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a Mench 37s Doing a bit of everything.
- zxq 4m
- Napoleon 2h
- Ameliorative 1m
- Bruhlicious 4m Deine Mutter stinkt nach Erbrochenem und Bier.
- notloose 8h
And 27 more hiding and/or disguised

[Dec 2019] Improvements & Bug Fixes
Rolling thread of all updates from December 2019

GOSSIP / GRAPEVINE

Per request of the Grapevine/Gossip team, we have removed channel join/leave messages from this channel.

NOTE BOARD

Note boards used to collect and display a character's display name as the author of any notes they added to the board. This was meta as some characters never go by this display name. Now the board will ICly prompt the character for a name to post the note under and use that instead. The change is not retroactive and only applies to new notes.

MEMBERSHIP RENEWAL

We had the site in development mode and it was causing membership renewal to fail as it was pointing to the sandbox paypal. This is resolved so you should be able to renew / get memberships again. Sorry about that!

TATTOOS

SkinWriters now allow the proper removal of most tattoos - with one notable exception that should be discovered ICly.

SIC TRIANGULATORS

Previously, you did not need any skills or anything to run a SIC triangulation tool. We have added skill checks to this object, requiring a basic skill check to triangulate to a level, and a more advanced one to narrow the location down further(we gated current functionality behind skill checks).

This change applies to all triangulation tools in the game.

SHOVE

You can no longer shove sleeping PCs off roofs. If there is some plot reason to do this, you can xhelp as the command's output will suggest. We can't think of any reason to shove a sleeping PC off a roof other than to hurt/kill them and this is against the the rules as described in 'help sleepers'. This change just extends the coded protection to more closely match our rules.

VEHICLES BREAKING ON ACCELERATION

In rare cases, it was possible to accelerate a vehicle beyond it's actual maximum speed. This would throw a range-error trace back, as you were trying to access a speed beyond what speeds exist on the vehicles.

This has now been fixed, you can no longer attempt to go ludicrous speed with your vehicles. Top speed will cap out at the absolute fastest possible speed of the vehicle, regardless of what mods you put on.

CORPSE FORENSICS INTERUPTION

I've refactored the corpse forensics code now that it has had some time to percolate. It uses the "act" system now which means that if you are halfway through your inspection of a corpse and walk away, or stop holding your forensics kit, or get grappled, the inspection will stop. This makes for a much more realistic experience. I've also extracted all the messaging to props that can be easily updated or extended with minimal effort by a builder.

NAILZ & KNUX

These two cyberware weapons are pretty underutilized. After talking with the staff, the common theme is that because they cause you to take damage when you block they are subpar compared to a regular knife or brass knux, especially when you consider the cost and the PDS.

So, we're experimenting. These will both parry without taking damage now. Same as if you were holding a butterfly knife or scalpel or brass knux. We'll see if that causes their usage to pick up.

GELCEL CHARGERS

These no longer allow you to place things on them that are not chargeable.

EXPOSE

When exposing a naked we were using our system to only show to people monitoring or paying attention to so the message about exposing, but showing the naked to everyone. This has been resolved.

HARVEST FIX

Fixed a bug where the last line of harvest tracebacked in some situations.

TERMS & STEALTH

You must now unhide before using a terminal.

TERM SPAM DUE TO USING IT HIDDEN

In some places you would get spammed with crap if you tried to use a term while hidden. This is resolved as well.

TYPOS

Since the last update when we were at 95 typos, we went up to 101 typos but I worked through those and now we're down to 83!

Find a typo? Let us know with @typo

ETHICOL PUMPS

You can no longer fill a vehicle with eth while it is in motion.

SPRAYING SOLVENT

Spraying and cleaning with solvent will now break your stealth.

FLYER TRASHING

Fixed a bug where flyers would sometimes TB on being trashed.

ROOMS FROM ABOVE

No longer will you be able to look off a rooftop and see a room and the contents of the room if the room you are looking into is dark.

NEIGHBORING ROOFS

No longer will you be able to see neighboring rooftops if the rooftop itself is dark. This means that some rooftops may be hidden at different times of the day :)

BANSUPURO PARK ROOFS

These roofs are not 'unlit' which means they are dark, just like the paths, when it is night time. Good luck getting out of the park alive without a flashlight.

EXPOSE BUG

There was a bug with expose where certain nakeds would cause a traceback. This is now handled gracefully by not attempting to show the naked.

