289 Release Notes

• Fixed: Icon+icon arithmetic was often corrupting the cache.

• Fixed: stat() was not correctly displaying embedded expressions. (Air Mapster)

• Previously, areas did not have location variables (loc, x, y, and z). With the new /atom hierarchy, area inherits these atomic variables, but they were not being correctly handled. The loc variable for areas is always null. The x, y, and z vars give the coordinates of the area on the map at its lowest z, y, and x position (in that order). If you need to efficiently test whether an area is on the map or not, you can check if area.x is a true value. It will be null if the area is not located on the map.

• Fixed: view() was not doing "boundary highlighting", which is done on the visible map because it produces a more pleasing view. They are now identical. (Pmikell)

• Fixed: When a player switched mobs (by assignment of the key to another mob) and when the original mob got immediately deleted (in Logout()), this was failing to halt the original procedure (with src equal to the deleted mob) in some cases. The symptom was a "bad mob" or "bad object" error message.

• Fixed: Deleting a savefile (with del) was sometimes generating a BYOND Bug message when the garbage collector tried to clean up certain dangling references.

• Fixed: "verb" and "proc" were being treated as special reserved words, which broke code that used them as variable types. (Zilal)

• Fixed: there was an infinite loop that was happening in the new code that handles flick messages that arive at the client before the next map update containing new objects on the map. (LexyBitch, Gughunter, Spuzzum)

• Added a "Find Next" option to Dream Maker. (Deadron, Gughunter, Leftley)

• Dream Maker is now more intelligent in recognizing modified files. (Mloren)

• Changed Topic() a little bit. Previously, if you wanted to route a hyperlink to a particular object (other than the client object), you would do it like this: <a href='?\ref[Object]...'> The reference to the target object was simply the first part of the href data.

  That still works, but now the preferred method is to do

  <a href='?src=\ref[Object]...' The "src=" allows you to make the entire href a standard application/x-www-form-urlencoded text string, parsable by params2list() and producible by list2params(). In other words, the whole thing is a key/value pair list. The src value no longer has to occupy any particular position in this list.

  As an added convenience when working with href data encoded in this way, Topic() now has a second argument which is the result of params2list(href). This reduces overhead if you have several overridden versions of a Topic() proc and each one needs to examine the decoded parameter list. Example:

  mob/verb/test() usr << "Click <a href = '?src=\ref[src];f=sqrt;x=3'>here</a>." mob/Topic(href,href_list[]) switch(href_list["f"]) if("sqrt") var/x = text2num(href_list["x"]) usr << "sqrt([x]) = [sqrt(x)]" else ..() //not handled, do default action This example illustrates several points. One is that you can easily pass any number of arguments to the Topic() procedure by appending them to the href value in the form ";key=value". Another note is that all parameters in the list are text values. You need to convert these to numbers or objects or whatever else is appropriate in your case.

  Another way to generate the href value is to do so with a list passed through list2params(). This has the advantage of automatically escaping any special characters such as "=" within the parameter names and values. Example:

  var/href_list[0] href_list["src"] = src href_list["f"] = "sqrt" href_list["x"] = 3 var/href = list2params(href_list) usr << "Click <a href = '?[href]'>here</a>.

  The intention in all of this is to encourage a good standard encoding scheme for hyperlink data and to make it more convenient and efficient to use it. It's still possible to use any format you want, but when you need to encode multiple values, it is especially convenient for you to use this one. This should not affect any existing code and you are free to ignore the minor notational change if you choose.

  The reference has been consolidated a bit to take advantage of the new object hierarchy. Many entries have been updated. A few of the main ones with new content are listed below.

  • garbage collection
  • DEBUG
  • text
  • rooms
  • contents
  • New proc (client)
  • usr var (proc)
  • time2text proc

  The time2text() proc was actually introduced a couple months ago because in order to produce an HTTP header time values in the CGI library. If the hub library system had existed at that time, it would have been more sensical to use Deadron's library, but it didn't, so here it is as a built-in instruction. If you don't like the format, or you need more control over the calendar, Deadron's excellent library comes to the rescue.