12 July 06
As I suspected, someone has flown into a
tizzy over my
revocation
of GPL. Their rant is
a perfect example of the sort of vitriol that
made me choose to do that in the first place.
Have a look at the discussion
here.
The 2.1 release is going a little slower than
I expected. I've gotten a case of the "perfects",
and I keep going over and over things to make
sure it's all ok.
We're still on track for "sometime this week."
UPDATE:
W00t! I can't tell you how relieved
I am to be done. Dead Souls 2.1 is now available
for download from the front page.
If you find bugs, please tell me about it, but
also expect a slower schedule for the release of
patches. I need a break.
Patches to upgrade to 2.1 will be available
later today or tomorrow, as will be diffs.
11 July 06
I've disposed of all the items in the todo
list of July 7. There is nothing wrong with
the stargate. The example file has been renamed
to avoid confusion, and to avoid it accidentally
going live on the stargate network.
I've killed the bugs found by the playtesters
in the past few days, and unless something major
happens, Dead Souls 2.1 will be released this week.
10 July 06
Things are going just great. At this point,
the number and type of bug report coming in is
such that I'm running out of things to do. I
need playtesters, so please, if you get a chance,
log into
rugose.com 6666 and
beat on that mud.
Let me know what bugs you find. Thanks!
Oh, by the way,
2.0r29 is out.
We're getting
closer and closer to
2.1!
W00t!
07 July 06
A really surprising thing happened today. I
decided to reorganize my .plan file and remove
anything that wasn't either an important feature
enhancement or a bugfix. I wanted to know *exactly*
how close I am to releasing Dead Souls 2.1.
After slogging through and tearing out pages
of wishlists and maybes, this is what was left:
- fix /obj/stargate
- update colors with %%^^ data
- verbify force
- can't delete glass case?
- are people defaulting to the start room?
- sell machine to cat
- make an npc's living body go away BEFORE the corpse is moved into the
room
- make channels understand ) after : can have non emote messages after
- SetMaxHealth shouldn't need to be in init()
- help area
- help newbie
- apostrophes
- add damage types to dummy
- intergossip logging to two files?
- review setinventory, is addstuff necessary?
- Beggar says in English, "Hi, A mangy little rat."
- shop in the town is confusing the maglite with the cheap one.
- If a piece of gear is set for a "left foot" attribute, why can I also
wear it on my right foot?
- the handbook says that its easier to kill things as a mage,
- bug: cp sefun.c /
- delete mfinger
- SetEmptyName(), SetEmptyLong() and SetEmptyShort().
- install faq: if compile problems, try as root, try non 64bit amd
- wipe the unused tc's
That's it. Now compare the size of this list with
the size of stuff in the
release
notes. That's how close
I am. I was shocked.
So folks, I need your help. Any bugs that have been
bothering you but you haven't gotten around to telling me,
this is the time. If you feel like knocking about the code
trying to break stuff, please log into the demo mud
at
rugose.com 6666 and have at
it.
It's ok that you'll make the list longer. That's
what I *want*. I want to get these bufixes as over with
as possible.
06 July 06
more update news:
I overlooked a couple of important things when
I released 2.0r27. They have been addressed in
2.0r28.
There may be a compat buster here. One of the
things that needed fixing was a peculiar bug that
would generate extra corpses under unusual circumstances,
during combat. This bug had some relationship to
another combat bug that prevented the accurate
recording of a player's deaths.
In the end, the fixes for these two involved the
manipulation of persistent player variables. The
good news is that things now seem to work just fine,
and the bugs are seemingly gone.
The bad news is that since new player variables
are involved, you may find that test chars created
before an upgrade to r28 do weird things in combat...
like not fight.
The fix is to create new test chars.
If Dead Souls was widespread enough that that
there were muds out there that were open, with players,
I'd look into some sort of system for updating
older player files. Since this is not the case,
I expect that people will be able to tolerate this
minor inconvenience with minimal discomfort.
05 July 2006
router news:
The gjs router has been down for a week now, and
we may see some refugee muds start to make their
home on our router, yatmim (which by the way, stands
for Yet Another TMI Mud, which is how the router
started out. It's a DS mud now.) Yatmim is public and
so all are welcome, but there are some rules folks
need to abide by. The point of yatmim was to have
a reliable router for DS muds, but also one where
new people wouldn't be afraid to ask for help.
Please see the new
router rules page
for more info.
update news:
Version 2.0r27 is out. I'm ever grateful to the
folks who find problems and report them...without
their help Dead Souls would take much longer to
get where it's going. Thanks, guys.
It probably still has a bug or two, specifically in
message boards. As usual, hotfixes will be posted
on the
hotfix page. As
usual, please let me know what
bugs you find.
One of the new features in r27 is that the install
process will now work on Wolfpaw servers, so you folks
staying away because you couldn't get it to work, come
on in. The water's fine. Just be sure to run
make -j 1
instead of just
make.
