The Fairy Garden MUSH RSS

New Wardrobe!!

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 17:19:40 MST

By Alara: A massive upgrade to the wardrobe system has been implemented. For years we used localized appearances and outfits stored on a wardrobe object in your inventory which was then parented to the engine. This always worked fine. However with my obsession with SQL, I've moved all descriptions previously in the wardrobe objects to an SQL table. You are only able to access your own, and all the old commands should work as-is. A new system, however, has been implemented, which necessitated this change. If a player sets the REDRESSABLE=1 attribute on themselves, any other player can REDRESS WITH =. Essentially this allows other players to forcibly set your outfit for, you know, roleplay purposes. Of course, as a target of this command you still have control over your description - simply set REDRESSABLE=0 to lock out other players changing it to one of their own. Additionally the player executing the command must be in the same room as the target and both players must be connected. The executor of the command must include some emote text to enforce roleplay. And worst case the target can immediately CLOTHSET their own outfit once again and overwrite the one they were forced to take. If there are any questions, let me know! This is a big deal, and I have a few other fun plans for it.

Dozing Update

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:36:49 MST

By Alara: The strobscure() function has been updated - no longer using a totally static list of words I came up with 10 years ago, it now utilizes a snapshot of Webster's dictionary and an @http call to a webpage which, when run, repopulates the list on the Communication object. Note - simply using strobscure() will not actually update this list. Rather, the SAY command triggers the http call to update randdict. An example of strobscure() is used in the Dozing room of the dreamrealm where one may hear random snippets of things being said, and some words may be different than what the speaker intended.

SCORE and +FINGER

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 14:56:42 MST

By Alara: I've updated SCORE and +FINGER to match! All printed lines have been migrated to subitems of the FINGER` attrib, and so the commands themselves are dramatically simplified! I'm planning on reworking some of the age mechanics (which prompted this change), but if you see any anomalies regarding the SCORE or +FINGER commands, please let me know!

+HELP updates!

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 14:55:46 MST

By Alara: Fantastic new addition to the +HELP system! The new column `attrib_eval` is a boolean that determines if the +HELP text is a call to an objects attribute rather than static text to display! For example, the +HELP CLOTHING article pulls direct from the wardrobe parent's description rather than storing all that a second time in the database. For those who care, we simply make the +HELP text #dbref/attrib, and then set attrib_eval = 1 in the db record, and this functionality will work. If I haven't noted it here, all +HELP articles have also been moved and imported with all data. The old softcoded database has been completely destroyed. As such, we lost a few @functions regarding formatting (footer(), header(), midline(), and fhtml()), but I found those in an old backup and restored them to a more global object, so they should all be working now. We're now only missing Rules. And these articles are not necessarily missing. I just haven't set them up under the global "RULES" command in the new system yet. Rather they're currently being stored under UHELP.

Knockin' Out a Few Ideas

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 12:02:45 MST

By Alara: Dryad Windblow is now colored bright cyan so that it's more noticeable Movement into a room now shows others the exit from which they came, and movement out shows the exit used. This is a bit complicated, but importantly, OENTER/OLEAVE on rooms has been completely blanked. Instead we now use the standard OSUCC/ODROP on exits for regular movement and OTPORT/OXTPORT on players for other kinds of movement. It is important to note that OTPORT/OXTPORT is set to NOT give any message if an object is teleported out by anything but itself. This, then, assumes that any instance of @tel will be paired with a custom message (like Windblow). Since HOME does not have a paired HOME/AHOME/OHOME/OXHOME attrib set, we cannot get our usual blank line prefix on "Alara goes home", but it will always show, too, so other players can see when someone goes home instead of walking out.

The Death of Mercutio's +HELP System

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 14:36:14 MST

By Alara: At long last, the janky, complicated +HELP system written by Mercutio has been @nuked! SQL is totally live! The only thing that doesn't work yet are RULES. But the data's all been captured and +help, ahelp, rhelp, and bhelp are all accessible for those who have the permissions to them!

Pushover Update!

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 10:52:58 MST

By Alara: The notifier service I use to keep on top of player logins, new player requests, and SQL server connection issues has been updated!! Previously the Linux machine running the MUSH would execute a cron job every minute and trigger a curl request to a local PHP script that would log into a MySQL server, search for 'notifier' records inserted by the MUSH in an event table, and php_curl up to Pushover those details. Sound complicated? It is. But now PennMUSH can run @http requests directly, and Pushover is extremely straightforward, taking a user ID, secret token, and message body directly from a POST request. Basically, it's a ton simpler and I'm a lot happier being IMMEDIATELY notified of you logging in, rather than waiting up to a minute! YAY!!!

+HELP

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:56:36 MST

By Alara: Fixed! I finally dug in, found the SQL functions needed to fix the new +HELP system, and now all categories with their respective permissions and syntaxes are working! At least as far as I can tell. And as far as it matters. If you run into any anomalies, let me know! Additionally, all +HELP data within the new system is completely static. I do want to add dynamic +HELP (i.e. +HELP that, instead of pulling text from the SQL database is directed back into the MUSH to pull from an attribute on an object). This is potentially insecure at first glance as a simple built-in function within the object help attrib could inject code into places, but we could add some sanitization beforehand.

Pending +HELP

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:17:09 MST

By Alara: I'm slowly transferring a bunch of admin-level +HELP files over to the new system. This means some of the regular +HELP entries are breaking because I don't have the back-end all up and working for multiple systems yet. I'll try my best to get this fixed really soon!

Oracle & AI Sadness

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 14:34:32 MST

By Alara: I've just removed the AI bot. Too much craziness there, and it's squelching my creativity. I put waaaay too much work into it, and it's very distracting.

Clothes

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 23:29:53 GMT

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).

The Oracle

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 23:24:20 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!

Reactions!!

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 23:58:25 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)]!

LONGER Room Descriptions

Thu, 25 May 2023 18:16:16 MDT

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).

Golds

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 17:03:01 MDT

By Alara: Gold coins are boring. All hail the new "Alarans!"

+Finger Updates

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 15:16:30 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!

Updates

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 11:56:59 MDT

By Alara: LOG is now a thing! See the last 20 connections from people. Additionally we are updated to 1.8.8p0,

MediaWiki Namespace

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 17:46:39 MST

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.

Voting and URL Shortener!

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 10:49:51 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

Big bug quick updates

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 16:58:45 MDT

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

Racial Homes

Tue, 27 Aug 2019 13:50:09 MDT

By Alara: By popular (woo three people on at once) demand, I've looked into the default racial homes and found them to be a bit confusing. As of today, 'A clearing in the trees,' the marshmallow roasting spot, has been set as the furry class's homebase. I've retroactively gone through and re-@linked all players who had their homes set to the previous defaults. Those who had their homes customized later still maintain them, though! Additionally, I'm working on one slight upgrade (also requested) to make these racial homes a little more obvious. The base of the Great Tree has been redescribed with something a little more than the default for the zone, as well as the entrance to the Dark City. I have some big plans for the Naga race, whose racial home is not in the City, but some random spot in the south forest. Stay tuned! P.S. Pipeweed isn't yet a thing, but can be soon!

New maps

Fri, 29 Mar 2019 22:58:06 MDT

By Alara: The central plains have at last been mapped out in I think five sections! Additionally, I've added maps to the Moon Temple and Timara. At this point, I count 732 rooms that are not mapped at all. I am unsure how many of these are in private housing, but I don't think it's too many, really.