BUGS BACKLOG

Kard and I have reviewed the bugs backlog which was at 575 items and reduced that to 234. This was done by fixing some bugs, closing a ton of duplicates, mark several hundred from 2017 and 2018 as obsolete (either they were fixed, we have more recent submissions about the bug, or they are so old that we won't be able to triage them properly).

234 is still more than I would like, but we'll continue to bash away at them.

MIMIC DISGUISE

There was a bug where when you shrouded up you might get a traceback when the system tried to mimic your disguise. This was actually fixed a while back. If you see it happen again please let me know.

STARTING A GAME OF POOL

Breaking off a game of pool didn't require you to be holding a pool cue. Now it does.

BUGS BACKLOG

Backlog is down to 200 now.

SOUTHSIDE MOTORS

Couriers will now get deliveries for Southside Motors.

UNLUCKY BYSTANDERS

There was a bug preventing missed sniper shots from hitting unlucky bystanders. This has been resolved.

ITEMS RECYCLING WHILE FREEHANDSING

If you eat a calzone or something and stash/freehands but the item is also at the end of its uses, it was throwing a TB. This is fixed.

PROGIA CALL TB

It is possible (though unlikely) that when calling a progia that was on a player or npc that was not in a room, it would traceback. This is resolved.

BUGS BACKLOG

After further triage we are done to 147 bugs. I believe these are just about all unique.

SIC ALIAS TO CHARACTER MATCHING

We had code that a few objects use to take a SIC alias and match it to the character currently on that alias. Because of how SIC aliases are formatted and stored we needed to match using a regular expression. The one used meant that 'Bob' would match "TheBob", "Bob" and "Bobby", whichever it found first. The regular expression was updated so it will now only match with "Bob" - an exact match.

FUELING VEHICLES AT PUMPS

A tiny bug was preventing vehicles from fueling up at ethicol pumps. This was fixed and you can now fuel away.

CYBERWARE DROPS FROM CLONE

Whoops. I forgot to account for needing to remove cyberware from the player when they died, without 'dropping' it on a corpse. It is now working as intended and you shouldn't clone with your cyber. Please report issues with this to the admin.

CYBERWARE SCANNING ON CORPSES

You can now use a cyberware scanner to check a corpse for warez. It works exactly like it does on alive people.

CYBERWARE SCANNING FOR RIPPERS

If you are looking to harvest cyberware from a corpse, certain things such as location can make a difference. It will be easier to detect cyberware while rooting around in a corpse when you are in a clinic or cyber clinic. The same is now true if you are in possession of a cyberware scanner, and the most recent scan you conducted was on the corpse you are about to to harvest from.

Some things to note:

1. Scanning a corpse and seeing it has cyberware is not a guarantee that you will be able to find the warez when you are rooting around in the corpse. It just makes it easier. Using a scanner and using a scalpel are different skills.

2. You don't have to be the one to have performed the scan. Got a friend who is ace with a scanner but you are only ace with a scalpel? Team up. They do the scan, and hand you the scanner with the results. This will give the same bonus. My rationale here is that the scanning was the thing that required skill. It doesn't take any skill to look at a screen and see what was detected and use that info to direct your search.

3. Scans have to be at least moderately successful to offer any kind of bonus. You can have a scanner and fail the scan and detect no cyberware even if there was some. This isn't going to give you a bonus. It won't penalize you though.

VISIBLE WOUNDS

There was a bug in visible wounds code that was causing a range error in certain edges. I believe this is resolved.

ETHICOL TOWERS

Fixed a typo in a recent code change I made that was blocking eth towers from working in some cases-- and also reenabled the code that blocks filling your bike while driving through the room.

OOC ALIASES ON CHAT

There is now a cool down of five minutes on changing your OOC alias after sending a message. This is to better allow moderation tools to work moving forward.

Is it intended that alias change is supposed to be blocked after sending a Game-Help message (which doesn't use your @xalias)?
DART BOARDS

Melee style bladed weapons like hatchets will now use the proper skill when you throw them at dart boards.

DART BOARD HELP

'help dart' in a room with a dart board will show a brief help file on their usage now.

SIC TRIANGULATION

There was a bug where the final steps of SIC triangulation were throwing an error in some edge cases. This has been resolved.

OOC ALIAS COOLDOWN

I've fixed the issue where the cooldown was being set even if you didn't chat on OOC chat and instead chatted on Game-Help.

