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ACKMapper, Clan Storage, Make and more! End of Month update recap!

Nearing the end of May, its been a big month for those of us on the development staff.  Myself and Kimadi have been working hard to eliminate bugs and lessen crashes.  Most all crashes from the mud have been due to faulty pointer handling left over from the original SMAUG base or as a result of a piece of code someone added at a later time who didn't fully understand the correct way to do it.  But, whatever the reason, we do monitor many things and are constantly making changes and fixes to the system to prevent crashes from happening.  In addition to preventing crashes we work on adding features, restoring features, and fixing features.  And much has happened in the month of May.
  1. A bug fix with color codes in the editor buffer
  2. Auto-wrapping lines and auto-formatting text (/f) in editor buffer didn't always produce the same result, so that has been fixed.
  3. Clan objects had a memory leak when being loaded that was fixed.  This didn't really cause problems on the mud since up to this point clan object didn't work because of a flaw in the way SMAUG coded the loading order for areas and clans.
  4. Fixed some over-read errors and modified the code to be more 64bit friendly.
  5. Fixed an issue where if you had two different tiers of advanced grapples (borderland combat, seanchan combat, aiel combat or wolfkin) they would conflict with each other.  Also fixed grapple selection to make the choice more random than it was when it picked a grapple you didn't know.
  6. Restored the Pager!  A long de-activated feature that had originally been turned off because a buffer overflow was corrupting pager data and causing crashes, but that overflow has been long since fixed and so the pager came back.
  7. Added a new config, due to popular demand, to enable/disable capitalization of the first letter and adding a period if no punctuation is at the end of a sentence when you use say or osay.
  8. All weapons in the entire mud were updated to bring balance to the force.
  9. Form speed has also been adjusted taking weapon weight into consideration in the name of bringing balance to the force.
  10. wforge was adjusted to make player weapons more sought after than NPC weapons and also bringing them into alignment with the new system.
  11. Rewrote the mud rebooter code.  When typing time it displays a next reboot date/time but nothing ever happened.  We've had times where its been over a month past that time since the last reboot.  The existing auto-reboot code didn't work at all so a complete replacement was written.
  12. Fixed a crash from e-mail addresses being freed when they shouldn't be.
  13. Clan Store Rooms repaired!  Clan Store Rooms are rooms where people can drop items and those items will stay in that room until someone takes the item.  Even across reboots and crashes.  The original code would load clans before it loaded areas so that when mobs were loaded the mobs could have loyalties.  But the clan loading function would check to see if storerooms existed before the areas were loaded (obviously they couldn't exist if they haven't been loaded yet) so never worked.  I broke the clan loading into 2 stages, first loads the clan, then allows the areas to load then goes back through the clans and loads their store rooms.
  14. ACKMapper was ported from a FUSS (Fixed Up SMAUG Source) snippet.  Along with that config +/- automap was added.  If you turn it on your room description is now processed by the ackmapper code.
  15. Added the map command to view a larger map of the area than the automapper shows.
  16. Fixed the "make" command.  This will allow guild leaders, like the Amyrlin Seat and Mistress of Novices (1st and 2nd) to create things like golden serpent rings, white novice dresses, shawls for ajahs etc without needing an imm.
As you can see a lot of things have changed, those of you who are just logging in for the first time, welcome, those of you who have been here for a while, enjoy the updates.
-Vandread