New Stuffs

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 08:12:06 MDT

By Alara: Nysh'ala and I are currently trapped on the Isle of Namek (a.k.a the Lonely Isle). We are planning a long flight to return to the mainland, but really have no idea which direction to go. The plan is to fly off this island, hopefully find another island closer to the mainland, and eventually, by hopping from one tiny strip of sand to the next, make it back to civilization. Wish us well! In other news (though in the same general vein), the garden on Lunara is mapped! It's a very symmetrical spot, so it was more than easy to draw and make work. I also found out that my short script to detect unmapped rooms was not adequate - it grabbed ALL objects (not just rooms) which did not have a map table. Detecting unmapped rooms should be much easier now, though I do need to also clean up the Wizard Skills list (the command object is fine, but the LIST SKILLS command doesn't show hardly anything).

Flags

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:08:20 MST

By Freya: Two new flags have been created: MOB and ITEM. I wish to differentiate between living and non-living thing types. We have over 900 different things in the Fairy Garden, and there has not been a standard way to split mobs and non-mobs. This should take care of that. I will be writing a short wizard script to scan all things and give Pueblo links to set either one flag or the other. Note - this flag is not mutually exclusive, so if you are able to set it, I will ask that you not set both unless absolutely necessary.

Domain and Website

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 11:19:56 MST

By Alara: And we're back up! A month later. And a few more updates: I've put this server behind Cloudflare, just as a thing to play around and experiment with. If there are any connection issues, this may be the cause. Another small item of note - in the next week or so, we may lose DNS, as I've initiated a transfer of the domain to another registrar. I'll try to get everything hooked back up asap after this takes effect. Finally, "Connected Players: #" on the website now links to a pretty-print link (https://tfgmush.org/players/connected) which is a special case that shows online players rather than the original URL format.

Great News

Sun, 06 Jan 2019 11:51:57 MST

By Alara: Best news ever, in fact. That is the RPi is nearly recovered fully! I have a few outstanding items to take care of, but right now they are minor. But all websites hosted on this tiny $30 device are now working, and I now have a plan to have an active mirrored backup for everything as soon as I can justify another hard drive to run a second Pi.

Fix the thing

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:57:00 MST

By Alara: Timezones are still not being written into SQL correctly (for the ATOM feed). See if this fixes it??

Further Fixes

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:52:48 MST

By Alara: A quick note to let y'all know that all SQL has been recovered, and backup scripts are still working. The only major items left are actual web hosts, letsencrypt and hooking everything up from them. This should not be too bad, though. At least I hope not too bad...

Upgrades, Breakages, and Fixes

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:41:46 MST

By Alara: Here's an update on what's going on this week. Alexander is visiting MAGFest this week! HOORAY! I wish I were there too. I told him to try to attend the Demoparty, because I hear those thing are pretty underground and cool. I completely screwed up the server on Tuesday while running a suggested upgrade to MariaDB 10.1. Turns out Debian (and Raspbian) has a demo OS release out which when upgrading to that (because I thought they followed the same major release schedule as Ubuntu, Windows 10, etc.), completely borked the system as far as MySQL, Apache, and PHP goes. Basically my LAMP install bit the dust. So I am spending the remainder of this week refreshing ALL of Raspbian from scratch. This includes upgrading to a RPi3+ which I've been hoarding at home as well as migrating to HDD-Only mode (this is apparently programmable in the RPi3's internal flash, so you can pull the SD card and it will still function)! Additionally I got Raspbian Stretch installed by default, as well as MariaDB 10.1 running as the base SQL server. Compiling PennMUSH last night was a real pain. Turns out it couldn't guess that the SQL client libraries were located in /usr/include/mysql, and so I followed PennMUSH's SQL instructions to "specify mysql_config via --with-mysql=" but did not realize that was supposed to point to /usr/bin/mysql_config. I thought it was supposed to be /etc/mysql/my.cnf or something! Well, after that was clarified around 11pm, the engine FINALLY compiled and I spent the next hour merging MUSH configs in with the newest distributions. Outstanding issue: All old web hosts are currently under construction. I need to reintegrate all the old website files and reconfigure SSL (probably will just generate new certs from scratch, rather than try to recover the old ones, since certbot is free). Additionally, I need to get cron back up and running in order to properly perform daily backups and other periodic activities. MUSH-wise I decided to turn on the config option to warn on all rooms disconnected from #0 rather than on rooms without exits leading ino them. This means there were about 50 rooms this morning that were complaining about disconnects and unfloating. I am slowly working my way through them which leads to today's big(ish) in-game update: The Sky is now mapped! I thought for sure I had already gotten this, but apparently not. Plus working my way through disconnected rooms, I ran into a few old grid projects which I'm going to gradually open up. A few are easter-eggy, so I don't want to spoil everything by giving you all details here. Just have to go searching, or in ten more years, randomly run across them!

Christmas Box and GMCP

Sun, 09 Dec 2018 12:46:03 MST

By Alara: Hiya, all! I was just working on a few fun things. And annoying things. And frustrating things. But I think everything works now! 1. The Christmas Box was not correctly releasing all the wandering creatures. More realistically, the wandering Christmas creatures could not find the door because they didn't realize they could walk through the only exit out of the Christmas Box due to the inability of testlock() testing EVAL-type locks. Turns out elock() works much better for this. 2. GMCP is actually a working thing right now! I only have one module available: Exits! Set OOB`EXITS=1 on your character to turn on this option. Of course, your client will need to be parsing incoming json data over Telnet Subnegotiation. Check out HELP OOB and https://www.gammon.com.au/gmcp for more information on this. I will see about also publishing my MUSHClient scripts on the website for the saavy folks to pick apart.

Crashes

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 08:17:04 MST

By Alara: I've been attempting to track down what's been causing the game to crash about once a week. So far it's been completely untraceable, due to logs telling me that 'it was the parent process. Oh no!' and the crash happening at very weird times of the day. Therefore, I've done a little digging into my backup scripts and have added some datestamp logging to a few key points in the process. Then reading through mush.cnf, I found a line that said that 'forking database dump doubles your memory usage. Do not use if you are low on memory.' I have no idea what my memory usage is on my little RPi, but I imagine it's not THAT big. Therefore I've turned off the forking, just to see if I can run for an extended period of time. This also means that once more, the game will freeze for a few seconds while we back up the database every twelve or so hours.

HTTP

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 17:43:05 MDT

By Alara: Woo!!! 1.8.7 totally adds this HTTP thing, as well as a websocket (which I have yet to figure out). HTTP Handling is totally awesome! This is WAY better than my plan for a REST API via MySQL. By creating an "HTTPHandler" bot player who is assigned as such in the config, I can now code it with a bunch of GET/POST responses for someone viewing on a browser! For example, check out RIGHT NOW tfgmush.org:3349/who or tfgmush.org:3349/look?name=here and gasp in awe or something.

Social Networks

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 18:30:45 MDT

By Alara: The Social Network list in the +FINGER code should be fixed! For whatever reason it was giving up around Facebook or so, but all options should be back. Additionally I added an easy Discord one in case you want to share your username for that. I could stand to turn off a BUNCH of these though... They're so uncommon! +HELP FINGER SOCIAL has all the details you should need.

Quick note on Ambiance

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 09:37:44 MDT

By Alara: I decided to also add on a fast little feature to ambiance: if you're idle for more than an hour, all these messages should halt until you're active once again. We have players that remain logged in for days, and I imagine they'd appreciate coming back to see what's ACTUALLY been happening, rather than seeing days of ambiance messages filling client buffers.

Ambiance Update

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 13:07:34 MDT

By Alara: Quick note: you may have noticed for a long time that periodically (anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes) you'd get blank lines interspersed with maybe ambience messages (I'm not talking about the keepalive characters in Blowtorch). I looked over the ambiance object just now and found a way to significantly simplify its code. Hopefully these problems will be fixed! Let me know if they're still appearing though.

