250 Release Notes

External pixmaps more than 256 colors were crashing Dream Maker when being pasted into the icon-editor. (Deadron)
The clipboard was thrashing the colormap when entire icons were copied. Before 248, it was messing up for individual pixmaps too, which explains some old complaints. Whoops! (Zilal, Deadron)
Fixed: There was a bug in the output code (the << operator) causing non-text output to be sent to unintuitive targets. Specifically, when a list was used as the target of output, the message was being propogated to everything contained in the list. While this may sound correct, it had unfortunate side-effects in some cases. For instance, since the oview() list contains the area of the current user, output sent to it was being propogated to the area, which was then propogated back to the user (and all other mobs in the area), thus defeating the whole point of oview().
To fix this problem while still keeping things reasonably convenient, target lists only pass on output to mobs and not to other types such as turfs and areas. You can still output to turfs and areas and have them forward the message to their contents just as before. The only difference is if you have a _list_ of turfs or areas that you want to send output to, you have to explicitely loop through the list and send the output to each one individually. (Spuzzum, a while back)
Optimized string allocation. It now often avoids doing an extra string duplication that it was doing when parsing embedded args and text macros.
Improved error messages in the auto-save routine. Instead of just saying "bad write", it tells you which variable was being written, where it was being written, and what the value was.
Added some additional error checking in the code that maintains the client-side copy of the stats. Also limited the number of repetitions of related error messages (such as the infamous DelStat()) since these can potentially become very annoying.