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[SPRING 2019] Improvements Roundup
Improvements from April, May, June

mprovements & Fixes from April, May, and June. This is a collection of all posts from this forum from that time, for easy review.

EXAMINE ME

I've updated examine me with all the commands we've added in the past year or two since we hadn't updated it in a while.

SLEAZE

Many doors that you probably should have been able to sleaze through were not even running a check on sleaze because they didn't have a score set up. These were places like the Drome, Sly's and others topside as well. I've updated these so that you can attempt to sleaze through them. The difficulty is based on their location. Also, remember someone who runs the place might notice and mess you up if they spot ya!

BUG REDUCTION

Day started with 299 bugs in the queue, it's not 257. Here are the highlights.

IMAGE ENHANCEMENT FIX

You can no longer see the chyen inside of closed things.

JACKLE PIPES DON'T CLEAR MRC WITHDRAWALS

Not going to fix this, they only clear one drug, and it's TH-2c. Consider the mrc to be 'not enough to remove your withdrawals'.

@OOC DESCRIPTIONS ON IC CHARACTER

Would love to fix this but didn't get enough info in the bug report. Please remember that someone might look at your bug report like, months later. So include your current location, the object names for anything having an issue, etc. The more the better.

ASHLIN CROWN ELEVATOR

Haven't been able to figure out what's wrong with this yet, have the GMs ready to ping me if it breaks again so I can look before they fix it.

XAING GIVES SAKE WHEN ASKED WHERE PARTY IS

Didn't happen for me. Maybe your language caused it? Or you typoed. Or it's not longer an issue.

GET DEPRECATION NOTICE IN LIMO

Should have been a one time thing, if it happens again, LMK.

ORB PHOTO FAILING TO PRINT

Added better help text to explain how to use it correctly.

SLEEPING NIGHTMARE ALWAYS SHOWS UP THE SAME WHEN ROBBED

Your stats are the problem, not the code ;)

PLAYER RIDING ON A BIKE WHEN NOT IN ROOM

Better to xhelp about these since they need a more immediate fix, but it's resolved.

TAKESHI WANTS BUBBLERS

I've prevented shopkeepers from having 'wants' like other NPCs since they already have code around buying things handed to them.

LIGHTS IN MEMBERSHIP PAD

No idea what your pad is, can't fix.

OBJECT INSPECTS AFTER @FINALIZE

Should be clearing the inspection cache now thanks to Mobius.

SYS-MSG HAS BAD URL

Fixed the link.

HELP CYBERPUNK

Reported not working, but currently working.

DART BOARDS

No longer will they TB when you look at them.

VIAL OF MEDICINE

This was technically an empty specimen vial because it's the parent for all medicine vials but wasn't assigned a cure/disease. I've removed many of these from game though some of you figured out you could use them as specimen vials so I've kept those in play-- but you won't see 'vial of medicine' on sale at the medical store anymore.

GANGER ITEM PAYOUTS

Based on feedback from GMs and Players, we have adjusted the payout for gangers buying weapons they want from 100% to 75%. This should give fixers who buy these weapons at the market the ability to still make a profit, and anyone coming into one of these weapons by nefarious means, will also have the ability to profit.

Previously we had these set to 50%, but that was too low, 100% is too high. We'll see how 75% does.

TV SCHEDULES

NLM-TV had an issue with displaying the TV schedule relating to the 256 color code update. It's been resolved and it's using the new code.

EMPLOYMENT TERMS

Per Dreamer flagging to me that employment terms hire the new person at whatever tier the job was last at, I've updated the terms to do the following things:

1. You will get prompted when you hire someone, as to what tier you want to hire them into. This will include the salary info for each tier.

2. When you fire someone the position will reset to 'Junior' or whatever the lowest tier is, and that is what will be displayed in the list of jobs.

3. There is now a prompt when you fire someone to confirm you want to fire them.

For GMs this means that there will be less demoting people after hiring them.

For players it means that $chatter won't be all wonky with demotions after hiring.

It may take a bit for some of the old jobs that are vacant to reset to 'Junior' but I didn't want to manually fix them all since regardless of what they are set at you have the option to hire them.

Let me know of any issues.

METRO CHAT

It's fixed now.

SEWAGE DRAINAGE PIPE

It was discovered that the sewer drainage pipe was not pulling characters down as it should when they enter it. This bug has been fixed and it is not much more difficult to get back up the pipe as we intend it to be. You have been warned.

