PennMUSH 1.8.5p0

The PennMUSH development team is proud to announce the release of 1.8.5 patchlevel 0. As usual, lots of fixes, some new stuff, and, justifying the version bump, some major new changes in requirements to compile and run a PennMUSH (Formerly optional libraries are now mandatory.).

Get it at download.pennmush.org or at the googlecode project download page.

Changes below the cut.

Major changes

• The PCRE library is now required to build Penn, instead of falling back to an old, buggy version formerly bundled with the MUSH. [SW] Daniko assisted greatly with Windows changes and documentation.
• The OpenSSL library is now required to build Penn. Again, Daniko has provided instructions for installing on Windows. [SW]
• A new command prefix, "}", enables debug for a single execution of the command - }think foo, }+who, etc. See 'help }' for more info. Suggested by Wiggles and [GM]. [MG]

Minor changes

• Added a new event, OBJECT`FLAG, triggered when a flag/power with the "event" restriction is set or cleared. Suggested by [SW]. [MG]
• Expanded help on lock types and @powers. [MG]
• @startups are now processed in db order (#0, #1, etc) on reboot instead of giving priority to player objects. [MG]
• @startups (and local_startup() in local.c) are now triggered slightly later, ensuring that the db is fully loaded, and that the connected player list is loaded on @shutdown/reboot. Suggested by Padraic. [MG]
• Switch names that are defined but not used by any commands are warned about on startup, and several unused ones have been removed from the master list. [SW]
• Tweak utils/mkcmds.pl for the above change and to remove references to generating the obsolete patches.h. [SW]
• Tweak the parameters of the skip list used to store memcheck counts to save some memory. [SW]
• Bring the scheme scripts in utils up to date with current versions of chicken scheme (The implementation of the language they're written for.) [SW]
• The test harness code strips trailing whitespace before attempting to match against expected results, making it easier to use bounded regexps. [SW]
• @destination (for variable exits) is now a standard attribute, and has a helpfile. [MG]
• Sound is now propagated through audible variable exits, and exits @linked to 'home'. Suggested by Mercutio. [SW]
• The internal QUEUE attribute is no longer used to track the number of action lists an object has queued; the objdata system is used instead. [SW]
• isobjid() now requires a full object id (with :ctime), and will return 0 for simple dbrefs, or objids of destroyed/invalid objects. isdbref() still matches both dbrefs and objids. Suggested by Covenent. [MG]
• @entrances and entrances() now use the same internal routines as @search, and have similar (and saner) privs. From a suggestion by Sketch. [MG]
• Connection messages that are evaluated from an attribute instead of read from a file get the dbref of the connected player as %1, as long as they're ones shown post-connection (motd_file, etc.) [SW]
• Passwords are, thanks to OpenSSL digest routines, now stored in a less error prone, more secure, flexible and extendable format. Existing player passwords will be upgraded automatically on login. [SW]
• New script in utils/ for manipulating player passwords in an offline database. Useful if you forget God's password. [SW]
• The my_vsnprintf function in the hardcode has been renamed to mush_vsnprintf to avoid a conflict with MySQL. Reported by Balerion @ Blood of Dragons. [MG]
• The enactor (%#) for the PLAYER`DISCONNECT event is now more useful, instead of always being set to the dbref of the player disconnecting (%0). Suggested by Padraic. [MG]
• The SOCKET`LOGINFAIL event now gets passed the name that was entered as %5 when no matching player is found. Suggested by Daniel Powell. [MG]

Commands

• Added @mail/review for reading mail you've sent, and @mail/retract for deleting unread mail that you sent. Idea from MUX. Patch by Minion.
• @hook/list now shows error messages if you don't have permission to use it, or if a command has no hooks, instead of failing silently. Suggested by Padraic. [MG]
• Wizards can now @pcreate players with restricted names, as well as being able to rename existing players to forbidden names. Suggested by Nymeria @ Blood of Dragons. [MG]

Functions

• Functions that take a sort type argument now accept 'mtime' for sorting based on object's modification time. Patch by Minion.
• New registers() function, like listq() but returns all kinds of registers (q-registers, %0-%9 args, iter/switch context, regexp captures). Also takes an output separator arg. Suggested by Wiggles. [MG]
• digest(list) returns all message digest algorithms the server supports. [SW]
• sha0() has been deprecated in favor of digest(). [SW]

Fixes

• lit() didn't properly handle ''s. Reported by Wiggles. [MG]
• listq() incorrectly returned all registers (including %0-%9, %i0, etc), not just %q-registers. Reported by Wiggles. [MG]
• The mud_url code didn't always work correctly in Firefox because http headers weren't sent. [MG]
• %0 and %1 arguments weren't properly passed through verb attributes after a change in p8. Reported by Padraic. [MG]
• Fix really stupid copy-and-paste error in magic sorts on strings with ANSI, which broke setinter() and friends. Reported by Minion. [MG]
• Help fixes by Wiggles, Mouvar and others. [MG]
• Memory leak in ldelete() fixed. [MG]
• Fix a crashbug reported by Minion. [MG]
• Sorting functions now ignore ANSI when sorting a string as a number or dbref. From report by Mouvar. [MG]
• strreplace() was broken for overly long length arguments. Reported by Ashen-Shugar. [SW]
• Compile errors on Windows with OpenSSL. Reported by Daniko.
• @uptime could report negative times for the first dump, purge, etc after a game was started. Reported by Cooee. [MG]
• override/inplace hooks from .cnf files didn't work correctly. [MG]
• The portmsg announcer daemon was broken. Reported by Minion. [SW]
• A change in p8 broke the sending of the Pueblo hello string in some cases. Reported by Mercutio. [MG]
• Fix crash bug in @sitelock/remove [SW]
• ssl_slave would drop connections if it couldn't resolve a valid hostname for the connecting IP address. [SW]