Recent News

By Alara: Yes, it's been a while. Yes we are moved! The Fairy Garden is back up and running mostly full-time! I had the game go down a couple days ago, which I only just a little while ago discovered, so I need to figure out what's causing that and hopefully remedy it, but we are indeed back up and running on the Pi!

In addition, please welcome Rajabelle back from her long hiatus! It's been a very long time since I saw her and it was a delight to be able to catch up and chat yesterday.

Also, I've been working on lots of new things including random butterflies which are very awesome, a multiple name match search tool that WORKS FINALLY (hoping to eliminate the 'I don't know which one you mean!' message), and a few other things. Fun times for all!!

-Alara
--Wed, 18 May 2016 23:15:36 MDT

By Alara: Morning, all! Just FYI, the server has been down since the weekend. Unfortunately this is a nice hardware issue. The server machine we've been running on for the past few years (a 2009 HP-DC7600 has been giving me numerous disk errors and periodic reboots have prompted processes that will hang the computer until I look at it days later.

As a result, I've decided to simply retire it and migrate everything to a nice, simple (and quieter) Raspberry Pi. Everything will continue running there, at least until I can afford a nice big server to replace the old one. Latency due to slow hardware (it IS a $35 computer, after all) may be present, but I'll try to keep everything lightweight to reduce background processor load.

Also, the online state of the server may be sporadic for a while as I optimize and update, particularly with importing the website and removing the Raspbian desktop interface (didn't realize full Raspbian included the GUI which I hate). Online state may also be affected by the physical move of the server to new ISP in a couple weeks.

Thankfully the old server files are still accessible, so I'll be able to import Apache website settings and such.

Thank you for your patience!
--Wed, 30 Mar 2016 10:42:38 MDT

By Alara: Wow! And here I was going to try and hack it into the hardcode myself in my spare time. But guess what? THEY ADDED GMCP SUPPORT!!

I'm very excited about this. I was talking with Jadesaber just last night (before discovering that GMCP is now a thing for PennMUSH), and thinking about the maybe-spammy sunrise, sunset, moon phase and clock quarter-day tick messages. I know if I were to idle without the SILENCE flag, I'd become quite annoyed at all the text scrolling by. That's why SILENCE was invented, after all!

But my idea was to see about adding GMCP support so that I could send messages to the client, but automatically keep them from printing to the console. I mean, that's what the protocol is for after all. Well guess what? While searching for the sources to MSSP-REQUEST (which uses a similar Telnet option), there it was in all its glory. GMCP. Already implemented.

Thank you PennMUSH devs!! You guys are awesome!
--Tue, 01 Mar 2016 22:12:51 MST

By Alara: In the past 2-3 weeks I've been working steadily to upgrading the RSS feed as well as updating the News page on the website. Running the RSS feed through Google's RSS Validator tool flagged a TON of invalid items (as Feedburner was not updating for a long time). Some major upgrades as well as changes required or recommended by Feedburner are as follows:

- Feed is now dynamically generated via PHP. New feed URL is at https://tfgmush.org/db/feed.php.
- Feed now references ATOM libraries.
- managingEditor and webMaster tags now give my name in addition to my email, something Feedburner requires.
- A number of feed items did not contain properly formatted pubDates when I was fiddling 2 years ago.
- Some item descriptions had invalid binary characters which were blocking EVERYTHING.
- Item GUIDs were not actually unique. All RSS tutorials say if you make GUIDs equal to the URL to a single news post it should work. Right now, I don't 100% trust it, so I've created an in-game function "guid()" to generate a standard 128-bit GUID for this SQL field.
- The link tag no longer relies on the SQL link field for each post, since URLs and such are changing as I develop. The Link tag is now dynamically generated and routes users to the single news post page for that entry.
- I am thinking I'll simply set the GUID tag to the same string as the link tag. The IDs in the SQL table SHOULD be unique, so it should work.
- I am also planning on possibly putting the UNIX timestamp into the pubDate field in the SQL document, then translating it in PHP whenever the RSS feed is generated.
--Wed, 24 Feb 2016 17:56:22 MST

By Alara: Just a quick note: Wanderers now checked for regularly @locked exits (without doors) to pass or fail choosing a random exit to walk through. This will let me complete the Christmas Box idea by setting a custom lock on the out door.
--Sun, 03 Jan 2016 16:44:03 MST

By Alara: Hello all! It's been a while!

This holiday season I've made some significant updates to a few of the systems, specifically those pertaining to the old Holiday Boxes and wanderers.

Firstly, the "Christmas Box" as it was called, is no longer some little object that I hide away way up in wizard-land where I push a button every Dec. 1st and out pops everything. No! Rather, this all should happen semi-automatically now! To release all the creatures I will still have to push a button (i.e. open a door and let them out), but the festive snow-cover you see in the forests and central plains will now occur immediately on the 1st of every December, and dissipate on the 1st of January!

Secondly, on a more technical side, wandering creatures will now respect closed doors a little nicer. Instead of just butting their heads against one non-stop, if one is closed, they'll simply glance at it every so often.

Also creatures will reset to their respective homes during the midnight hour of every day. Note - this does mean that a creature may just sit in one room and do nothing for an entire hour, but at least they won't get lost for very long now. Unless they end up FIXED for some reason.
--Sun, 27 Dec 2015 18:22:57 MST

By Alara: I've reinstantiated the Winamp bot to notify me when someone logs in and requests a new character! Finally, after migrating to Ubuntu, I can be notified and no longer blind to new character requests for weeks after they're made (yes, I could log in regularly, and probably should, but I haven't for a while...).
--Sat, 29 Nov 2014 09:27:22 MST

By Alara: This is just a quick test to make sure SQL is still working...
--Mon, 22 Sep 2014 08:40:28 MDT

By Alara: One more issue I need to fix: new news posts are not corretly being added to the SQL database. This should be fixed. And I'll see about updating the ServerStat widget on the website as well. Maybe make it work via SQL as well. That would be awesome if it worked!

Written by: Alara on Monday, April 21, 2014 at 09:45AM MDT
--Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: Another issue I've been having: Winamp doesn't seem to want to work at the moment. For whatever reason, Ubuntu 12 dislikes any version of Ruby above 1.8.whatever, and given that I was using some of the Ruby 1.9.2+ gems, I'm going to have to find some time to sit down and debug it.

Written by: Alara on Monday, April 21, 2014 at 09:41AM MDT
--Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST