257 Release Notes

• Fixed: Whoops! Dream Daemon got completely busted in 256. Now it should work again. (Zilal)

• Fixed: The timer system was causing persistent crashes (that would last between multiple instances of the client) in some sitatutions. Hopefully that is cleaned up now.

• Fixed: A bug in the URL parser that was getting confused between paths to real files and virtual path information used by the host server. This should only affect URLs with an implicit protocol or with the "file:" protocol.

• Fixed: Invisible verbs were causing the verb panel to show up, even if it contained no accessible entries.

• Fixed: The pager wasn't allowing pages to be sent to keys with spaces in them. When sending multiple pages you must now separate them with a comma ',' character. (Spuzzum)

• Fixed: Output to world.log was failing if it ended in "\..." so there was no way to suppress the newline.

• Fixed: A recent bug was causing all but the first instance of a savefile to be inoperable. In other words, if you opened several savefile objects all pointing to the same file (without closing the previous ones first), only the first one was working. The feature behind this bug, is that it now handles this case much more efficiently by internally sharing some data structures between the instances.

• Screenshots are now activated with the F2 key, and by default save as a unique name (scrnshot1, etc) in a directory that also gets preserved between gaming sessions. No more complaints! (Deadron)

• The "Host World..." and "Register World..." options have been removed from the client. No one used them much and they have been obsoleted by the new hub setup, which will be our primary focus now.

• You can now click on links output by the pager to respond to the person sending the page. (Deadron)

• DreamDaemon now waits for world.Del() to finish before shutting down. Previously, any sleeping operations initiated during shutdown were simply aborted. To prevent indefinite hangs, a timeout of 10 seconds is enforced, after which the world shuts down whether or not world.Del() has returned. (The hub communication library now uses this to automatically remove temporary links from the hub.)

  Any cleanup you need to do when the world exits should be done in world.Del(). Calling that procedure is the first action to be taken during shutdown, so it is the only time at which you can expect the world to be in a self-consistent state. After that, objects are deleted in an arbitrary order, which can result in unexpected behavior if you do anything with other objects in your Del() procs. If you need to do some complicated cleanup for an object that still exists at shutdown time, just be sure to call the proc that handles it from world.Del(), rather than waiting for the server to call your object's Del() proc.

• The local server (built into the client) is now run in -once mode. Previously, it stayed running even after you and anybody else logged out! That means if you ran a world in Dream Seeker and then connected to another world on the network, the local server would keep running, possibly eating up precious CPU time. Now it will automatically shut down when everyone logs out.

• Even if you have DreamSeeker configured to ask you before rerouting to new worlds, it will now automatically accept links received during the initial connection to a world. This is known as "bouncing" and it is precisely what the host server does, after starting up the requested world. It is far too annoying to have the client ask you every time you go through the host server whether you want to jump to the new world or not. (Deadron)