Spring Solstice

Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:17:15 MDT

By Alara: It's the vernal equinox today, and Jadesaber suggested we do a little celebration with it! It's a bit of a spur of the moment thing, and I don't know what all we can throw together at the last minute, but if you want to hang out, I'll see if we can start something around !

News Update

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 12:38:45 MDT

By Alara: I've updated the News Printer to announce, not via @pemit to everyone alive, but rather on the Public channel when a new article has been posted. Hopefully this particular post was visible when that happened!

Features, Fixes and Fun

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 11:13:17 MDT

By Alara: I've fixed up a bunch of things, thanks to Alexander who has been unintentionally playtesting a lot of my lesser-used systems! Let me see if I can remember all I've done in the past few days. - Dreamcasting no longer sends @mail to the sleeping/away player unless they are offline. You can now dreamcast to offline players. - +FINGER / no longer shows the "That player does not exist." message due to double command matching. - &SOC_ now uses &SOC` to clean up a player's examine. Similarly, FINGER_ now uses &FINGER`. - +FINGER has been massively cleaned up in the code so that I can add or fix things easier. - +FINGER now takes new keywords after the player name: +FINGER RP shows only roleplay and general IC information. +FINGER SOCIAL displays a character's social networks (SOC`*). +FINGER TOPICS displays the subtopics set on the character (FINGER`*). Take a look at +HELP FINGER which has been updated accordingly. - With the creation of our newest player, Nysh'ala, we've confirmed that non-alphabetic character names do work. However, there may be unforseen issues with this. Submit a bug if anything is discovered! - I'm slowly working on migrating Merc's +HELP to a homemade SQL system. Progress is slow, and the system is not ready for release yet, but stay tuned as it's looking nice so far! - All rooms now belong to a zone, including spaceships and other planets. YELL is broken as of yet, but I should be able to fix that relatively easily. - Superzones such as other planets, extraplanar areas, a far-away island, etc. will now take priority over where you are teleported to after a death cooldown. In short, if you die too far from your HOME, you will be teleported to a base room for the area in which you died. This is more for convenience (a friend flew you to Megadon in his own ship, and so arriving back in your bed after having died, you have no way of getting back there on your own) than it is for RPG/QUEST cheat prevention. Because we don't really have many quests, and RPG fighting is unheard of. There may be more I've missed, but this is the most I can think of for the moment. If any problems arise, do let me know! Take care. -Alara

Predefined Emotes

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 18:24:04 MST

By Alara: And that wraps it up! Pre-defined emotes have been completely reworked, including gender-specific ones. Note that the +HELP files have not changed much, but for staff, AHELP EMOTES is added which mirrors the HELP attribute on the emotion machine. If any problems are found, pleeeeeease bug them! These could be simple things like me overlooking automatic adverbs (which I discovered yet one more while going through the old formats), or blank lines in which I case I missed one or two attributes. Also if you want more, they're much easier to create now, so send in your ideas!

Possession and Pre-defined Emotes

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 15:38:34 MST

By Alara: I've gone and done a super awesome, super streamlined thing!! The Sluagh race has been given the "Possess" skill! This means that while in the same room with some thing that is able to be possessed, you can POSSESS . From this point on, you will be set as dark, but instead of Someone doing all the things that are audible in your location, it will look like the thing you are possessing is acting. This applies to all communications specific to room-wide audible actions like SAY, EMOTE, HISS, ASK, EXCLAIM. I am also working on updating pre-defined emotes to handle possessed things as well, but since I have coded each of these separately from one another, I feel it's now time to streamline them into a single command or set of commands. Here is a list of specific examples (using 'a creepy bunny man' as the target of our possession): - SAY Hello: 'A creepy bunny man says, "Hello."' - EMOTE grins creepily: 'A creepy bunny man grins creepily.' TICKLE: 'A creepy bunny man wiggles his fingers threateningly.' - TICKLE Alara: 'A creepy bunny man tickles you mercilessly!' Additionally!! This rewrite of the pre-defined emotes now means that you can use emotes on things: TICKLE MAN: 'Alara tickles a creepy bunny man mercilessly!' There are a FEW weirdnesses and things people might find odd: 1. You will no longer be able to target yourself with a pre-defined emote. Trying to will revert to the untargetted version. 2. If you are possessing something and it in turn uses a targeted emote on you, it will work, but you will see yourself acting on yourself, and then the thing acting against you. 3. You must be in the same location as the object you are possessing. Moving to somewhere else will revert to the typical dark-mode commucation where your name will be substituted with 'Someone.' A few other things of note: UNPOSSESS/RELEASE clears the possession of the thing, and unhides you in the room. Also logging out (and maybe dying in the future) will force you to UNPOSSESS.

Discord Webhook

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 17:50:27 MST

By Alara: Okay, so ignoring all previous news posts, I've gone and fixed up the Discord Server I administrate to handle a webhook from IFTTT which reads the rss feed on a regular basis! And then in drops THIS POST in one of the channels. So coooooool. In addition, I worked through a few bugs I was finding in regards to the wikiLinker, and a few PHP errors regarding the news stuff. Hopefully the majority of these issues has been fixed. Later! -Alara

Yayy!!

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 10:30:24 MST

By Alara: Because this has been Jadesaber and I all week long!

Finally some creativity!

Sun, 12 Nov 2017 19:56:32 MST

By Alara: Thanks to Adamros for kicking me into a short spurt of inspiration. Last weekend I sat nearly all of Saturday working on a recipe for roasting marshmallows with him as the test subject. In short, any sort of campfire item (something @parented to #9135) will allow any sort of "bag of marshmallows" (cloned from/parented to #9134) sitting beside it to work. These items plus ROAST MARSHMALLOW and EAT MARSHMALLOW are all you need to enjoy a shot of jet-puffed deliciousness. In addition, you'll find the area of the forest just north of the Great Tree to be a bit more connected and a bit less "rectangular." In one of the empty areas, I've cleared an area where you can gather with fellow forest folk to enjoy a nightly bonfire (armed with marshmallows, of course). I also have plans to open up a few campsites in the same clearing to set up tents and the like. I plan to talk with Jimmy and see if he'll be up for stocking all items necessary for camping excursions.

Clock

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 11:06:28 MDT

By Alara: I find that the clock ticking once per hour, when you have a sun and moon to periodically tell the time, is a bit annoying. Therefore, I've disabled the once-per-hour clock announcement, and will rely on in-character sun/moon messages.

Friends

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 10:10:24 MDT

By Alara: A small update - FRIENDS was not used, except by one person, so I've gone ahead and removed the entire system. This was a bit like +watch systems that other MUSHes use, but given that everyone who connects notifies everyone in +public, I found it a bit redundant, and figured it could be removed as a codified system.

Moar Fixings

Tue, 30 May 2017 10:46:11 MDT

By Alara: I've done a few things regarding registration and player requests which I did not realize were problems until today. 1. Multi-word player names are now allowed. I see no reason to prevent them, as they work, and setting an alias for a first-name only is easy enough. 2. I did not realize until now that the "You are not registered" notification was showing up for everyone all the time. Except me. I've moved that script off of the player parent and onto the event logger, so this should no longer be an issue. Anything else, let me know!

More Dryad changes

Sat, 27 May 2017 10:28:28 MDT

By Alara: Okay, we'll see if this works. Tree portal no longer possible to unfindable people or locations. I may also implement the quiet flag into a lot of these, but we'll see.

