299 Release Notes

• Fixed a crash that was happening at the end of procs in certain situations. (Gughunter)

• Fixed an old but rare bug in the byte-code generator. Just in case, recompile!

• Fixed a crash point in the handler for startup(), which is used to launch child worlds.

• Fixed a source of savefile corruption. Corrupt savefiles used to be opened in read-only mode, which usually just produces lots and lots of run-time errors. Now auto-recovery is attempted. The corrupt file is backed up and exported to a text file (which is also saved) and then this text is imported into a fresh file (with the same name as the original). Of course, there are no guarantees, but this may save quite a bit or even all of the data. If there are still problems (not corruption but just important values missing or something), you may need to examine the .txt file, make some manual repairs, and re-import. If too many attempts at auto-recovery are made without the corrupted backup files being removed, this process is skipped, on the assumption that something is horribly wrong. (All of this is explained in the log files when it happens.)

  No amount of corruption from the software itself is acceptable, and if there are any remaining sources, we will certainly make that a top priority to elliminate (one has been fixed in this release). However, certain events, such as a process getting killed or the machine going down, can still introduce unavoidable inconsistencies into a savefile, so this auto-recovery system will make things as robust as possible. Fortunately, we had real live corruption to test this feature on:( It worked pretty well, though:)

• Fixed a source of strange compiler error messages, having odd line numbers and really just an indication of some prior error. (Mloren)

• Fixed: #ifdef, #ifndef, and #undef were silently allowing syntax errors. (Gughunter)

• Fixed a few reference counting problems. There were some obscure ones in the savefile code, and there were some in relation to area.contents.

• Fixed: The 'del' key was sometimes causing unexpected behavior in the icon editor. (AbyssDragon)

• Fixed: Proc paths were being converted into numbers in the dmp parser. (AbyssDragon)

• Also removed the old client behavior of 'del' which was to clear the current command prompt. Use ESC or '/' instead. (LexyBitch)

• You can now define macros for just about any key (SHIFT and CTRL are the main exceptions, since they are necessary in the editor). The SPACE, BACKSPACE, and RETURN keys not only work now, but also don't require ALT to be used in normal fashion. Since those keys have signficance when there are commands on the command-line, they will only work on an empty command line, or when ALT is pressed. The other non-printable keys may be used without ALT at any time. Example: macro/spacebar set name = "Space" // keyword for the space key return "fire" // perhaps a mob verb to fire a gun Complete list of macro keywords for non-printable keys.

  Also recall that you can make printable keys work as macros without the ALT key by putting the user in "macro-mode", via:

  client/command_text = ".alt " And the user can escape back to the command-line to enter normal commands by using the '/' or ESC keys. This might be useful for arcade-like games where quick key access is critical.

• Fixed: Certain macros weren't working in conjunction with SHIFT. You may specify both uppercase and lowercase keys now (or, in the case of non-printable keys, normal and "shifted" keys). If only one version is specified the macro will work when the user presses the key with or without shift. If both are specified the appropriate macro will be executed depending on the shift state. (Spuzzum)

• Also, special characters in macro names (such as '[') may now be escaped as expected. If you need to do that, definitely put your script in its own .dms file, rather than assigning client/script to a text string, because in the text string, you would have to double escape it: client/script = "{ macro/Bracket set name = "\\\[" return "inventory armor" "}

• The mini-map now works (to some degree) in the map editor's text mode.