Recent News
Here are some really old news entries that never got migrated to the database.
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219 (NEWS 410) - Crashes
By Alara: I've been attempting to track down what's been causing the game to crash about once a week. So far it's been completely untraceable, due to logs telling me that 'it was the parent process. Oh no!' and the crash happening at very weird times of the day. Therefore, I've done a little digging into my backup scripts and have added some datestamp logging to a few key points in the process. Then reading through mush.cnf, I found a line that said that 'forking database dump doubles your memory usage. Do not use if you are low on memory.' I have no idea what my memory usage is on my little RPi, but I imagine it's not THAT big. Therefore I've turned off the forking, just to see if I can run for an extended period of time. This also means that once more, the game will freeze for a few seconds while we back up the database every twelve or so hours.
--Mon, 08 Oct 2018 08:17:04 MST
217 (NEWS 409) - HTTP
By Alara: Woo!!! 1.8.7 totally adds this HTTP thing, as well as a websocket (which I have yet to figure out). HTTP Handling is totally awesome! This is WAY better than my plan for a REST API via MySQL. By creating an "HTTPHandler" bot player who is assigned as such in the config, I can now code it with a bunch of GET/POST responses for someone viewing on a browser! For example, check out RIGHT NOW tfgmush.org:3349/who or tfgmush.org:3349/look?name=here and gasp in awe or something.
--Tue, 14 Aug 2018 17:43:05 MDT
216 (NEWS 408) - Social Networks
By Alara: The Social Network list in the +FINGER code should be fixed! For whatever reason it was giving up around Facebook or so, but all options should be back.
Additionally I added an easy Discord one in case you want to share your username for that.
I could stand to turn off a BUNCH of these though... They're so uncommon!
+HELP FINGER SOCIAL has all the details you should need.
--Thu, 14 Jun 2018 18:30:45 MDT
214 (NEWS 407) - Quick note on Ambiance
By Alara: I decided to also add on a fast little feature to ambiance: if you're idle for more than an hour, all these messages should halt until you're active once again.
We have players that remain logged in for days, and I imagine they'd appreciate coming back to see what's ACTUALLY been happening, rather than seeing days of ambiance messages filling client buffers.
--Thu, 07 Jun 2018 09:37:44 MDT
213 (NEWS 406) - Ambiance Update
By Alara: Quick note: you may have noticed for a long time that periodically (anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes) you'd get blank lines interspersed with maybe ambience messages (I'm not talking about the keepalive characters in Blowtorch). I looked over the ambiance object just now and found a way to significantly simplify its code. Hopefully these problems will be fixed! Let me know if they're still appearing though.
--Mon, 04 Jun 2018 13:07:34 MDT
212 (NEWS 405) - Spring Solstice
By Alara: It's the vernal equinox today, and Jadesaber suggested we do a little celebration with it! It's a bit of a spur of the moment thing, and I don't know what all we can throw together at the last minute, but if you want to hang out, I'll see if we can start something around 7pm MDT tonight!
--Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:17:15 MDT
211 (NEWS 404) - News Update
By Alara: I've updated the News Printer to announce, not via @pemit to everyone alive, but rather on the Public channel when a new article has been posted. Hopefully this particular post was visible when that happened!
--Wed, 14 Mar 2018 12:38:45 MDT
210 (NEWS 403) - Features, Fixes and Fun
By Alara: I've fixed up a bunch of things, thanks to Alexander who has been unintentionally playtesting a lot of my lesser-used systems! Let me see if I can remember all I've done in the past few days.
- Dreamcasting no longer sends @mail to the sleeping/away player unless they are offline. You can now dreamcast to offline players.
- +FINGER/ no longer shows the "That player does not exist." message due to double command matching.
- &SOC_ now uses &SOC` to clean up a player's examine. Similarly, FINGER_now uses &FINGER` .
- +FINGER has been massively cleaned up in the code so that I can add or fix things easier.