Dryad Skill Update

Sat, 27 May 2017 09:45:29 MDT

By Alara: I've made a few updates to the dryad skills, since Deh has been about and asking for a few updates! 1. DESCRIBE TREE LOCATION is now accepted, and will set your tree's description as it appears in its container room. Any length of text is accepted at the moment, but please do keep it at a reasonable length. One sentence is probably good, any more is also probably good so long as you're not sending every reader into conniptions. 2. WINDBLOW is now restricted to outdoor rooms only. If the ISOUTDOOR attribute is set on the room, container, or its parent (and the target is connected and not unfindable), you can windblow. It turns out TREE PORTAL is not yet restricted, so I may want to set up similar permissions.

KEEPALIVE

Wed, 17 May 2017 09:31:14 MDT

By Alara: Previously we had the keepalive flag set by default on all players. However, I have found over a number of years that this, while keeping the connections alive as expected, also caused some unintended behavior on clients like Blowtorch, which would still print the characters 0xFF 0xF1 once a minute; something that gradually becomes annoying, especially when real estate for actual, useful information is limited by the screen size. So I've decided to simply remove KEEPALIVE from the default list of flags to set on new players, and I've also reset KEEPALIVE flags on all players. If you find you have connection issues after this, you can, by all means, @SET ME=KEEPALIVE and re-activate it on yourself. Also remember that while KEEPALIVE prevents your ISP or router or computer from terminating an otherwise-quiet connection, you can also keep the server from terminating the connection by sending a periodic IDLE() command via a timer.

New map!!

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 19:20:27 MDT

By Alara: At long last, after YEARS of the promise, the Southern Forest has been mapped in beautiful ASCII. Enjoy!

Test

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 11:15:39 MST

By Alara: This is just a test post to see if RSS updates still work properly. Good luck!

News Update

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:29 MST

By Alara: I'm not sure why it wasn't fixed before, but I've finally gotten around to actually updating the news page links on the website to use the URL rewrites for news posts (https://tfgmush.org/news/). Also, the in-game NEWS command should now contain pueblo (or plaintext) links out to the webpage equivalents for each news post. Also, if pueblo is used in your client, a news post will also provide clickable Prev/Next links. Finally, more of a to-do item: https on the website is not yet global. There are still a few unencrypted elements, and for whatever reason, https is not forced like it should be. It may just require re-registration from certbot...or a few Apache tweaks.

Functions/Hooks

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 12:44:46 MDT

By Alara: Note sure why, but for whatever reason the work I did in May to migrate functions and hooks out to alias.cnf (for better administration on those systems) was reverted in the database, or simply did not get removed from the Startup Machine. However I'm pleased with myself so much that I am announcing that these definitions exist and work solely out in a separate config file. Should be much easier to add new functions now!

New Location

Wed, 18 May 2016 23:15:36 MDT

By Alara: Yes, it's been a while. Yes we are moved! The Fairy Garden is back up and running mostly full-time! I had the game go down a couple days ago, which I only just a little while ago discovered, so I need to figure out what's causing that and hopefully remedy it, but we are indeed back up and running on the Pi! In addition, please welcome Rajabelle back from her long hiatus! It's been a very long time since I saw her and it was a delight to be able to catch up and chat yesterday. Also, I've been working on lots of new things including random butterflies which are very awesome, a multiple name match search tool that WORKS FINALLY (hoping to eliminate the 'I don't know which one you mean!' message), and a few other things. Fun times for all!! -Alara

Server Upgrade

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 10:42:38 MDT

By Alara: Morning, all! Just FYI, the server has been down since the weekend. Unfortunately this is a nice hardware issue. The server machine we've been running on for the past few years (a 2009 HP-DC7600 has been giving me numerous disk errors and periodic reboots have prompted processes that will hang the computer until I look at it days later. As a result, I've decided to simply retire it and migrate everything to a nice, simple (and quieter) Raspberry Pi. Everything will continue running there, at least until I can afford a nice big server to replace the old one. Latency due to slow hardware (it IS a $35 computer, after all) may be present, but I'll try to keep everything lightweight to reduce background processor load. Also, the online state of the server may be sporadic for a while as I optimize and update, particularly with importing the website and removing the Raspbian desktop interface (didn't realize full Raspbian included the GUI which I hate). Online state may also be affected by the physical move of the server to new ISP in a couple weeks. Thankfully the old server files are still accessible, so I'll be able to import Apache website settings and such. Thank you for your patience!

GMCP at last!?

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 22:12:51 MST

By Alara: Wow! And here I was going to try and hack it into the hardcode myself in my spare time. But guess what? THEY ADDED GMCP SUPPORT!! I'm very excited about this. I was talking with Jadesaber just last night (before discovering that GMCP is now a thing for PennMUSH), and thinking about the maybe-spammy sunrise, sunset, moon phase and clock quarter-day tick messages. I know if I were to idle without the SILENCE flag, I'd become quite annoyed at all the text scrolling by. That's why SILENCE was invented, after all! But my idea was to see about adding GMCP support so that I could send messages to the client, but automatically keep them from printing to the console. I mean, that's what the protocol is for after all. Well guess what? While searching for the sources to MSSP-REQUEST (which uses a similar Telnet option), there it was in all its glory. GMCP. Already implemented. Thank you PennMUSH devs!! You guys are awesome!

News Feed Updates

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 17:56:22 MST

By Alara: In the past 2-3 weeks I've been working steadily to upgrading the RSS feed as well as updating the News page on the website. Running the RSS feed through Google's RSS Validator tool flagged a TON of invalid items (as Feedburner was not updating for a long time). Some major upgrades as well as changes required or recommended by Feedburner are as follows: - Feed is now dynamically generated via PHP. New feed URL is at https://tfgmush.org/db/feed.php. - Feed now references ATOM libraries. - managingEditor and webMaster tags now give my name in addition to my email, something Feedburner requires. - A number of feed items did not contain properly formatted pubDates when I was fiddling 2 years ago. - Some item descriptions had invalid binary characters which were blocking EVERYTHING. - Item GUIDs were not actually unique. All RSS tutorials say if you make GUIDs equal to the URL to a single news post it should work. Right now, I don't 100% trust it, so I've created an in-game function "guid()" to generate a standard 128-bit GUID for this SQL field. - The link tag no longer relies on the SQL link field for each post, since URLs and such are changing as I develop. The Link tag is now dynamically generated and routes users to the single news post page for that entry. - I am thinking I'll simply set the GUID tag to the same string as the link tag. The IDs in the SQL table SHOULD be unique, so it should work. - I am also planning on possibly putting the UNIX timestamp into the pubDate field in the SQL document, then translating it in PHP whenever the RSS feed is generated.

Wanderer Update

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 16:44:03 MST

By Alara: Just a quick note: Wanderers now checked for regularly @locked exits (without doors) to pass or fail choosing a random exit to walk through. This will let me complete the Christmas Box idea by setting a custom lock on the out door.

Christmas Updates

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 18:22:57 MST

By Alara: Hello all! It's been a while! This holiday season I've made some significant updates to a few of the systems, specifically those pertaining to the old Holiday Boxes and wanderers. Firstly, the "Christmas Box" as it was called, is no longer some little object that I hide away way up in wizard-land where I push a button every Dec. 1st and out pops everything. No! Rather, this all should happen semi-automatically now! To release all the creatures I will still have to push a button (i.e. open a door and let them out), but the festive snow-cover you see in the forests and central plains will now occur immediately on the 1st of every December, and dissipate on the 1st of January! Secondly, on a more technical side, wandering creatures will now respect closed doors a little nicer. Instead of just butting their heads against one non-stop, if one is closed, they'll simply glance at it every so often. Also creatures will reset to their respective homes during the midnight hour of every day. Note - this does mean that a creature may just sit in one room and do nothing for an entire hour, but at least they won't get lost for very long now. Unless they end up FIXED for some reason.

