276 Release Notes

• Unfortunately, this release breaks backwards compatibility in the networking protocols. Old clients and servers cannot communicate with new ones and vice versa. Nothing bad will happen if you try. It will just inform you of the incompatibility and force you to upgrade. Incidentally, all subsequent releases will now manage their upgrades through BYOND itself; you won't need to download the binaries through the web.

• Fixed: Creating multiple temporary savefiles was sometimes causing data to leak from one into the other because they were incorrectly sharing certain data structures that only savefile objects that point to the same file should ever share.

• Fixed: The code generation optimizer was screwing up in certain obscure situations involving the switch() statement. Recompile! (Guy T.)

• Fixed a bug in the beginning-of-sentence detection that automatically capitalizes articles. Example: var/mob/cat = new() cat.name = "cat" usr << "[cat] purrrrrrrrs." usr << "[cat] smiles and [cat] dissappears." In this example, the third [cat] was getting replaced with "The cat" becaue the "." in the previous statement lined up with the "[". Don't ask! (Zilal, Guy T., maybe .. probably not the same bug).

• Fixed: there was a bug in the code that loads resource files (such as icons) from a savefile.

• Fixed: the "inconsistent indenation" bug. (Spuzzum) And ditto for the "Devision by zero" bug. (Guy T) Embarrassing!

• Fixed: DM was parsing hexidecimal digits 0-9 but not A-F. So you can now enter a hexidecimal number by using the prefix "0x". Example: 0xABC == 2748. Case does not matter. The octal prefix is "0", so you can do 0123 == 83, for what it is worth.

• Fixed: A larger number of different area instances on the DS map (more than 50) was causing a garbled view. (Deadron)

• The ':' operator no longer silently fails at runtime when the requested proc or var is not defined for the source object. This made it too difficult to track down errors. (Guy T.)

• Fixed: The hard-coded movement procs were misbehaving when the object being moved or the locations being entered and exited got deleted in the middle of the procedure.

• Fixed: During shutdown or reboot, Dream Daemon bypasses certain garbage collection procedures (nulling out of references to deleted objects). This was sometimes causing error messages such as "BYOND BUG: bad obj". These have now been fixed. (Gazoot)

• The default Del() proc no longer dumps the object's contents to its location. Anything in the contents is deleted. The previous behavior was more suitable for something like a Die() procedure. Since that is a fairly game-specific behavior, it seemed better to have Del() simply obliterate the contents.

• Fixed: The code generation optimizer was screwing up in certain obscure situations involving the switch() statement. Recompile! (Guy T.)

• Fixed: there was a bug in the beginning-of-sentence detection that automatically capitalized articles. Example: var/mob/cat = new() cat.name = "cat" usr << "[cat] purrrrrrrrs." usr << "[cat] smiles and [cat] dissappears." In this example, the third [cat] was getting replaced with "The cat" becaue the "." in the previous statement lined up with the "[". Don't ask! (Zilal, Guy T., maybe .. probably not the same bug).

  Fixed: there was a bug in the code that loads resource files (such as icons) from a savefile.

• Fixed: Subtraction of constants was not being evaluated at compile-time. (Gazoot)

• Fixed: Some internal recycling of object id's was causing temporary drawing glitches. The Deadron DragonSnot bug solved at last! (Deadron)

• Fixed: Dream Seeker's "host world" option wasn't made available between reboots. (Guy T., Air Mapster)
• Fixed: The popup list prompts were sometimes automatically making selections when more than a single option was available.

• Fixed: Dream Maker wasn't allowing you to jump to external files from the output box.

• Fixed: Dream Maker's search & replace wasn't working correctly for all-whitespace entries. (Spuzzum)

• Fixed: The automatic zip installation packages were sometimes crashing DS, or simply not working at all.

• Fixed: Dream Maker was sometimes failing to correctly open newly saved files. (Guy T.)

• Added sin(), cos(), arcsin(), and arccos(). These all work in degrees rather than radians to be consistent with turn(), which also works in degrees. I have noticed *very* small round-off errors for things like sin(180), so do not be concerned if it differs from what you expect by an infinitesimal amount. (Spuzzum, Gazoot, others)

• The reponse to Click() calls should be quite a bit faster. (Guy T.)

• cKey() now preserves the '-' and '_' characters. The related instruction ckey() still strips these characters, along with all other punctuation. The intent of cKey() is to produce a more readable result that is still safe to use in a wide variety of circumstances, such as for names of files on the filesystem. The ckey() procedure in addition to that is intended to produce something which groups together all text strings differing by something obscure like '_' vs. ' ', so that ckey("James Byond") and ckey("James_Byond") yield the same value "jamesbyond".

