239 Release Notes

• Fixed: Icon modifications following a paste operation were sometimes creating duplicate pixels. (Manifacae)

• Fixed: The server crashed if you removed the .rsc and ran the world.

• Fixed: Smooth movement was cutting corners when the real position got more than one tile away of the visual position. In most cases, that looked sloppy, so now it jumps ahead in cases like that.

• Fixed: The adaptive visual movement rate was returning to the base speed whenever an object completed a movement. For a smoother effect, the maximum speed is remembered for a short waiting period after the completion of the movement.

• Fixed: The compiler was choking on expressions of the form:

  return (A) + B

  or anything after the return beginning with a piece in parenthesis. It had the order of opertions wrong and was grouping this as (return (A)) + B which resulted in the error message: "missing expression". (Paul Mikell)

• Fixed: step_to() and family had a fixed horizon of 10 beyond which targets could not be seen. They now use world.view to determine the horizon. Note that the horizon is actually twice the view() distance.

• Fixed: invisible things no longer show up in the expansion lists.

• Fixed: contents.Find(Val,Start,End) was not always correctly filling in the default value for End (which should be beyond the end of the list).

• Fixed: There was a bug in the code generator for the ? operator causing subsequent expressions to fail in some cases.

• Fixed: References to deleted client objects were not getting nulled and procs associated with them were not automatically terminating.

• Fixed: There was a savefile synchronization problem that you would see if you opened a file, wrote to it, opened a second instance of the same file, and read from it. In certain cases, the read was not seeing the results of the previous write.

• Fixed: The compiler was failing to evaluate forward-referenced variable types when the variable was not actually used in the proc. This could only happen if you use the variable solely as the target of new() or some other instruction that cares about the type and the type is defined below in the code.

• Fixed: view(), oview(), range(), and orange() had a bunch of null entries when the region extended beyond the border of the map. (Guy T.)

• Worlds automatically switch to text mode if you are missing the rsc file. I don't know why anybody would be missing the world rsc file, but wouldn't it be a pitty if they were and the darn map was invisible!

• Reduced some internal overhead in handling user procedure calls. DM code that does a lot of proc calls (say inside a long loop) should be faster as a result.

• text2num() now returns null when the argument has no initial numeric portion.

• Garbage collection in cache files is now more robust. The standard period for keeping around cache items that don't get used is 30 days. However, as the cache file gets bloated, this period is shortened to as low as 5 days. Also, the cache file is automatically compacted and defragmented when the amount of unused space gets too big. Previously, garbage items were simply marked as free and their space re-used, but that meant the cache file would never decrease in size and could potentially get fragmented or allocated in an inefficient manner. In addition, cache garbage is now collected on the fly rather than only when the server starts up. That way, servers which run for extended periods do not have to be stopped and restarted to keep the cache from indefinitely expanding.

• The icon_state, desc, and suffix properties now default to null, not "". To avoid confusion, however, I removed the behavior which was internally converting "" to null in assignments, since that was understandably confusing.

  I would still encourage people not to write code which depends on the difference between "" and null unless they really care about the difference. Use expressions like if(icon_state) rather than if(icon_state == ""). Boolean operations are shorter to write, faster to execute, and less prone to subtle errors. If you need to ensure that you are working with a text string rather than a null value, you can use an expression like (icon_state || ""). That returns icon_state if it is a true value and "" otherwise.