Good news

Sat, 29 Nov 2014 09:27:22 MST

By Alara: I've reinstantiated the Winamp bot to notify me when someone logs in and requests a new character! Finally, after migrating to Ubuntu, I can be notified and no longer blind to new character requests for weeks after they're made (yes, I could log in regularly, and probably should, but I haven't for a while...).

A quick test

Mon, 22 Sep 2014 08:40:28 MDT

By Alara: This is just a quick test to make sure SQL is still working...

SQL Fixes in Progress

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: One more issue I need to fix: new news posts are not corretly being added to the SQL database. This should be fixed. And I'll see about updating the ServerStat widget on the website as well. Maybe make it work via SQL as well. That would be awesome if it worked! Written by: Alara on Monday, April 21, 2014 at 09:45AM MDT

Winamp on Ubuntu

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: Another issue I've been having: Winamp doesn't seem to want to work at the moment. For whatever reason, Ubuntu 12 dislikes any version of Ruby above 1.8.whatever, and given that I was using some of the Ruby 1.9.2+ gems, I'm going to have to find some time to sit down and debug it. Written by: Alara on Monday, April 21, 2014 at 09:41AM MDT

Linux/Ubuntu at last!

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: Just so all of you know, last week I performed a super major server upgrade, converting over to a Linux-based OS which allows us to run the latest version of the server without any issues. However, migration has been a bit of a headache due to a few improper coding on the website. That and my daily backups of the SQL databases seemed to fizzle out sometime last July, so whatever was added between then and now was lost (which, honestly, I can't say is a lot). However, everything should be back up and running now. If you have not done so, please update your connection info to tfgmush.org. Our old domain at fairygarden.no-ip.org needs to go. I'll leave it up for now anyways, since all the older players probably still work off of that. -Alara Written by: Alara on Monday, April 21, 2014 at 09:39AM MDT

TMS/TMC Updates

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: I've updated my TMS and TMC listings to use my new hostname "tfgmush.org". If you want to switch from fairygarden.no-ip.org, feel free to! However, I still need the no-ip address to take care of my dynamic DNS, so that will be staying active for a good long while to come. -Alara Written by: Alara on Wednesday, December 11, 2013 at 09:12AM Mountain Standard Time

Coders Wanted

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: I just remembered. A few months ago I editted my TMC entry to state that we're "hiring" coders. So, if any of you all know anything about MUSH/MUX coding, either in Penn, Tiny or any of the other spinoffs of this particular family of servers, feel free to let me know! I'd have to get a system set up for giving out perms, since I've turned on the builder power restrictions for non-wizard players. Anyway, if I can get a general number of people that WANT to code stuff, I can see how worthwhile it would be to set up something. Otherwise, for a small number of people, I could just start giving out builder power to them and leave it at that. -Alara Written by: Alara on Saturday, November 16, 2013 at 03:02PM Mountain Standard Time

Outtage and Data Loss

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: Check that. If you did anything between the 17th and now codewise, you will have to manually restore all that. I'll message the applicable people with information regarding what I think was lost. -Alara Written by: Alara on Saturday, October 26, 2013 at 11:00AM Mountain Daylight Time

Outtage

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: We had a bit of downtime yesterday. All day our router where the server is hosted from was blipping in and out, and so our connection was being weird. I accidentally force killed the server when I was rebooting the computer, and lost about ten days of stuff. Thankfully not a lot happened in that amount of time, and the only one thing we lost code-wise has been restored from logs! So we're good to go now! -Alara Written by: Alara on Saturday, October 26, 2013 at 10:57AM Mountain Daylight Time

Player Titles - Length Limits

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: One small change: Each title part is now limited to 15 characters, giving you a total of 30 characters to use for your combined prefix and suffix.. Any longer and it will just trim the string down to size. -Alara Written by: Alara on Wednesday, October 16, 2013 at 11:43AM Mountain Daylight Time

Player Titles

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: Name titles have been implemented! If you set a PREFIX or SUFFIX attribute on yourself, your prefix and suffix titles will be displayed in your room appearance. Also, PREFIX will override the +public title, replacing any @channel/title you might have set there. Don't worry though. All you need do is unset your PREFIX attribute and your regular @chan/title for Public will be restored. I'll see how this goes, and if it works out well, I'll see about moving the system into the other channels as well. Written by: Alara on Wednesday, October 16, 2013 at 11:39AM Mountain Daylight Time

Wardrobe Owners

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: New owner definitions for the wardrobe system: when a wardrobe is requested, your wardrobe dbref will be stored alongside that of your player. This is put into place to make way for a planned near-future expansion of the system. Also, two new wizard commands have been put into place: - NUKE

@mail on SCORE

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: I've added a mail summary line to the scoresheet if mail exists in your inbox. Note: this does not check any mail that's been archived into your own custom folders, unread or not. It also displays which messages have been cleared and queued for purging either with @mail/purge or logging out. This is the first step toward streamlining a messaging system that I have in mind. Hopefully it won't be too difficult and won't require much hacking in terms of disabling the regular mail system in lieu of a "better" one. -Alara Written by: Alara on Monday, September 23, 2013 at 11:05PM Mountain Daylight Time

@doing and WHO

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: I've reinstated the DOING attribute on players. If you are afk, or in the middle of something, or really anything, set the DOING attribute with the syntax @DOING ME=. @DOING ME by itself will clear it. When you have a DOING, the message will be shown behind your name on the WHO list. This is especially useful if, for example, you are at work, but still logged in and idle. That way people will know why you're not responding if they want to get ahold of you. Enjoy! -Alara Written by: Alara on Monday, September 23, 2013 at 11:28AM Mountain Daylight Time

Is a Windows-based server worthwhile?

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: Just a quick note: right now, the server is running off of an old Windows XP 2-core HP DC7600. Not very fast, though it's enough to run the MUD. However, any large web packages I've installed have always run rather slowly, probably due to Windows built-in security. So, keep these notes in mind when you're submitting suggestions. Written by: Alara on Sunday, August 25, 2013 at 11:09AM Mountain Daylight Time

Web Designers Wanted

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:49:00 MST

By Alara: So I'm looking at the website, and I see it's sorely lacking in, how shall we say, quality. If anyone has any suggestions for upgrades to the website design, including content even, feel free to @mail me or send me an email at samakhulis@hotmail.com! Perhaps, if anyone is competent in web design themselves, I can open an FTP port to the webserver to allow you contribute apart from the wiki which already allows such things. I've also fiddled around with the idea of a CMS over the years, and it's still looking pretty attractive. However, I can't seem to pin down a good one, though with all my testing, it seems like Wordpress would be the best as long as we didn't glut it up with too many plugins. Let me know if you have any ideas! I'd love to hear your thoughts. -Alara Written by: Alara on Sunday, August 25, 2013 at 11:05AM Mountain Daylight Time

Major SQL Feature Release!

