doesn't rewind back to the top of the list of names after deleting one).
• * BUGFIX: "Shout Mute" should now work.
• * BUGFIX: Book of skins no longer truncates credits frame (used to cut off below the 'shadow' line)
• * BUGFIX: No longer creates an 'invisible player' when you change whisper target after current target leaves game. Many thanks to Lurch, LG, FF, and GM for finding out how to duplicate this.
• * BUGFIX: No longer crashes during MAP sort, if it encounters a bad entry (such as the invisible player).
• * BUGFIX: Should no longer generate duplicate death sentences if several people hit you at once.
• * BUGFIX: /A works in /afk messages again
• * MONSTERS MORE DIFFICULT. I upped the specs on most monsters so they are generally tougher (and pay more XP). Also, they are slightly more smoothly distributed, so you should have more high level monsters to choose between. And, just because lurch whined about it so much, I upped the max XP per fight from 32767 to 60000 (I was using the negative values for a special purpose, but I can live with 5535 values reserved for that :-) Bear in mind that this means you can level faster, which wasn't my overall goal, so I might boost the XP requirements if this makes it too fast again. It is SUPPOSED to be tedious to get to level 99, otherwise what's the point .
• * HIGH LEVEL MONSTERS PAY A LOT LESS GP. By about a factor of 5 in the case of the Troll, I believe. Low levels are about the same. I give you more starting GO, however, to tide you through the early stages. (Don't go wasting it all on potions, unless you have a sugar daddy/mommy nearby.)
• * MONSTERS ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT difficulty-wise. In general, everything is harder and pays less GP (though you probably make more XP than before, on average, just coz they are tougher.) Why am I repeating myself on this?
• * YOUR LEVEL *WILL* CHANGE! The experience required equation got yet another reworking. This time it is a pure exponential of the form:
• XP Req(level) = 450K * (level/99) ^ 2.4
• Where 2.4 was chosen to match the growth curve of the XP earned by the new 'algorithmically balanced' monsters (remember, world designers can still fiddle monsters manually, it's just a nightmare to achieve balance that way). In general, you need to kill 20-40 monsters of your same level to advance to the next level. A special bend in the curve still simplifies early levelling.
• So, your level will get squeezed a little. Oddly enough my level 71 character remained at level 71, but my level 92 dropped to 88 or so, and a level 32 dropped to 31. go figger. No predictions, but expect your level to DROP. The curve before was very chaotic with many more monster fights required at some levels than others.
• * MAJOR CHANGES TO MAGIC AND SPELLBOUND ITEMS (STAVES AND NEW RIGHT_HAND CLASSES). Well, I couldn't throw everything else into a turmoil without totally messing with this as well, could I? First off, the way staves were working was just plain screwy. If your staff supposedly case 'fry' what REALLY happened was you got the fry animation, but the actual blow delivered was just a physical attack based on the physical attributes of the staff (A points). Now, a spellbound item REALLY CASTS THE SPELL. The only difference between you learning and casting that spell yourself is that instead of using just your WISDOM, it uses the weighted sum of your wisdom and strength. This way a staff works well for a warrior, if he can equip it. Anyway, this was a critical change to make the new right-hand classes interesting.
• Now the other big change to magic in general is that magic used to benefit from your total A points (really I should have imbued all items with three attributes: Attack, Defense, and Magical Attack - but I didn't, it's too late now, fuggedaboutit). Since I didn't, I had a missing bit of math for magic, hmmm, let me describe it like this.
• Your physical attack is basically your total A points times your hand ratio, then increased by your STRENGTH, LEVEL, and TRAINING.
• Your magical attack is your spells base strength times your magic ratio, then increased by your WISDOM, LEVEL, and TRAINING.
• The problem is that a spell's base strength is fixed (you can't change it), while your total A points can be increased almost forever. I felt this wasn't fair for the magic users, so I snuck the A points into the old magic equation. (I still do now, but derated by your HAND ratio, which seems fair)
• Update: When you cast magic, the effect of the spell benefits from your A points multiplied by your PHYSICAL ratio (so sword-users, weak in magic in general, get a kick-up from their A points, and magic-users don't see ALL their A points as being useless). Currently this effect causes your spell to double for every 400 A points.
• I think I also improved the effectiveness of TRAINING in general and made it more fair as well for magic and physical attacks.
• The more I get into this, the more I appreciate that magic and physical attacks will never be directly comparable, and we can only hope to achieve an acceptable mix of attributes. It should be possible for the same amount of effort expended to result in a magical character or a physical character which can kill the same level monster in about the same amount of time with about the same amount of risk as each other.