99 ITEMS PER SHELF

Players will not be able to stock more than 99 items on a shelf in a store from now on. If there are already more than 99 items, you won't be able to stock anything new on it until its 98 or less.

UP TO 5 SHELVES

Player run stores can have up to 5 shelves in total. No More. :)

MISCHAN WARNINGS FOR ADMINS

By default, admin will now get a nice warning when they are about to send a message to a player chat channel (ooc-chat, game-help, free-chat, etc), giving them a chance to avoid a plot destroying or character outing mischan by saying the wrong thing on the wrong channel.

Brave or foolish admin who find this annoying can type @gm-options +no_mischan_warn to disable this warning.

PHOTOS

You can trash photos again.

BRIEFS & WALLETS

Photos fit in this again. Whoops!

ELEAVTORS BREAKING

There was a race condition causing some high traffic elevators to break, it was one in particular but it could have happened to any of them. I fixed this (at least it seems it's been resolved). If it breaks again, I'll know my fix only partially worked. Hopefully, it's good forever and ever though.

ADMIN HELP UPDATES

I've updated the admin help files to include some commands we had left off of their examine me. So they are better aware.

@GM-OPTIONS

GMs have specific @options, there were some on @gm-options and some on @options, I've moved them all to @gm-options and added some new ones. I won't go into them here as unless you're a GM they don't matter much, but suffice to say their experience is a little bit more customizable now.

@cured & @infected

GMs didn't have an easy way to see who was infected / being cured by biologicals. They now have two new commands to see this information.

NEW COLUMNIZE

When we updated to $xterm256 we needed to update our columnizing verb that shows things in a table-ish way. We only updated some of the references to columnize to new_columnize. Over the weekend I updated all the remaining references. This includes help, WJF tac-comps, and about 40 other places that now use the newer, better, more color smart columnize.

DEFACING SECURITY GEAR

You can not deface security gear with spraypaint.

STANDARDIZED LOCATION BASED PRICING

For a while we've had a set of standard price modifiers for places like Red, Gold, Green, Blue, Space, Badlands, etc. But they were not being applied across the board because it was a manual setting on each shop or purchase terminal.

We've standardized and centralized this so that all stores, and all purchase kiosks now have a set of sane defaults based on the level / location. They can still be overridden, but this way when we set a new place up, it will automatically have the default modifier for the sector it's set up in.

GENUINE PEOPLE PERSONALITY

The new @personality command is now available for all players to use. Please consider it a tool to help you further define who your character is for yourself and for staff. Other players will not see this information.

WRITING PHOTOS TO DISK

I have finished converting all photo colors to the new system. And have dumped them to disk. They are now lazy loaded when needed and not stored in memory as they were up until now.

This allows us to keep our database size low-- as we have an ever growing number of photos. Currently there are 6250 unique photos! That's not counting ones that are printed out multiple times.

Before the photos were written to disk we were a FAT 142 megabytes.

After writing photos to disk we are a slim 115 megabytes.

That is a trimming of 27 megabytes. Probably the biggest slimming down we've had ever. Go us.

BANK TRANSFER VIA SIC ALIAS ONLY

You can now ONLY transfer funds from account to account via a SIC alias. This means:

* no more knowing someone is disguised because you can't transfer funds to them.

* no more transferring funds to people without a SIC

* no more using someones 'name' to transfer funds even if they don't actually use that name and your character doesn't know it.

FREEHANDS

This now has an alias of 'fh' to make it easier to type and harder to typo. Help file for hands has been updated. Dreamer's idea.

GLANCE

Glance or gl typed on it's own will now default to glancing at yourself the same way 'ht' does. Dreamer's idea.

STOP

I have created a help file for stop, with all the 'stop' actions. It's been cross linked from combat as well, so people should find it early. Check it out.

STOP ATTACKING

There is now an alias for this: 'stop att' will do the same thing, but is easier to type in the midst of battle. Dreamer's idea.

MEMENTO UPDATES

1. A number of snake memento npcs were not retiring. I'm not sure exactly why but I've added logging around it and retired them manually.

2. Sinners/Snakes/Arts mementos were not spawning with the correct gear. They will now all spawn with the stuff we expect them to have (this was in part a caching issue that I resolved, see below)

3. Sinners & Arts were not set up to automatically spawn members the way the Snakes/TERRA were. This has been resolved.

4. [ADMIN] Looking at a group object for something like the SNAKES will now show a new column for npcs at the top 'SPAWNED AT' which will either be PERSISTENT or a rough estimate of how long ago an memento was spawned.