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 08:31:38 MDT

By Alara: Great news, everybody!! I've updated the player sql table to include a written summary of your character! All you need do is set the SUMMARY attribute on your player, and the sql object will do the rest. Of course, updating only takes place every hour or so. The summary is fully evaluated, so if you want to parse in your description or any other bit, feel free! Do note that I'm surrounding everything with the sqlescape() function, so you shouldn't be able to pull off anything too funny though :P. Example: &SUMMARY ME=She was born a fairy of Lunara, and discovered/created a portal to the old world.%r%rShe looks like this:%r[eval(me,describe)] [See this link for the result!] Have fun! -Alara

POKE ALARA

Sun, 23 Jun 2013 16:57:19 MDT

By Alara: I swear someone is gonna get fed up with my computer making noise all day, so don't go abusing it. However, note that now you can POKE ALARA and basically get my attention with the wizard-only beep() command. If I'm on my phone's client (Blowtorch), I have it set up to buzz whenever the bell character is heard. So feel free to poke me! And who knows? Time it just right and make sure it's sitting in my pocket just so and ..well...you can pretty well figure out where I'm going here. Anyhow, hopefully soon I'll have my bot back up and running and alerts related to you all logging in and sending messages will be much smoother and easier. I might even set up the Pushover service to send notifications! Wouldn't that be awesome. -Alara

Online Checker

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 08:40:06 MDT

By Alara: We've a new website tool! https://tfgmush.org/check will now show online status of every server we host here at this address. This ALSO includes the periodic minecraft server that I might turn on in the evenings (for which there's a limit of 20 logins (which is default)), plus an SVN server that I use for work, but can open code-based projects up for various reasons. Anyway, I'll probably expand on it later, but for now, enjoy the new page! -Alara

Wardrobe Multidescer

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:46:15 MST

By Alara: I've just made a significant change to the wardrobe system. Previously, the wardrobe would return a large block of text for you to copy and paste into your client to redescribe yourself. No more! Now, all that nees to be done is a simple @DESC ME which evaluates the current DESCRIPTION attribute from your own wardrobe object. This command only needs to be run once if you plan on using the wardrobe object to manage all of your stored descriptions and outfits. Take a look at your own wardrobe object to see the exact syntax. -Alara

WHO

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:13:32 MST

By Alara: +WHO has been revamped to be more streamlined in its visual formatting. Instead of the brute-force methods of manually spacing out the various columns, I've changed it to instead use the align() function which greatly simplifies parsing individual records into the table. A few more changes to +WHO: - *ASLEEP* no longer shows player location in the dreamscape. - *ASLEEP* ALSO blanks out idle time, since asleep would indicate that the player is...asleep. This is mostly just to keep a sense of roleplaying reality. - If a player is connected twice from two different locations (two MUSH windows, or a mobile client along with their regular client, or whatever), that number will show up in the Flags column. - The OOC/IC flag in the flags column has been removed. It was worthless. All rooms, except for #2 (the master commands) were considered IC. Besides, removing it makes space for the aforementioned "# of connections to this player" flag! And lastly, I've upgraded the LAST option in +who/all (+WHO/ALL/LAST) which now sorts the list of players based on last logout date for disconnected players, and idle time for connected players. So, logically, if you're connected and you check +WHO/ALL/LAST, you've just reset your idle time, and should ALWAYS show up on the bottom. -Alara

SHORT vs. Name

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 09:07:03 MST

By Alara: I've reverted the SHORT attribute idea. It's going to cause way too many problems, especially with things like an object that is @force'd to communicate via say/emote and such. We'll just have to put up with long, descriptive names until one of the devs decides to enable the @alias attribute for THINGs. Which they don't see the point in doing in all the three years I've tried convincing them too. But that's a rabbit trail. In short, no SHORT! -Alara

A few changes and additions

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 16:35:38 MST

By Alara: I've added and changed a number of little things. - Founda a bug with hidden exits that caused them not to show up for cansee (and equivalent) players. This has been fixed. - Sally Spiven has a few more pastries and baked goods for sale. Her menu started getting a little smudged, so she spent time rewriting it and making it prettier. - Dark players (if you have that capability) will now see a room LOOK/QL/LL in a monochrome highlighted black (hx), regardless of current room ansi formatting. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of when you're dark and when you're not, and this should help. There are more things to come, but those will be later! -Alara

Short Name

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:29:22 MST

By Alara: Per a request by our newest player, Leighann, room contents will now parse a SHORT attribute before displaying their name. In short, an object will be displayed with certain attributes in the room contents list in the following order of preference: STATUS, SHORT, NAME

WHO

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:43:45 MST

By Alara: +Who is now consolidating multiple connections. No longer will you see a player listed twice if they are connected in more than one place at the same time. Instead, there will be an added (##) before their name to tell you how many times they're logged in. Also fixed up a small typo with the bottom "There is ## players connected" which fixed various plural verbs/noun endings and such. -Alara

Sleeping and Dreaming

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 23:42:00 MST

By Alara: Alrighty! So, I've added an idle room to the Dreamrealm. This is primarily to be used for players who are afk or distracted or even asleep IRL. If you don't feel like logging out (such as me, where I can't log out or else I'll miss something important), you can simply go to sleep in your current location, wherever that may be, and enter the dream plane. From there, take the south exit and you'll be in a darkened idle room where you can just leave your character be. Nobody should bug you, and even if they do, it's alright. You're not obligated to pay anybody any mind when in the idle room. Just one simple rule: don't start scenes in there. People are there to relax and do NOTHING. If you want to hang out elsewhere, you have 2222 other places to do so (and yes, that's minus one of the exact number of rooms that the world has at the moment! Congratulations on reaching 2222 rooms!). Of course, sleeping will put you at 'risk' for dreamcasting which is the new skill available to everyone (in a brand new skillset known as General Skills even!). LIST SKILLS to see what that's all about. Goodnight, all. -Alara

More bug fixes and feature updates

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 01:11:39 MST

By Alara: Work on the underworld has begun, thanks to the return of Satyana, the daemon queen! However, I, as fairy queen, deemed it necessary to banish her to the underworld, where she now sits trapped in a pit of lava. Feel free to throw tomatoes at her. Well...at least you can try. Other updates! I've changed the TvN wiki page to read "Asepsis" and "Antiseptic" rather than my cheesy term of "Alive" for the term of "Good Taint." Thanks to Rajabelle for this idea. ALSO, I've further updated the standard @conformat to show "sleepers" in a room. This basically shows those who are within the dreamrealm and will wake up in this room. So, if I sleep and am transported to the dream plane, you will still see me in the room where I went to sleep, but under a new listing called "Sleepers." The player will not actually be there, but will awaken there if they ever do awaken. This means I should probably set them as FIXED if they sleep, to ensure that they do use the WAKE exit to leave. That's all I have for now! Have fun, all -Alara

Bug Fixes and Updates

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 01:26:16 MST

By Alara: I've updated a few things and fixed some related bugs in regards to dark players and room contents: - Room @conformat has been updated to be more streamlined and easier to edit. - The new @conformat caused unconnected, dim players to show up. This has been fixed as well. - DARK players now show as *UNFINDABLE* on +who, +who/all and where. - Sleeping players (in the Dreamscape) now show as *ASLEEP* on +who, +who/all and where.

Skills, Ideas and lotsa players!