• * GOSSIP ON /TUNE IS NOW MARKED. Similar to "Bill shouts:", chat on a gossip channel is now marked as "Bill gossips:" (downside - you can't use /a in a gossip)
• * LAST USED AFK MESSAGE IS REMEMBERED. If you type "/afk" without providing a message, it will use the same one as last time (or the boring one if you have NEVER set it)
• * CUSTOM COLORS REMEMBERED. (this ones for you, LG). I am referring to the 16 colors at the bottom of the color chooser dialog.
• * ITEM CLASSES SUPPORT EXTENSION BITMAPS. (for FireFox). Items in the game are divided into classes (helmets, staffs, items, etc) and each has a unique filmstrip bitmap file with all the pictures in it. World designers have alwasy been able to substitute their own filmstrip, but it hasn't been easy to simply 'add some more' to the stock filmstrips. Now it is. Just add a filmstrip of your own to your world's ART folder and name it "Helmets_1.bmp" (add "_1" to the stock name) and then in your ITEMS table, if you set the image number to "+3" it will use image 3 in your 'extension' file, instead of image 3 in the stock file. THis is discussed in the quest file. For now, there is only one extension file per class. (but who knows.. someday... "_2", etc...)
• * NO MORE "RHn" Hand classes. Evergreen now has four new right-hand classes. I should keep them a big surprise but I wont. They are: Sword, Staff, Bow, Music, Fist, Dart, Book, and Spirit (as in summoning). Thanks, Ben.
• * 200 NEW ITEMS. Whew! Having a large number of items is actually an inducement to not cheat. Nothing more tedious than cleaning up after a "/gimme" :-) Anyway, about 50 items in each of the new hand classes (so all 8 hand classes have a balanced number of items).
• * 4 NEW CHARACTER CLASSES. Not very exciting, just one class each for the new hand classes. fist-user, dart-user, book-user, and spirit-user. I leave it to other world designers to make all the derivational classes ("I'm a dart user, with 55% magic, who can only learn healing spells and is not allowed to touch a sword")
• * CHANGED LOOK OF ITEMS SCREEN. I doubled the size of the item image shown on this screen. Partly, I wanted to make it look different from the EQUIP screen, but also I wanted to see some of the new BOOK items in more detail. In fact, you do NOT get more detail (just bigger pixels), but I think it looks better anyway. Better enough that it exposed all the noise pixels which had crept into the items during their brief sojourn as JPEGS, so I just spent an embarassingly long time micro-editing every item image.
• * DAWN OF THE AGE OF CHAT FILTERS. I re-organized the right-click chat menu and added a new submenu called 'filters.' The first filter on the list is the ALL CAPS filter. It allows a certain 'cap density' but beyond that forces lower case. It also filters excessively duplicated characters. Any filters I do (old english, drunken) will first appear in this menu for pure entertainment value. (filtering all incoming chat)
• * FIRST CUT DRUNKEN FILTER. This is just for entertainment value right now. It doesn't get turned on automatically in response to anything, it's just another filter you can turn on for ALL INCOMING CHAT (that is to say, it translates what you read and has no effect on what you type). I tried to make a generic filter engine with a simple rule set. Basically a filter is a list of rules, applied in order, where each rule has a trigger sequence, a probability of occurence, a replacement/insertion string, and an action. For example:
• "you ", "ya ", FILTER_REPLACE, 100
• will turn 'you ' into 'ya ' 100% of the time, while:
• "did you ", "didja ", FILTER_REPLACE, 50 will do the replacement only 50% of the time.
• Some rules can be very very general, and hence should be placed at the end of the rule list so they don't sabotage more specific rules, for example:
• "e", "", FILTER_OMIT, 10
• will simply delete 10 percent of all occurences of the letter e.
• The engine is VERY simplistic still, with no wild card matching characters (I use 'space' a lot to track start and end of words)
• 
  * CHARACTER HP AND MP RATES CAN BE SET AUTOMATICALLY. If you don't feel like entering those wacky hp/mp values in your character class tables (as a world designer, I mean) there is a new command for you:
• AUTO_MAX minHP, maxHP, minMP, maxMP, startMPLevel
• This tells me to autogenerate the hp/mp values for that class (and ignore those entries in your table for that class). Level 1 will start with the minHP and level 99 will a=havv *appx* the maxHP. Same for MP, but you can defer first appearance of MP to the level specified by the 5th argument.
• * MAGIC AND HAND RATIOS CAN BE SET SEPARATELY. Caving in to more whining from wannabe world designers , I added a couple new commands to the character level class (usage described in the new quest.txt file)
• MAGIC_RATIO - 0 to 100, specifies effectiveness with magical attacks
• HAND_RATIO - 1-100, specifies effectiveness of non-magical attacks. If you set to '0' it will use "100 - magic ratio"
• Note: you can NOT set the hand ratio to zero by any means other than setting the magic ratio to 100. (it's a forward compatibility issue, but it almost makes sense anyway).
• In case this isn't clear, you now CAN create a class with 100% magic *and* 100% hand. It is up to the world designer to keep it balanced.
• Also note that these particular settings are only used when a new character is born, so old characters don't benefit from this changing after the fact.
