Recent News

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

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

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

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

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:
+FINGER RP shows only roleplay and general IC information.
+FINGER SOCIAL displays a character's social networks (SOC`*).
+FINGER TOPICS 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

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

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

By Alara: Okay, so ignoring all previous news posts, I've gone and fixed up the Discord Server I administrate to handle a webhook from IFTTT which reads the rss feed on a regular basis! And then in drops THIS POST in one of the channels. So coooooool.

In addition, I worked through a few bugs I was finding in regards to the wikiLinker, and a few PHP errors regarding the news stuff. Hopefully the majority of these issues has been fixed.

Later!
-Alara
--Mon, 22 Jan 2018 17:50:27 MST

By Alara: Because this has been Jadesaber and I all week long!
--Thu, 04 Jan 2018 10:30:24 MST

By Alara: Thanks to Adamros for kicking me into a short spurt of inspiration. Last weekend I sat nearly all of Saturday working on a recipe for roasting marshmallows with him as the test subject. In short, any sort of campfire item (something @parented to #9135) will allow any sort of "bag of marshmallows" (cloned from/parented to #9134) sitting beside it to work. These items plus ROAST MARSHMALLOW and EAT MARSHMALLOW are all you need to enjoy a shot of jet-puffed deliciousness.

In addition, you'll find the area of the forest just north of the Great Tree to be a bit more connected and a bit less "rectangular." In one of the empty areas, I've cleared an area where you can gather with fellow forest folk to enjoy a nightly bonfire (armed with marshmallows, of course). I also have plans to open up a few campsites in the same clearing to set up tents and the like. I plan to talk with Jimmy and see if he'll be up for stocking all items necessary for camping excursions.
--Sun, 12 Nov 2017 19:56:32 MST