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 08:39:16 MST

By Alara: Heya, all! Haven't written to here in a little while, but I wanted to give you all an update on what I've been up to. Welcome back Ytheria (previously Lorien), and thank you to Rajabelle for coming on so much more frequently. And also welcome Tiel. Did I already post and tell ya'll to welcome him? Well welcome again. Hopefully we'll have Satyana back as well. I've been speaking with her and as demon queen, she really wants to come back and wreak some havoc on us all. I welcome the opportunity for a bit of roleplaying 'conflict' or fun, whatever comes first. On another note, our increased player activity has stirred up quite a few bugs and ideas which I've been working intently on: - Sally Spiven purchases will now show a prettier messages to third parties. - Ytheria's made a few requests for ideas, and the first is complete with: a smokeable pipe. - I'm planning on upgrading the room contents list a bit. It won't look any different, except now objects will be able to be set dim. - AWAY players (and dark/@hidden) will have their room colours monochromized as a reminder that they are set away/dark/@hidden. - I'm planning a big upgrade to the wardrobe, making the commands easier, and actually letting the wardrobe SET your description, rather than just telling you what you should change it to. - Dryad tree descriptions in the container room now evaluate instead of just get the text on the dryad player. - A new skillset called General Skills has been introduced for skill-type commands that all players can access, instead of being limited by race. The first skill to this is DREAMCAST, which lets you send an illusion to a player who is asleep. - More plans are on the drawing board regarding the dreamrealm. And much more to come! I have about 50 or so tasks/bugs/ideas that need to be processed or reviewed, so I'll be taking a lot of time with that. Hope you're all well! Love you all! -Alara

Gateway MU*

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 16:21:42 MST

By Alara: I've successfully gotten an embassy set up for the Fairy Garden over in Gateway MUSH! In addition to it being a nice advertising system, this also gives us a place to go if for some reason I have to shut this game down temporarily. I've cloned three rooms (my limit) there in our embassy from here: Sally's cafe, a snapshot of the isle of Endelana, and one of the areas upon the lunar plane of Lunara. These three, I felt, were the most descriptive to depict the general feel of this world. I'm going to write +HELP GATEWAY for the connection and direction info while in that realm, but for now, you can find Gateway MU* at connect.mu-gateway.net:6700. I'm going under the name of Alara there as well, so +FINGER ALARA and +MUD/INFO THE FAIRY GARDEN MUSH should all reflect the information about this world properly! Yay for advertising! -Alara

Christmas 2012

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 21:31:03 MST

By Alara: So, per my latest tweet, it's now snowing big time where I live. Therefore I've decided to get all festive and fun and put out the decorations early. Enjoy the snowy weather! Oh, and be sure and welcome a new ..what I would call a demigod, since that's probably the best I can do for a general description. Welcome Jack Frost who lives in a hidden ice cave up in the winterland mountains. If all goes well, he'll be taking adding a rather personalized touch to the snow around here. Have fun! And early Merry Christmas. -Alara

Dryad Treemeld

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 12:51:18 MDT

By Alara: Wonderful news, all! I've been working long and hard on a new Dryad system and I think I've gotten it all squared away. Please put your hands together and welcome the new Treemeld skillset! With this skillset, dryad are now able to plant a seed and grow a tree in any natural environment. Once their tree is grown, they are able to return to it instantly (like HOME), meld with its heart and enter it, describe its interior and even open portals to allow other players in! And of course, they can uproot their tree and plant it elsewhere. All the initial bugs should be worked out of the system, thus making it useable, but I'm thinking of a few more features and bug anticipations to take care of soon. That'll be put in a separate task though. For now, if you're a dryad, look at LIST SKILLS and see all your newfound abilities, and enjoy! -Alara

Backend Function/Hook/CMD()

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 12:24:11 MDT

By Alara: Great news! I've added a new softcoded function: cmd(). This will, at least for me, make it a whole lot easier to write help files and directions. You may have noticed that many of the help snippets on various objects display commands as bright yellow text, usually capitalised, signifying that this is the bit you should type to make a command work. Well, before, I coded this the hard way by using the ansi() function and calling a standard color value from a data table listing somewhere out there. Well, NOW I've at long last @function'd that string, and consolidated everything down into a simple function called cmd(). In addition, I've ALSO moved all of the function and hook handling into the Startup/Shutdown Machine. As a note to myself, if I ever need to add more hooks or softcode functions, all of them are initialized there on startup. And attributes no longer need initialization, but I've kept my old command list in there anyway, just for posterity. Anyhow, you shouldn't see anything out of the ordinary, nor will I, but things should be at least a little bit cleaner now. More to come soonish. -Alara

STATUS Attribute

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 23:52:40 MDT

By Alara: I've enabled STATUS to work on players as well. This opens up quite a few possibilities, such as the dryad tree-morph thingy, or a similar idea I had for a masquerade party for Halloween. However, due to skill restrictions, I've turned this attribute into wizard-only, so if you have an item you want to set status on, you'll have to ask me for help with that. Of course, I'll be willing to do so without any problem at all. Or I'll just build a command that will do it for you. We'll see.

Server Update

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 23:11:43 MDT

By Alara: Sorry we were down for the last couple days. I felt the need to do a complete server reformat and reinstall of the operating system. Thankfully everything was backed up and so getting everything back up and running was no issue AT ALL. By the looks of it, we should be completely up and running now! Feel free to log in and idle or poke me at your leisure! -Alara

Eluana

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 16:51:53 MDT

By Alara: Please help me in welcoming our newest player, Eluana! We're getting quite a repitoire of players now, though most everyone has moved on rather quickly. If you're interested, pop in via one of our five Guest players and check out what we're about! -Alara

Orange

Wed, 16 May 2012 01:47:08 MDT

By Alara: At long last, 256-color support has been ADDED!!! This means we now support Orange text! I've added the XTERM256 flag as a default player flag. If your client does not support 256 color, you may @set me=!xterm256 to turn this off and revert back to standard 16-color. However, if it DOES support it (you saw orange text when I did "Orange" above), and not something funky, then there's no harm in leaving it alone, so you can enjoy! -Alara

Date Bugs

Sat, 12 May 2012 15:39:39 MDT

By Alara: For some reason, the day() function was returning day of the week rather than day of the month. Also, the day() function was not properly taking object dbrefs, and so age of an object was not properly reported. Both bugs have been fixed. -Alara

New Players! New Stuff!

Fri, 11 May 2012 22:09:52 MDT

By Alara: Welcome Sparkle, Moraine, Aihmin and Satyana, our four newest players as of late last month up until now! Satyana's yet another recruit from Achaea, but the other three are from, I presume, finds on Mudconnector or something. Also, I just updated +score [<person>] to reflect class selection, as well as fixing a slight typo in the race lines (which added a space before the period if a race was not yet selected). -Alara

OOC Time Restraints

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:15:41 MDT

By Alara: Heya, all! I just want to let you all know that I've gotten a real, honest-to-goodness JOB irl, and so it will be quite difficult to be here during the day server-time. However, I'll try to be here for a bit every evening or so as best as I can manage, so if you're having difficulty pinning me down, this may be the reason. -Alara

Facebook

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:03:00 MST

By Alara: Okay. I've done it. No matter how much I detest Facebook, it seems to be a thing that almost everyone ought to have. So I've done it. I've created a TFG page at http://facebook.com/fairygardenmush. It's linked to my Twitter, so...well I'm not sure WHICH direction posts will go, but it'll be pretty much a duplicate of the Twitter account, though I might deviate between both just slightly. I dunno. Anyway, there you are. -Alara

Mapper Update

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:32:31 MST

By Alara: A behind-the-scenes update has been made to MAP. Builders may now set the NOPARENTMAP attribute to 1 on a room (preferrably a map room parent) to prevent parent objects from imposing larger ascii maps onto child sub-areas with smaller maps (which would before have caused the parent maps to bleed onto the small child ones). -Alara

SSL, Rolepoints, and Dryads

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:00:14 MST

By Alara: Well, I'm pleased to announce that we've officially upgraded to 1.8.4p9. This took quite a bit of trouble, as we weren't completely set up with the latest versions of OpenSSL before, and the server itself was running into problems when I tried to update it. Because this latest release of Penn requires the latest release of OpenSSL. Ouch. Well, in any case, it's all up and running now and in the following days, I'll be trying to figure out just exactly what I did to make it work. Secondly, I've added the Rolepoints system to the global commands! You may now freely (well, within the limits of the system) request rolepoint rewards for other players. Take a look at +HELP ROLEPOINTS for more info! Finally, from a bit of inspiration from Norbert and a BBC video he had me watch today, I've created the Dryad Rustle skill. This will allow dryads to basically wave their leaves around and create dryad-intelligible messages which will be carried by the wind to all other dryads who are awake. Enjoy! -Alara