• * SPELLS COST MUCH MORE. The PP cost of learning a spell has gone up 5x. No more 50PP spells at the 'spell store'
• * MAYBE YOU CAN COPY AND PASTE MORE EASILY. It's possible that your text selection in the chat window may not evaporate as soon as someone types something. Maybe. We'll see.
• * NEW, IMPROVED, MONSTER PLACEMENT GRAPHICAL EDITOR!!! (You have to be impressed because as simple as this is, it was a lot of work!). OK, world designers no longer have to make monster groups. If you DO, they will still work. At any given time, your character is 'closest to' exactly one map link point. If that link point has a monster group assigned to it, then that will control the mix of monsters seen if a fight starts.
• But if that link has NO monsters assigned to it, then monsters will be picked via the new graphical monster editor thingy. Here are the only instructions you have for using this: It's a lot like the terrain editor in that you open the LINK EDITOR then click a checkBox called "Monster Map". Your cursor then changes to a pencil with an angry face and the monster 'palette' window appears (a simple list of all available monsters). Pick a monster from the palette then click on the map to place a monster there. Repeat. If you click on an existing monster on the map, you can drag it around, or get rid of it via a DELETE button on the monster palette. a CHANGE button on the monster palette lets you change the monster assigned to the current spot on the map. Also shown is a circle indicating the radius on the map that monster can roam. (currently this is a fixed value, but I plan on providing an assortment of radii). When the time comes to put you into a fight, every monster whose circle you are inside of will join in the fight (possibly more than one of each). If you are inside of NO circles, I always use monster #1 (so be sure to define monster #1 as your general purpose monster which covers your entire world)
• To see the current monster circles while playing, type "/monster" -- this is not yet a cheat, since I want everyone to appreciate it first :-)
• Existing worlds will default such that if you had "no monsters" selected for a link point, it will now use "mapped monsters" (if you really wanted no monsters at all, you will need to change the link's monster group to the (new) setting "Really, no kidding, no monsters at all")
• * WHISPER NO MORE. OK, say you're like a guy whose 's' and 'c' keys are broken. And you're embarassed by the whisper lips you left dangling on some PKer's entry. You can now turn them off without selecting a new whisper target. Lucky you. I am about 30% tempted to make a 'hacker filter' so you can live in a world of everyone talking just like you (with your broken keyboard). As a further condemnation of h4|<3r speak, it would be a trivial filter.
• * MORE FILTERS YOU DIDN'T NEED OR ASK FOR. I couldn't sleep and didn't feel up to doing anything valuable, so instead I made the following filters: Pig-Latin, h4k3r l33t, and shakespearean. Actually I hope shakespearean is useful someday (it's pretty stupid right now), but the others are purely for entertainment (mostly mine :-)
• * NEW REST AREAS. I threw in a couple new recharge scenes. They are: The classic "Fairy Recharge", the "Mermaid Recharge", and the "infinite free fish" scene.
• * NEW CONSUMABLES. I needed some fish for you inventory, so I stuck in a couple fish items, a sandwich, and 3 styles of liquid beverage (all alcoholic, Firefox, but none of them actually have an effect yet). These are just 'health potions' under a different name.
• * SETI@HOME INSIDE THE GAME! Well, not really, but I snuck in a 'Science Institute' (in stonetree) where you can help solve one of the great mysteries of the 13th century...
• * NEW MINI-GAME - BLACKJACK. Gotta have the classics. Quite possibly the most boiled down version of the game you have ever seen, but it's a classic so I know it will work in spite of my implementation :-)
• * NEW SCRIPT FEATURE: RANDOM CONDITIONAL. You can now have 'random forks' in your quest scripts. For example:
• IF R34, @label1
• This will go to lable1 34% of the time (and 66% of the time it will just fall through to the next instruction.

DISCLAIMER

Anyway, none of this is binding. Please don't develop anything too elaborate with these tools as all is liable to change and then you will be mad at me.

COPYRIGHT

Well of Souls (the RPG) is the copyrighted property of Dan Samuel of Synthetic Reality Co. All rights reserved. Eventually this will be a shareware program which will require a registration fee to be played longer than a certain evaluation period.

People contributing Worlds will probably not see any return on their investment short of their credits (and my gratitude). My intention is for the game to make it easy to share worlds with friends. To the degree this web site can be used to facilitate that, I will make my own best effort. I will try not to exercise any censorship, but I might have to provide some sort of rating system for worlds deemed to contain offensive content.

Let me know what you like, what you hate, what you'd like to see, and any other feedback you might have. I'm not in any rush to finish this. It will be done when it is done, and hopefully the development copies will become more enjoyable throughout the process.

Thanks again!

Dan Samuel