For those uncomfortable with frequent patching,
please be aware that it isn't absolutely necessary.
See the
patch
article for more details.
Note that for those unwilling to follow the
standard patch procedure, diffs are being made
available
here.
LPUni news:
Tacitus has made some improvements to the front page.
Let's hope he keeps that up and fleshes out the rough
draft we see today.
He has also set up a "mud farm", with various LP
lib flavors running. Take a look in particular at the
Dead Souls 1.1 mud he's hosting. It should be interesting
to see how different it is from DS2. The address is:
lpuni.org 6501
Sourceforge news:
In case you haven't noticed, I'm relying less
and less on Sourceforge. They're great and everything,
but lately they've been down a lot, and it made me
realize I'm depending on them for stuff I can do
myself. The download stats are totally misleading,
and all their fancy project management stuff is just
a waste on me.
So you can pretty much figure on releases and
patches showing up here first and more often than
on Sourceforge.
23 June 2006
I've been frustrated for some time with the way
the LPUniversity site seems almost intentionally
designed to be confusing and inscrutable to newbie
mudders. For example, if I didn't happen to know
the site is supposed to be an LPC mud resource, the
front page wouldn't be much help in informing me.
So I bought a domain with the single purpose
of clarifying things. It's a shame I had to take it
upon myself, but you know what they say about things
done right.
The
lpmuds.net site
is intended to be a simple,
easy-to-read description of LP muds. What they are,
where you can get some, and where you can go to
talk about them. None of this fancy calendaring,
plenipotentiary council executive meetings, soup for
the needy, whatever.
It's just a web site with information that I
hope is useful.
If you have any suggestions or requests about
what the site should have, please let me know.
On another note, please be aware that Dead Souls
is no longer GPL. For more information, please see
this
article.
Saquivor has found a neat
creation GUI that he's
adapting for DS use. Keep an eye on the
downloads page
for a DS template. It should be available soon.
18 June 2006
The
2.0r26
patch is out. Anyone under that rev is
subject to having their mud compromised by any creator
at any time. Please upgrade
NOW if
you haven't already
done so.
As to the issue of Tacitus, please see
this link.
16 June 2006
As usual, good news and bad news. The good news
first. Tacitus
helped discover a serious security flaw in Dead Souls. Woot!
Congratulations to him for being clever, and thanks for
helping secure DS.
The bad news is that all versions of DS are
affected, so
you should lock your DS muds (using admintool) and avoid
promoting anyone to a Creator position until the patch
is in place. Hopefully I'll be able to cook something up
this evening.
The other bad news is that I found Tacitus trying
to delete log files on the dev Dead Souls mud. I think I
was fortunate that he missed a couple of details in rooting
me, so he failed. However, until I can account for every
free inode with recovery software, the dev mud will
be locked also. Sadface.
For some reason, he also chose to go online and
announce
the details of the flaw without giving me a chance to
address it. This means you are rather exposed, so please
make sure to only allow
very
trusted people to Creator postions.
13 June 2006
The
I3
router box suffered a storage subsystem failure:
around 8pm the fiber array crapped out and took down the raid volume
the I3 router mud was on. As of 9:20 I3 is back up.
09 June 2006
ROXOR. I discussed with Marius the MudOS bundling
question.
Here's the
scoop.
06 June 2006
I am so delighted I could pop any moment. Earlier
today I checked the LPU forums while at a work site,
and was just blown away to see Saquivor had solved
the Windows sockets problem. I was all smiles, and
could barely wait to get to my desk to poke at it.
Then...sadface. It looked like we solved the
technical
problem of networking, but the next problem involved GPL
code. MinGW used libcrypto that I could not be sure
was not GPL, and the native Win32 binary we made required
that dll.
In a burst of uncharacteristic optimism, I went
about seeing if I could obviate the GPL library in
question, and eventually solved the problem by using
the MudOS built-in MD5 hash auth mechanism. JOY. I
had to get pretty violent with the crypto code, but
it appears to work well, and is far more secure than
the old system.
The only drawback is that new passwords are not
compatible
with old passwords. A driver change will mean some
pain. Fortunately this is an unusual situation.
In the interest of cross-platform compatibility I
plan to make the Unix side of the DS distro MD5 auth
also. This will probably happen in the release following
the release I plan to make this evening.
05 June 2006
I spent the entire weekend hacking at MudOS to
try to compile a native Win32 binary. I made a solid
amount of progress, and I'm almost there, but I
need help.
Please see if you
can lend a hand.
I called RedHat bright and early today, to get
in touch with the Cygwin licensing people. Predictably,
I got no straight answers, and I am now officially waiting
for a call beck from a Sales Rep named Mike within
then next two to three business days.
What do you suppose are the chances that a Sales
representative will offer me what I want for free?
----
He got back to me! And the verdict is:
" That license costs 25K per
year. I did not mention it as an option
because you mentioned you we looking for a free/low cost option. The
Buyout license doesn't qualify.
Mike "
----
CASE CLOSED.