LNA VISION

This was borked because it was lasting for 24 hours no matter what because of the way I wrote the code. It was checking your tracker for recent drug hits, which lasts 24 hours after your last hit. Fixing that to make it expire at the end of the last hit (including the after effects) fixed half the problem, but I then needed to check if you were in an 'after effects' state. Future hits of drugs that cause this will end at the appropriate time, based on the modifications I made. If you encounter issues please @Bug or xhelp and let me know.

BEHAVIOR MOD CHIPS

Someone reported the following: 'Turns out that you can take things off sleepers or strip them with a behavior modification chip installed, but you can't plant them back on them, or pickpocket them.'

This is fine. You can take things from sleeping players with a chip. It could be your friend. We don't want to restrict too much. No change here.

WREST WITH BEHAVIOR MOD

You can no longer wrest things from other people if you have a behavior mod chip.

DISARM WITH BEHAVIOR MOD

You can no longer disarm someone if you have a behavior mod UNLESS YOU ARE IN COMBAT. If you are in combat, you can do it.

ABORTED DELIVERY PURCHASES

Some stores let you buy stuff that is delivered and installed for you. There has been a long standing issue where upon buying something and realizing they don't deliver to your place you @abort and lose your money and the item is not delivered.

This still happens, but there are now instructions for how to deal with it using a service request for the builders when it happens. This should let us service people as needed.

BOUNTY TERMINAL

Fixed the formatting on the bounty terminal when you list debts or bounty notices so it doesn't get all wonky when the name is longer than it is expecting.

Also made it format money properly.

BOUNTY TERMINAL CLAIM ISSUE

Fixed an issue with the bounty terminal where when you went to claim a bounty if you typed something besides yes or no it went bonkers and infinite scrolled.

SWITCHTO WEAPON

Switchto is a mostly undocumented command (until now) that let you switch between two held weapons inside and outside of combat. This command was old, and didn't synergize well with our existing system. It was from a time when we didn't have auto weapon switching, or dual wield bonuses.

It is now usable only outside of combat, and the messaging has been updated so that others in the room know you have switched your primary weapon.

Also, I've added a helpfile and updated the examine me on players.

GUARDED POSTURE COUNTER ATTACK DUAL WIELD

There was a weird bug in guarded posture where if you counter attacked while dual wielding your weapon would switch, but then get silently switched back. This was due to an attempt to fix a bug where guns were shooting to counter attack instead of hand to hand. It may now be possible for guns, in some rare lucky situations, to shoot someone when you counter attack. This won't be common, but it could happen and I'm OK with that. GunFu and all that.

In general though, this bug fix makes it so that you will correctly switch weapons when you execute a counter attack while guarded.

NORINCO CASE

Fixed a traceback that was shown when you tried to put a non-gun in a norinco rifle case due to referencing a non existent property.

SWITCHTO ACTION CHECK

Switchto is now action check aware, meaning you can't use it while aiming-- which someone did and which resulted in them being broken in weird ways.

NPCS ORDERED TO GUARD EXITS

Some of you may know, it is possible to be able to 'boss' around certain NPCs, such as fellow faction members (think gangers, judges, corpsec). There was a reported bug of NPCs who were ordered to guard exits not actually guarding, and instead letting people head right on through.

After some testing and frustration I realized this was only happening when the NPCs were not puppeted, because we specifically clear the guard if the npc is not puppeted, probably due to us not wanting GMs to leave a place guarded forever by accident. This was causing NPCs ordered to guard not to work. I've removed the code that was allowing NPCs to auto unguard if they were not puppeted, thus fixing this issue.

However, that left the issue of NPCs who were ordered to guard by PCs being left forever in a guard state. I've made it so the NPCs will auto unguard after 30-40 minutes. This allows us to clean up after PCs doing guards, allowing it, but within reason.

GUARDED INTEGRATION WITH LOOK

Up until now, if someone was guarding an exit, be they PC or NPC, you would have no idea unless you tried to walk through the exit and got pushed back (or let through if you were a friend).

This has changed. When you enter a room you will see, similar to how you see grapples or people aiming or in combat, those who are guarding an exit, and what exit they are guarding.

GANGER NPCS GUARD PASS/BLOCK RESPONSE

Ganger NPCs will now say a message to the person that just tried to walk through their guard of an exit, if they are allowing them through it will be a friendly 'go on by' if they are being blocked, it will be a 'fuck off'. This gives a bit more feedback when NPCs are interacting with the room.

ENTERING A VEHICLE WHILE RIDING A BIKE

You can no longer enter a vehicle while riding a bike (or vice versa).

