249 Release Notes

Fixed: FILE_DIR wasn't being respected for new items inside the instance-editor. (Guy T.)
Fixed: A clipboard glitch was occassionally causing colors to be incorrectly assigned in the icon-editor.
Fixed: The "replace" function inside the map-editor was occassionally corrupting the map. (Deadron)
Fixed: The "new" instruction now returns null if the object deletes itself in its own New() proc. (Guy T)
Fixed: mailto URLs were not being properly recognized. They should now be passed off to the browser to handle.
Fixed: Text string concatenation using the + operator was leaking memory.
Fixed: The callers of sleeping procedures were leaking memory each time the sleeper woke up. That could get really bad if the sleeper went into a lengthy sleep loop.
Fixed: copytext() was crashing the proc for starting or ending positions beyond the end of the text string. This is now accepted and simply produces an empty result.
Fixed: Execution of keyboard macros was broken by a recent fix to prompt(). (Zilal)
Fixed: When the player jumped off of the map and then returned, previously seen contents were remaining (even if those objects had been deleted!). (Deadron)
Tweaked the palette layout a bit to make the colors more consistent. (Guy T.)
You can now load and save colormaps. These are just .dmi files without icons. (Al)
The login screen is now bypassed by default when the default key and password are stored. This behavior can be configured in the Preferences menu.
locate() with no first argument automatically uses the type of the variable being assigned. Example:
Added an rgb(r,g,b) instruction. This returns the HTML-style color value. For example, rgb(0,255,0) --> "#00FF00" which is green. This makes it possible to do color arithmatic without messing with the hexidecimal conversion. It evaluates the expression at compile-time if possible so it counts as a simple constant expression in variable assignments and so-forth.
turn(dir,angle) can now also be used as turn(icon,angle). It returns a new icon rotated by the given angle. I'm imagining a 'booze' potion that rotates the player's icon by 90 degrees. It is very confusing!
Added support for icon "arithmetic" with +, +=, -, -=, *, and *= operators. Multiplication only works with a scalar so all three color components get equal treatment. In summary: More icon functions are on the way! We are hoping to reorganize the classes a bit.
Added visibility as a property of verbs. I realize that the current visibility control is limiting in a full-blown rpg where you might want varying levels of magical invisibility and what-not. However, in worlds (like BYOND Home) where you just want a simple mechanism for hiding certain things from everyone but the owner, visibility is perfect. I found one major limitation, however, and that was the inability to hide or make visible individual object verbs. To do that, I had to add the visibility setting. Example: The visibility setting defaults to the same visibility as the object containing the verb.
I anticipate that in some games, people will want more than just two levels of visibility and may even want several distinct visibility classes that are not necessarily each contained in the previous one. For now you will have to soft-code such accessibility checks at the top of each restricted verb and use visibility to hide as many inaccessible verbs as possible from players. At least normal users should not have to see all the designer-level verbs.
One nice thing about using visibility in this way is that by turning on and off one's SEEINVIS power at run-time, it is possible to see things from either point of view.