MEMENTO UTILS

1. [ADMIN] Refreshing a memento on disk (basically resaving the template for the memento) will now prompt an admin and ask them if they want to purge the cache for that object so that new mementos actually spawn with the new template and not the cached one.

GANGER NPCS

1. [ADMIN] All primary non memento gangers now do NOT show up with a purple * before their name, when you look at the group as an admin. This means they are not mementos. There was a config error on some that has been resolved.

2. All primary non memento gangers now have SICs. There were a few that didn't before.

PUPPET QUEUE

The puppet queue view/cancel puppet was showing the most recent puppet request instead of the one you selected. This has been resolved.

SINDO.ME

Many @who tips, help files, website pages, and other areas of the game were using broken sindo.me links. These should all be fixed. If you notice a broken one please @bug it.

BAR USERS

If you own a bar and you can 'manage bar' on the actual bar object, you will now see a list of authorized users when you run the command. Kinda crazy that this wasn't a thing already :)

DRUNK WALKING

If you are drunk, you may walk in random directions not the direction you picked. Previously there was a bug where it would be like 'You can't go that way'. Because it was trying to pick a random exit and failing. This was broken a LONG time I think-- so it may seem like new behavior. It's not.

Go home train, you are drunk.

PLAYING GO ON THE SLY

You can now play Go disguised without the game outing who you are - as long as your disguise holds up at least.

RUNNING OUT OF TICKS WHEN LOOKING AT GO BOARDS

Hopefully you will no longer get a traceback about running out of ticks when looking at very full go boards.

NPC SPAWNER

NPCs should begin spawning more often now, and in higher numbers. I'm keeping an eye on the stats but we are looking to get all our groups filled up to Max on a regular basis.

SEEING CHARACTERS FORCED INTO YOUR VEHICLE ROOM

When someone is forced into a vehicle all the people inside that vehicle that should be alerted are informed of the event and not just those in the 'front'.

NPC SPAWNING

I've further upped the number of NPCs that spawn concurrently. You should notice a drastic increase, at least until the numbers level out as groups hit their max members. Then they'll cycle out as they typically do.

NLM GUARDS

These NPCs would spawn and then not be able to get to their destination due to a lack of a waypoint near them to path through. I've added one at NLM that seems to have fixed the problem. This was an annoying long standing issue.

NLM NPCS

Some NPCs at NLM were having trouble getting through a specific door. I've resolved this issue.

QUOTA ISSUES

Some NPCs were failing to spawn because they were over max members for a group, which was as intended but the error messages were spamming staff, so I have fixed that issue (with a wrapper verb).

SCHEDULED TASKS

We have a variety of scheduled tasks that run-- instead of using fork(). With the increasing number of these, I've added a verb for admin to better view scheduled tasks based on the objs, verbs, and time they are scheduled for. QOL improvement for coders basically.

CGH DOOR

There was a door at CGH that was messed up and throwing errors. That's been fixed. It had the wrong .twin property.

RUNNING CRATES ON GOLD

A misconfiguration was allowing folks that worked at certain corporations to run crates on the Gold sector crate place, where they could not on the Green sector one. That has been fixed-- it's not a bug if you al the sudden can't run crates. If you work for a mega corp, you probably aren't allowed. Tis the way it is. Red sector continues to allow whoever wants to because they don't give a fuck.

THE AUTOPRUNER

This is a special system which calls special verbs on many different objects. These verbs prune things from various objects. For example: the text that is stored for gps displays-- basically forever, after they are generated. It's not needed and it takes up space. Another example would be photos that are in memory. It prunes them back to disk. This code isn't new, we've been working on it and improving it for about 3 years. However, we were running it manually now and then. It's now been $scheduled and will run automatically once a week.

When it runs you'll see a notification on game-help as it might cause a tiny bit of lag since it's writing a lot to disk (and it uses a fair amount of CPU while it's running).

[-][Game-Help] [SYS-MSG] Autopruner is running... cleaning the MOO up like a boss. Could cause a teeny bit of lag while it's running.

[-][Game-Help] [SYS-MSG] Autopruner has finished running and cleaned up 535 bytes

It'll probably prune about 2-3 megs each run-- mostly photos. But it will keep us nice and healthy.

TYPOS

Fixed some additional broken shortened links that were in the code. Also fixed about 10-15 typos that were typos in the code.