FORENSICS & CYBERWARE / BIOMODS

Cyberware & biomods should now be showing up when you look at a corpse or when you do a forensics inspection of the corpse if it is decayed or disfigured.

CORPSE PRONOUN SUBBING

Pronouns will now be properly subbed in when someone has used them in their description or biomods. You can use pronouns in your nakeds like "%P eyes are blue." This is actually a best practice as then if your corpse is disfigured and the system decides that your characters gender should be hidden your description won't give away info because you hard coded "he" or "she" or something else into your nakeds.

BUGS UPDATE

Down to 127 bugs that have not been triaged. What I mean by triaged is that, certain bugs need to be fixed by certain people. Usually the coder that wrote it. This is usually only the case with certain complex code that Johnny or I have written that would take a lot of time to understand. Mostly these amount to dynamic space issues, like problems with market mazes or flying.

Earlier this month I reviewed all our bugs in a cursory fashion and closed duplicates or bugs that were going to be impossible to reproduce due to limited information provided. That got us down to a couple hundred. Since then I've been working my way from newest backwards. We are all the way back to the most recent open bug being November 16th! Obviously excluding the handful I had to triage to Johnny to look at. This includes closing any new bugs that have come in. This is good progress. I will keep at this over the next week as I'm on vacation and will have extra time.

GRAFFITI NOTIFICATIONS

GMs get a notification and a mail each time graffiti is done. This has been updated so that it is a 'roll up' mail every 12 hours which contains all the graffiti someone has done instead of individual mails for each graffiti.

As such, the artificial GM enforced limit on how often you can graffiti is lifted. Feel free to spray as much as ICly makes sense.

WEBCLIENT PERFORMANCE

As mentioned in another thread, Google Chrome is having performance issues. We've made some changes that should limit this and we seem to be back to a stable point. Please use the Chrome Lag thread to report continued issues.

FIX-IT NAME

You will now use your OOC name when chatting on Fix-It. Same as Game-Help.

FILL LEVELS ON ITEMS

Perfumes now have a message upon inspection with the rough amount remaining.

Fuel containers already show this information if you simply look at them. I've added it to inspection as well.

Kitchens and bars now show this information upon inspection.

VEHICLE COLOR

I've added an orange option by popular request.

SIC TRIANGULATORS

These will now only allow you to triangulate one target, one at time. No more running it multiple times at once. Not what it was intended to do :)

ADMIN EDITING BGBB POSTS

With Johnny's help I've gotten a beta version of editing BGBB posts working for admin. And by admin I mean me and Johnny (for now). It works pretty well. I am still not 100% convinced that this code won't break something so I'm keeping it admin only for now. Once I've edited some posts and feel comfortable, I'll release it to the rest of the admin so they can better moderate.

Once I'm convinced that isn't breaking things, I will make it so you all can edit your own posts. Hopefully that will be within the next week or two.

BGBB POST LOCKING

It is now possible for admin to lock/unlock posts. This will be useful for threads like this where we want to keep it admin only. It is also useful when a thread goes off the rails and needs to be finished.

BGBB POST PINNING

We can now pin posts! I'll be going through and pinning some relevant posts. I'll also pin posts like this each month and unpin them when the month is over.

BGBB GLYPHS

There are now glyphs on any locked or pinned posts both on the thread listing page and on the BGBB thread itself to represent if a post is locked or pinned.

Both of these new features (along with editing posts) come with the potential for bugs, so if you see something, let me know via xhelp.

You can comment on these new features on the BGBB Tools thread.

HELP FILES UPDATED

writing-history *Last Updated: 12/19/19 by Mench*

player *Last Updated: 12/24/19 by Fengshui*

switchto *Last Updated: 12/24/19 by Fengshui*

@TOWN-HALL UPDATE

I have updated the @town-hall command so that when moderation is on in a room, players will not see people popping in and out of the meeting.

MODERATION IN SUB ROOMS

I've made the sub rooms children of the 'moderated room' parent. This means that if after the town hall there is a lively discussion the GMs can toggle moderation on if needed.

MODERATED ROOM LOOK

Based on the results of a poll taken in moo, the majority of people thought it would be meta to look at other characters during the town hall. I have blocked looking at other folks during town hall. The same goes for glance.

STAFF SIDE AIM NOTIFICATIONS

GMs will now receive a notification message when one character aims at another character. This makes it easier for GMs to notice that something interesting might be going down and will improve auditing of such situations when necessary.