- +FINGER now takes new keywords after the player name:
+FINGERRP shows only roleplay and general IC information.
+FINGERSOCIAL displays a character's social networks (SOC`*).
+FINGERTOPICS displays the subtopics set on the character (FINGER`*).
Take a look at +HELP FINGER which has been updated accordingly.
- With the creation of our newest player, Nysh'ala, we've confirmed that non-alphabetic character names do work. However, there may be unforseen issues with this. Submit a bug if anything is discovered!
- I'm slowly working on migrating Merc's +HELP to a homemade SQL system. Progress is slow, and the system is not ready for release yet, but stay tuned as it's looking nice so far!
- All rooms now belong to a zone, including spaceships and other planets. YELL is broken as of yet, but I should be able to fix that relatively easily.
- Superzones such as other planets, extraplanar areas, a far-away island, etc. will now take priority over where you are teleported to after a death cooldown. In short, if you die too far from your HOME, you will be teleported to a base room for the area in which you died. This is more for convenience (a friend flew you to Megadon in his own ship, and so arriving back in your bed after having died, you have no way of getting back there on your own) than it is for RPG/QUEST cheat prevention. Because we don't really have many quests, and RPG fighting is unheard of.
There may be more I've missed, but this is the most I can think of for the moment. If any problems arise, do let me know!
Take care.
-Alara
--Wed, 14 Mar 2018 11:13:17 MDT
209 (NEWS 402) - Predefined Emotes
By Alara: And that wraps it up! Pre-defined emotes have been completely reworked, including gender-specific ones. Note that the +HELP files have not changed much, but for staff, AHELP EMOTES is added which mirrors the HELP attribute on the emotion machine.
If any problems are found, pleeeeeease bug them! These could be simple things like me overlooking automatic adverbs (which I discovered yet one more while going through the old formats), or blank lines in which I case I missed one or two attributes. Also if you want more, they're much easier to create now, so send in your ideas!
--Tue, 13 Feb 2018 18:24:04 MST
208 (NEWS 401) - Possession and Pre-defined Emotes
By Alara: I've gone and done a super awesome, super streamlined thing!! The Sluagh race has been given the "Possess" skill! This means that while in the same room with some thing that is able to be possessed, you can POSSESS. From this point on, you will be set as dark, but instead of Someone doing all the things that are audible in your location, it will look like the thing you are possessing is acting.
This applies to all communications specific to room-wide audible actions like SAY, EMOTE, HISS, ASK, EXCLAIM. I am also working on updating pre-defined emotes to handle possessed things as well, but since I have coded each of these separately from one another, I feel it's now time to streamline them into a single command or set of commands.
Here is a list of specific examples (using 'a creepy bunny man' as the target of our possession):
- SAY Hello: 'A creepy bunny man says, "Hello."'
- EMOTE grins creepily: 'A creepy bunny man grins creepily.'
TICKLE: 'A creepy bunny man wiggles his fingers threateningly.'
- TICKLE Alara: 'A creepy bunny man tickles you mercilessly!'
Additionally!! This rewrite of the pre-defined emotes now means that you can use emotes on things:
TICKLE MAN: 'Alara tickles a creepy bunny man mercilessly!'
There are a FEW weirdnesses and things people might find odd:
1. You will no longer be able to target yourself with a pre-defined emote. Trying to will revert to the untargetted version.
2. If you are possessing something and it in turn uses a targeted emote on you, it will work, but you will see yourself acting on yourself, and then the thing acting against you.
3. You must be in the same location as the object you are possessing. Moving to somewhere else will revert to the typical dark-mode commucation where your name will be substituted with 'Someone.'
A few other things of note: UNPOSSESS/RELEASE clears the possession of the thing, and unhides you in the room. Also logging out (and maybe dying in the future) will force you to UNPOSSESS.
--Mon, 12 Feb 2018 15:38:34 MST