APARTMENT RENTALS

When renting a room at certain places, the rent is paid daily or weekly or monthly, the message that pops said that rent is weekly regardless. This has been fixed.

LICENSE FEES

When you apply for a license you pay a fee. This fee is non-refundable regardless of the outcome of the license request. I've added messaging around this to avoid confusion in the future.

@REQUEST-SERVICE

I've added a SENIOR option for those that need to speak with a senior staffer about an issue or request, or for when a senior staffer asks for a service request to be put in as a reminder for some reason.

NEWS DESK

Fixed this forum.

@TYPOS

On the admin side the typo system was pretty basic. It was hard to tell who could fix what typos since they were in a variety of categories (typos in description, room, properties, code, scripts, combat messages).

I've overhauled this system to allow builders to categorize typos, thus surfacing typos someone like me has to fix (code, combat) versus ones that a builder or regular admin could fix.

OOC-CHAT ALIASES

Anyone joining OOC-Chat will now be given a unique alias 'Someone1234' where 1234 is a unique integer for each new person to join. This should lead to less confusion where people have the same alias of 'Someone'.

ANSI ART

Fixed an issue where art with lots of ANSI color was throwing an error. Should be OK now :)

PARK BOYZ

Park gangers now have a memento so they can spawn mementos. This also means they can use the dispatcher for things like scheduled tagging of things.

DISPATCHER

Now that we are spawning more mementos we were running into a situation where the dispatcher couldn't spawn a new memento to do what it wanted. I've added some code that will select an available memento and if one is not available it will default to attempting to spawn one.

RETIREMENT

We were having trouble with some mementos not retiring and we put a fair amount of work (Johnny & me) into figuring it out. I can report that 99% of mementos are retiring correctly now.

WILD DOGS & RATS & SPIDERS OH MY

These groups were filled mostly with critters that were not retiring correctly. I manually retired them and now they are spawning/unspawning more members more regularly. This is good for the game, bad for anyone wandering around areas that might be dangerous ;)

STEALING

When you attempt to 'steam item from person' and they have multiple of item, it will now pick a randomized one (if possible) and have you attempt to steal it.

KITCHENETTES

There was a bug (or so I think) that was causing kitchenettes current stock of things to be completely overwritten when restocked. I've made this not a thing so you shouldn't lose stuff when restocking now. Unknown if this will cause other issues-- so please report any issues.

GUEVARA

10th floor elevator entrance is fixed.

LIMTING SKILL/STAT RAISES PER DAY

In an effort to curtail dumping a bunch of UE into any single skill or stat to become instantly a badass at something, we have put a new restriction on how much you can raise any given stat or skill by in a 24 hour period. We'll keep a log of what you've raised over the last 24 hours and prevent you from raising anything too much too fast.

To be clear, you should still be able to save up enough for single adjective changes. We wanted to preserve the possibility of this sort of 'sense of progress'.

Thanks a -TON-, Slither. Some amazing work here, and "ANSI ART Fixed an issue where art with lots of ANSI color was throwing an error. Should be OK now :)" <3 <3 <3
Haven't read the whole list, but think I've seen most of it separately in the updates threads. Much thanks to you admin wage-slaves for your work.

Remember to get someone fired so y'all can get that promotion.

Forgot to include updated help files:

socials *Last Updated: 04/02/19 by Mobius*

player *Last Updated: 04/03/19 by Fengshui*

intuitive *Last Updated: 04/24/19 by Johnny*

feeler *Last Updated: 04/24/19 by Johnny*

perceiver *Last Updated: 04/24/19 by Johnny*

introvert *Last Updated: 04/24/19 by Johnny*

personality *Last Updated: 04/27/19 by Johnny*

stop *Last Updated: 05/03/19 by Fengshui*

combat *Last Updated: 05/03/19 by Fengshui*

hands *Last Updated: 05/03/19 by Fengshui*

death *Last Updated: 05/04/19 by Fengshui*

shi *Last Updated: 05/25/19 by Fengshui*

computer science skills *Last Updated: 06/08/19 by Fengshui*

creator *Last Updated: 06/28/19 by Fengshui*

respec *Last Updated: 06/28/19 by Fengshui*

pickpocket *Last Updated: 06/30/19 by Fengshui*

membership *Last Updated: 06/30/19 by Fengshui*

ooc-chat *Last Updated: 06/30/19 by Fengshui*