318 Release Notes

• Fixed: The DME was sometimes storing invalid world/hub assignments. (Cinnom)

• Fixed: world.Topic() was not receiving a correct address when the target world was running inside of the host server. The "key" parameter also suffers from the same problem and could now be easily fixed, but we are going to phase out the use of that parameter. An identification password should be included in the query paramters instead of relying on world.key authentication. (Ebonshadow)

• Fixed: sleep(X) where X<world.tick_lag was rounding X down to 0, which caused uncontrolled speed under the new timing system. (WizDragon)

• Fixed: The last patch had numerous problems with timer backlogs.

• Old dmbs (<317) will now default sleep == sleep(1), for backwards compatibility, but new dmbs will use sleep == sleep(0). Keep this in mind when recompiling old worlds that may depend on specific delays in sleep. Most of the time it shouldn't matter, but this has caused some problems in certain games (like Tanks .. sorry SD!)

• Added atom/var/pixel_x and pixel_y. The pixel offsets are normally 0,0 and may range anywhere from -32 to 32. (You can get away with larger offsets, but they are not guaranteed to work when the object's grid location goes off the edge of the screen.) These may be used to displace an object from its natural position in the display grid. This even applies to overlays and images, so visual effects associated with an object may now extend beyond the bounds of the object's own icon. In many cases, shifting the pixel offset of an object may be much more efficient than accomplishing a similar effect with icon arithmetic.

  Screen objects have their own independent system of pixel offsets, consistent with the independence between map location and screen location. You specify a pixel offset using this format: screen_loc = "X:pixel_x,Y:pixel_y".

  Pixel offsets are a display feature only. They do not affect any of the range calculations in the view() algorithms or anything like that.

• Added atom/movable/var/pixel_step_size and client/var/pixel_step_size. These control the step size used when animating movement of objects on the map and when scrolling the map. The default value of 0 calls for automated adjustment of these settings, which generally results in a minimum step size of 4, which scales up based on movement history. Be careful using very small step sizes, because icons with a lot of high-contrast pixels look bad when sliding around.

  The missile() instruction also pays attention to pixel_step_size. The default, in this case is 32.

• Added more control over the method of movement animation. You can assign any of the following values to atom/movable/var/animate_movement: NO_STEPS 0 FORWARD_STEPS 1 //default SLIDE_STEPS 2 //allow object to move and face different directions SYNC_STEPS 3 //move as though rigidly attached to another object Synchronized mode is intended to force identical motion of objects that move on the grid in unison. You should have at least one object in the conglomerate without SYNC_STEPS set; that object will serve as the leader of the others when determining movement speed.