303/304 Release Notes

• Fixed: num2text() was crashing on very very high precisions (like 10000).

• Fixed: The suffix and icon were not getting correctly updated in the stat panel when changing a stat value from an object to text or a number. (FIREking)

• Fixed: The stat panels weren't always wrapping text properly. (ShadowDarke) Also, tab stops ("\t") may now be used in stat panels, allowing you to make your own primative columns until we add full grid support.

• Fixed: When an object gets deleted in the split second between a player executing one of the object's verbs and the server carrying out this command, the operation is now silently aborted rather than trying to execute the verb and inevitably having it crash with runtime errors. (Shadowdarke)

• Fixed: Worlds hosted but unadvertised on the hub were becoming visible after calling world.Reboot(). (Leftley)

• Fixed: Nested #ifdef statements were not working properly. (AirMapster)

• Fixed: Mob prototypes with hard-coded keys get automatically instantiated when the user with that key connects. In this case in was unintended that mob.Login() get called before mob.New(). (AirMapster)

• Fixed: There was a bug in the DS garbage collector that was causing occasional complaints from the server about invalid "appearance" requests. This was introduced a month or two ago.

• Improved the DS garbage collector in hopes of avoiding degredation of performance as the game proceeds. This may affect the loading time for the right-click popup menus. We'll see. (Skysaw).

• Fixed: there was a bug in lifetime subscription checking in client.CheckPassport(). (Deadron)

• Fixed: found a potential crash during world.Reboot(). This was also causing occasional failure to re-certify the identities of the users when they reconnected.

• Fixed: mob.group was no longer working as of a few releases ago. (Ebonshadow)

• Fixed: an infinite loop in the savefile code was happening when the server ran out of resources during a save.

• Fixed: a garbage collection bug was causing stat panel names to get leaked in certain situations. Also fixed yet another garbage collection problem in world.Reboot().

• Fixed: a networking glitch was sucking lots of cpu when people disconnected at certain inopportune times. (Skysaw)

• Fixed: Turf type paths were getting nulled out when used as the arguments to verbs. (FIREking)

• Fixed: The code editor was sometimes running out of memory when doing search operations over large numbers of files.

• Fixed: The movie editor's context menus were causing weird graphical errors and crashes. (FIREKing)

• Fixed: Map operations on large regions were sometimes freezing up due to an inefficient loop.

• You can now use the right-mouse button on the mini-map to select regions and use the context menu to operate on them, just like you can on the regular map.

• html_encode() now not only forces html characters to be displayed literally but strips out text macros such as "\red". This makes html_encode() useful in cases where you do not want players to be inserting special formatting commands in their text. Note that the macros are _removed_ rather than merely escaped. Calling html_decode(html_encode()) will give you back the original html text minus any text formatting macros. This is intentional, because it is not desirable for html_encode() to escape non-html text such as the '\' character. The macros "\\", "\<", "\>", "\n", "\t", and "\"", all have the expected behavior of producing a literal character, even after being passed through html_encode().

  In general, the old-style formatting macros such as "\red" are no longer preferred. All new code (but more likely all new programmers) should use the HTML syntax, since it simplifies matters to just have the one syntax for formatting text. (Zilal)

• The compiler now warns you if you do this: var/lst[0] = list(1,2,3) because you are specifying two different initializations of the list. Previously, this initialization to an empty list of length 0 (or whatever length you specify) was happening after the other one, which was never what you wanted. It now does what you want but warns you about the ambiguity. (Gughunter)

• Resource files (such as icons and sounds) are now batch processed when possible. This produces less network overhead and provides a more meaningful indication of the waiting time to the user. Even better: the batches are compressed. The intent is to expediate the transmission of resources when the user first connects. In the old system this process could be both slow and confusing, causing the user to often logout before even witnessing the world.

  The batching algorithm may need to be fine-tuned after we get some feedback about how well it performs in various situations. It is still smart as far as automatically filtering out resources that the client does not need (like not transfering sounds if DS sound is configured to be off). The client.preload_rsc variable is still respected as well.

  As a side-effect of these changes, it is also possible to force a specific resource to be loaded by the client. This might be useful if you do not have client.preload_rsc turned on but you need to make sure certain resources are pre-loaded in a given situation. Currently, this involves sending a query to the client each time it is called (no batching or server-side memory), so just keep that in mind. Example:

  mob/verb/test() usr.client.Export("##action=load_rsc",'whaap.wav') usr << "Whhhhaaaap!" usr << 'whaap.wav' If this turns out to be a common need, we'll probably add a convenience function for the purpose, (and it would take multiple files rather than just one). Many other client.Export() actions are handled through convenience functions (such as browse(), browse_rsc(), ftp(), and so on). Hopefully this won't be the case, though, because that would circumvent the ease of use that the automatic system provides.