298 Release Notes

You now have the option of making your logfiles persist between sessions. It's an option in the file popup. (Gughunter)
HTML logfiles also now correctly preserve the background canvas color.
On the icon and map editors, you can now use the SHIFT key in accordance with the "select" button to extend the selection rectangle. The CTRL key is not yet supported. (Mloren)
Small- and text-icon modes are now supported in the map editor. The mini-map doesn't currently support text-mode (since it doesn't seem too practical and it's a minor nuisance to implement), but we can add it in if people _really_ need it. (Spuzzum, Pmikell)
Fixed: Stats were still not always refreshing properly when new panels were added. (Pmikell)
Fixed: People would occassionally have over 9 million friends Live! We are starting to get quite a few users, but not that many just yet! (FireKING)
Fixed: The new garbage collector still had a few kinks that mostly just caused spurious output.
Fixed: In certain situations, browse() text was getting mangled. All text before the final '/' in the message was getting discarded, because it was being treated like a filename with the path part stripped off. This was happening when browse() output needed to be sequenced with calls to browse_rsc(), which was a recent bug fix as well. (Peter)
Fixed: file2text()/text2file() were not working with file() objects. You can also now write a file() object to a savefile. When you read it back in, however, it will not be a reference to an external file but to an entry in the resource cache. (Almost every file operation in DM can operate on an external file or a cached file with the same syntax.) You can always dump it from the cache using fcopy().
Optimized writing lists of objects in savefiles. Previously, this involved a lot of buffer open/close operations, but now it writes all the serial data first and queues up "out-of-buffer" data until the end. For large lists (such as big contents lists), this can make an enormous difference.
Added savefile.ExportText(path=cd,file). This converts the savefile to text and appends to the specified file. If no file is given, it simply returns a text string.
Objects written in existing savefiles will not be included in the text dump, because it doesn't currently support the old format. If that is a problem for anyone, let us know. You will be able to see almost all of the actual object data, but the reference to the object will be written as null.
Added savefile.ImportText(path=cd,text_or_file). This parses a text file (or string) in the same format generated by ExportText() and inserts the data into the savefile. With this pair of functions, you can do manual repairs to savefiles, and potentially all sorts of other useful things. The text file format is a lot like DM, with a few special procedures to handle such things as associative lists and embedded resource file data.
If you happen to look at one of these files, you will notice funny directory names such as ".0", ".1", and so on. Those are hidden directories created internally to store object data. An hand-generated file could, of course, use nicer looking names.
Example:
mob/verb/write() var/savefile/F = new() var/txtfile = file("players/[ckey].txt") F[ckey] << usr fdel(txtfile) F.ExportText("/",txtfile) usr << "Your savefile looks like this:"
```
   usr << "<xmp>[file2text(txtfile)]</xmp>"
```
mob/verb/read() var/savefile/F = new() var/txtfile = file("players/[ckey].txt") F.ImportText("/",txtfile) F[ckey] >> usr
loading maps with lots of objects into the map editor is much faster, thanks to a little base-52 arithmetic.
Direct references to verbs may now be written to a savefile. The "verbs" list is still considered to be a "tmp" var, so modifications to it are not saved. That may change in the future. (AbyssDragon)
All negative values for the drawing "layer" of overlays/underlays now behave like FLOAT_LAYER (-1), causing them to be in the same layer as the base object even if it changes layers at a later time. The added benefit of this is that the overlays are sorted internally so that -2 appears below -1 and so on. This would allow you to make certain types of overlays (armor) always appear above other types (clothes), no matter what their actual order in the overlay list.
Example:
Check out the reference for more information.
Updated a few reference entries, including:

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