Recent News

By Alara: I've added a new thing flag, wearable. This is to finally renew the 2014 "clothing system" which is still a work in progress, but will be a second option alongside the wardrobe.

Currently my thinking is to run the two in tandem. You may use one system or the other. But both may cause inconsistency. And the clothing system will, at present, try to replicate the Iron Realms system very closely, with actual items to wear, a clothes line in a player description, and clothing slots and layers for hiding. The player appearance will be stored differently. Possibly reverting to a wardrobe DESC_CURRENT or manual description minus clothing (more of an RP rule, not a coded thing).
--Fri, 11 Oct 2024 23:29:53 GMT

By Alara: ChatGPT in the Fairy Garden!! I found a really cool tutorial on how to accomplish from disloops.com! And in doing so I've recreated the author's "Oracle" mob. She resides down by the base of the Great Tree and will respond to says that start with 'to oracle!' Just ask her anything or state anything to her, and she will try to answer!

Example:
> say to oracle Hello, Oracle!
< The Oracle of Auramyth inclines her gracefully in acknowledgement. "Greetings! What knowledge do you seek from the whispers of fate?"

You can also ask her questions or requests:
> say to oracle Can you tell me how to get to the great tree?
< The Oracle of Auramyth closes her eyes, as if listening to the whispers of the wind. "To find the Great Tree, follow the path where moonlight kisses the earth. Hearken to the voice of the stream that sings of ages past. When the shadows lean toward the rising sun, you shall see its majestic boughs reaching to touch the heavens."

Note - As of right now, there is no historical, ongoing conversation. Only the initial system message is sent before your statement or question. Conversation history will be added in the near future, though, and as the original author from disloops desgined, my implementation will also delete history older than 2 hours (possibly configurable), and will have a maximum token limit. But that's for later!
--Fri, 11 Oct 2024 23:24:20 GMT

By Alara: Ooh hey! Reactions are real! What is this, you ask? Simply put, you've been able to target mobs and other things in pre-defined emotes for some time, but they never did anything. Now, if they're set up correctly, the mob you emote against may respond with a reaction!!

For the technically minded (or if you created a mob yourself that needed to have reactions):
- The THING object needs to be @parented to #4376 (the thing ancestor).
- Set your object as MONITOR and LISTEN_PARENT.
- Simply add <emote>`TSP and <emote>`TTP attributes to your object for second person and third person. Use %0 and %1 for object and the target, respectively!

For example:
@set Dog=MONITOR
@set Dog=LISTEN_PARENT
@parent Dog=#4376
&PET`TSP Dog=[capstr(name(%0))] pants and wags its tail happily and barks at you!
&PET`TTP Dog=[capstr(name(%0))] pants and wags its tail happily and barks at [name(%1)]!
--Wed, 09 Oct 2024 23:58:25 GMT

By Alara: If you have an excessively long room description (much like the example I discovered today and duplicated in #10349), the attribute buffer length may fill before you can finish it. I've doubled the capacity by adding another DESC_DAY2/DESC_NIGHT2 attribute parsed in the default room description on the room parent. You will need to add your own delimiter character (usually %b, but %r may work too).
--Thu, 25 May 2023 18:16:16 MDT

By Alara: Gold coins are boring. All hail the new "Alarans!"
--Mon, 31 Oct 2022 17:03:01 MDT

By Alara: Instead of rounding down to 'Last seen over a month ago', +finger now calculates the years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds it's been since someone was last logged on. This takes care of people like, say, Daniko and Sevilla and Loreen!
--Fri, 02 Sep 2022 15:16:30 MDT

By Alara: LOG is now a thing! See the last 20 connections from people.

Additionally we are updated to 1.8.8p0, Commit 152acc58d59765dcb93555a65b80d5fdb7592326
--Tue, 09 Aug 2022 11:56:59 MDT

I discovered the MediaWiki namespace (i.e. the System Messages) It lets me customize all sorts of default messages in the wiki area, and I find that to be extraordinarily fun and exciting to play with.
--Mon, 07 Feb 2022 17:46:39 MST

By Alara: New command! +VOTE will display a list of URLs to head out to listing sites for voting purposes which increases visibility of the MUD in general! No remuneration can be given for clicking these, and they're limited to once every 24 hours per IP address.

Additionally, I found that pasting the actual vote links was, in some cases, very spammy and glitchy, and have therefore updated a long-overdue project - the TFG URL Shortener!

https://tfgmush.org/url/ contains a list of shortlinks that can be shared around and will redirect out to the long URLs that they represent.

Currently there is no way to add to this list except through the back-end, so they will be limited to game-specific links to places. I know the M*U*S*H devs made one that can generate a new link in-game for the purposes of URL blacklisting and spam prevention when initiated from a +channel messages, but for now ours will be really bare-bones.

That's it for now!
-Alara
--Fri, 21 Jan 2022 10:49:51 MST

By Alara: Goodness, it's been a while since I wrote anything here. In the past three months, there have been some nice, big changes!

- We are now running on a NAS that I bought myself for Christmas! At long last, it's a machine that can actually handle some higher power stuff and isn't so old that it's half broken all the time anyway! In other words, we've graduated through the following stages of hosting:
- My Windows laptop
- A headless Ubuntu server on a dinosaur desktop
- A Raspberry Pi
- A brand-spanking new NAS

Granted, this is running as a virtual machine, but uses the NAS built-in backup tools to keep 4 weeks of snapshots. Plus the scheduled tasks built into the interface allow me to update indb from outdb easily instead of double-checking crontab or something like that.

I am also running a few more big applications on this computer, including Plex, MariaDB for the website, home-hosted Minecraft (it's a backup of my usual server that I run from work), and a couple other things. So with that said, periodic reboots are more likely, meaning weeks of idling will be interrupted more.

Next topic!!
I've been getting a ton of spam connect/disconnect attempts from some subnet in Russia. This has been going on for months. Therefore, behind the scenes, I've built in an additional Pueblo string on connect events to quickly ban an IP. If for some reason I've mistakenly banned your IP, even the connect attempt to the MUSH port will be immediately rejected. Contact me if you have issues and legitimately want to log in and play!

That's all for now.
-Alara
--Thu, 25 Mar 2021 16:58:45 MDT