• The '?' character is now the preferred way to do what we used to do with '#' in BYOND urls and hyperlinks. Standard URL syntax dicates that the stuff following '#' is information about the URL for use by the client, which means it is not really appropriate for submission of hyperlink "topic" data to the server. That's why we now use the '?' character which is the standard in web URLs. Dream Seeker now uses the '#' character for its traditional purpose, which is to store "meta" data about the URL. Actually, for backwards compatibility, DS currently uses '##' so that old-style topic data can still be recognized.

  One advantage of this change is that if you are displaying Topic() hyperlinks in the browser, you no longer need to preface them with "byond://#" but can just start them with "?".

  The full anatomy of a BYOND URL is:

  byond://server/path?topic_data#client_data The path information is used by host servers to find the requested world. The topic data is processed by the target world, and the client data will be used internally by Dream Seeker. This way, each application has it's own space in the URL without fear of conflicting with the others.

  The "server" component can be a full internet address including a network port such as dantom.com:6003, or it can be a registered entry in BYOND Hub, which will usually be of the form Author.Title.

• Added some security features to "BYOND Central" to protect against password cracking. The web login panel keeps track of bad login attempts and will dissable access for 5 minutes if more than 10 bad attempts are made in a short time span. It also sends out mail to us when this happens. This sort of temporary "denial of service" is sometimes exploited by annoying hackers in order to dissable access to a site by intentionally generating bad login attempts, but I think that is better than leaving it wide open to password cracking. If it ever becomes a problem, we can try to make it deny service only to the hacker's IP address. Even better would be a counterattack. Since BYOND will be distributed across thousands of machines all over the internet, the hub could send out an attack order and all the active Dream Seekers could send data to the target machine at the same time. Even if they each sent only a couple packets, it could totally swamp the enemy!

• The BYOND networking implementation has been streamlined. This means faster resource file downloads and faster installations from the hub. This comes at the cost of making the connection more sluggish for any other action the player may take while the resource files are in transit. If that is a problem, try setting client/preload_rsc to 0.

• Client-server communications are now encrypted. It's not SSL, but it is a lot better than plain ascii. "Simple" snoop attacks such as recording the initial login data and retransmitting this at the beginning of another session will no longer succeed.

• The #include directive can now take a directory as an argument. It includes the file in the directory with the same name as the directory. In case of ambiguity, it prioritizes the file extensions like this (highest to lowest): .dm, .dmp, .rsc, .dms. This feature works nicely with libraries distributed through the hub, because each hub package has to go into its own directory so you often end up with things like hublib/hublib.dm.

• Added a "pager-port" configuration setting. It defaults to ANY (or 0), which picks any available network port. A fixed port might be convenient for operation of the pager behind a firewall. If the firewall lets you host your own website, then the standard ports like 80 and 443 may be open for inward connections. Otherwise, the firewall would have to be configured to let incoming connections from hub.dantom.com work. There's no gui access for it yet, so if you want to use it do: ".configure pager-port [whatever]".

• When you start DS up while offline and then go online, the pager will now automatically start up (after a few seconds). Previously, you would have had to manually toggle the pager or reboot DS in order to force it to try connecting again. Also, the pager now pings the hub periodically to make sure the hub has not dropped the pager record. That could happen if your link to the internet goes down and then comes back up later. Previously, you would have had to manually toggle the pager off and back on or reboot DS to force it to re-establish itself. This is similar to the pager startup retrier but the ping is on a slower timer. (Guy T.)

• When a proc crashes, the diagnostic output now includes the last 10 callers, the first 10 callers, and all of the arguments that went into those procedures. Useful for catching "infinite recursion". (Air Mapster)

  Hub Stuff

• The world.hub variable should now be set to the name of the hub entry rather than its numerical id. In other words, it should be something like "Tom.Chess" (not case sensitive) rather than 27. This makes it easier to write the game and upload it to the hub before you know what the numerical id would be.

  There are several reasons why you should set world.hub: it makes live games show up in your hub page; it allows you to notify users of updates; and it allows your world to use hubfiles and report scores. In the future, we may determine world.hub from the context in which the game is running, but for now it needs to be set manually.

• If a hub package contains a readme.txt or readme.html file, DS now automatically displays a link to it so the user can view it. That way, if it is a library being included by some other package, you can still get your two cents in.

• DS now looks for a file called "include.txt" in a hub package installation. This file contains a list of other required packages (each on its own line). This is primarily intended for source code (like a library or tutorial) that relies on other libraries, but it could be applied to anything. Recursive dependencies are no problem, a tutorial could include a library which includes another library.

• BYOND Hub now has separate modes for designers and players. You can configure the amount of visible entries (ie- whether you want to see all of the designer stuff) when you first enter the hub. We'll post more info on the different hubs very shortly.