New people and newer tools

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:21:04 MST

By Alara: Hope you're all doing wonderfully! Quite a few new developments have been taking place within the last couple days. One, we've gained a few new players, and I'm not sure I mentioned some of the older ones. In total, this brings our ranks (including my alts and those of a few others) up to 22! Pyre, a dragoness, has joined our ranks, as has the naiad, Kaedin. I believe I already mentioned Gareth a while back, and of course Norbert has been fairly regular. Kilgannon joined up around the time Gareth did also, so welcome them both if you haven't already. I can't stress enough that roleplay is the basis of activity in the Fairy Garden, so if you're bored, see if you can't grab me or someone else for a scene! Okay, onto bigger and better and more interesting things: I've taken Saraid's advice, and have dropped the age limitations. You will all notice that your YEARS_BEGUN attribute has been removed, and in its place, the AGE attribute now exists on your player. Within chargen, the age limit has been removed completely. The only prerequisite now is that it be an integer value. The -result- of this is that +finger/+score now displays two lines: one reflecting the IC time for how long your player has existed, and the other reflecting your own age attribute. Age is now completely configurable at any time. Simply CHANGE AGE TO to change it. I've wizard-locked this attribute still, though, just to enforce the numeral requirement. And just for consistency's sake, I might as well make sure it's also positive ;). Secondly, I've fixed quite a few bugs regarding chargen. Hopefully the field of energy will now properly link you, unset your FIXED flag at the end and teleport you out to the central plain. Finally, I've introduced a new (but slightly standard) MUSH command called +hangouts. +HELP HANGOUTS lists proper syntax, but any room that is set as JUMP_OK will be listed here, letting the entire world know that it can be @teleported to. This should hopefully alleviate some issues people have been having with figuring out just where they are and letting them meet up with other people without my intervention. As always, any bugs, suggestions or enhancements should be relayed to me via BUG/TYPO/SUGGEST, page or @mail. Have fun! -Alara

Racial Evolution

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:15:23 MST

By Alara: After about a week and a half of further brainstorming and discussion, I'm happy to say that I've at last completed the new and improved Class and Racial Evolution systems of Chargen! While in the main Character Generation room, you are now required to pick a class. These classes, unlike other games, are not a basis for your skillset or 'profession', but are rather classes of RACES. One could think of these as racial categories, really. There are currently four classes, listed in order of alignment to and against Nature: elemental, furry, lepidran, and undead. Each of these classes has three races to choose from, the exhaustive list including fairy, naiad, dryad, anthro, metamorph, theriolyph, daemon, dragon, naga, lich, sluagh, and vampire. As of right now, the wiki and +help files have been updated adequately, though they could probably use a little extra work. Chargen has been configured to require class, and then step you through a quest-like race choosing system based on the class you picked. Over the next couple days we're going to be running some pretty extensive testing, and if you'd like to help, just pop in and ask me for a chargen reset. Or if you don't even have a character, log on as a guest and give me a poke for a brand new one! -Alara

Levels

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:18:49 MST

By Alara: I had a nice big brainstorm last night that I REALLY would love to make work. It's a system by which players will be able to level into a full-fledged 'citizen' of the garden in general. Based on race, each level would progressively give players new skills and basic guidelines for RP. You can read up on it on the Levels page on the wiki. If you want to contribute directly via this project page, you can always ask me for an account there and I'll make one up for you. -Alara

who-all

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:35:23 MST

By Alara: +WHO/ALL has been written which will list the complete playerbase of the Garden, gender, name and online status. If a player is offline, their LAST attribute will be displayed. If they are online, however, their location will be displayed (respecting MYOPIC and UNFINDABLE of course). -Alara

Super Updates

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:43:51 MST

By Alara: Okay! So, per a suggestion from Skegonga, I've built a large pulley and winch system to pull you up into the Winter Wonderland. This is accessible in the southern section of the high mountains. You'll see a basket on the ground..and if that's not there, you can find a lever in the cliff. Simply PULL the CLIFF LEVER to summon the basket down from the top. Get in and PULL the LEVER inside the basket, and you'll be drawn directly up the cliff and into the area. Other updates...I've gotten smart and stopped primarily hanging out on #1. Everything has been @chowned to Sama, and Sama has been renamed to Alara. Previously Alara (#1), has been renamed to Freya and is now considered off-limits to me unless I'm running database cleanup or a sitelock or something. So Alara still exists, and is still your main wizard contact, but no longer has God power. -Alara

Christmas Village

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 21:59:41 MST

By Alara: Attention!! Well..don't assume TOO much yet. I haven't built a nice proper way of actually ENTERING the place, but I have finished constructing the winter wonderland, and the Christmas village within! Next step before I continue on "Santa" gnome's mansion is updating the wiki to include it as a nice valid area, since it is! Anyhow, Skegonga's given me a couple ideas regarding entering and exiting the valley itself, but that'll take some time to code, and I need to write a few references in the wiki first. -Alara

DIM exits

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:18:48 MST

By Alara: Finally, I've cleaned up the functionality of the CANSEE flag and Vampire see-in-the-dark skill. I've created a new flag called DIM, which will set exits (and objects and rooms and players, eventually), as DIM, which are considered to be DARK to most people, but can be seen by people with the correct abilities, namely the CANSEE and R_VAMPIRE flags. If a dark exit is NOT set as dim, it will not be visible to anyone.

BBS

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:53:55 MST

By Alara: Okay. I've done it. I've broken down and added Myrddin's BBS. The help files have also been integrated in with +HELP BB (AHELP BB will also work if you're an admin). I've changed up the syntax of the help files, since I'm using Mercutio's +help system, and subtopics are the biggest draw for me on that. So instead of the default +HELP BBPOST, I've created +HELP BB POST instead. Just little things like that. Anyhow, if you know how to work it, then you're good to go. This is vanilla BBS. I haven't changed ANY of the basic code. I have integrated year patch, as well as +bbnext, but those are official patches on mushcode.com. Anyhow, enjoy! -Alara

TMC, Aliased Globals

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:57:37 MST

By Alara: Well, as of this morning, I'm happy to announce we are now listed on The Mud Connector! Check the page out at http://bit.ly/syW64T! Since this is a new listing, we're pretty visible at the moment. I've had about four guests login today alone, and all of them have been rather quiet, though a few have tried a few of the standard SGP commands like +finger, +score, +who, +where, etc.. THEREFORE, I've decided to alias a few of the more common commands for the systems that I've created myself to a number of these rather standard MUSH softcode commands. These include +who for WHO and +bblist and +bbread for NEWS (I have NOT installed Myrddin's Bulletin Board for some strange reason. I just...haven't. Finally, +staff and wizzes have been aliased to the standard WIZARDS command. Hoepfully this'll make these commands a little more universal with the rest of the known MUSHing world so new folks who HAVE been around the block will be able to use their memorized softcode commands to still get to the stuff they expect to see.

Updates

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:07:01 MST

By Alara: Oh and for you goofballs out there wherever you are, we're now up to r1316 and still working beautifully! -Alara

Christmas!

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:05:15 MST

By Alara: Merry late Christmas, everyone. Well I guess. My big fat box seemed to just put everything away all of a sudden, so I guess it's over in the Garden anyway. Doesn't mean I'm going to put my current project on hold though. This is something you can't know about yet. But it's coming along wonderfully! Anyway, I'm off to bed. Take care and stay warm! -Alara

More Server Updates

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:30:02 MST

By Alara: Make that r677. Apparently they officialized my Win32 updated projects and help files and things! And fixed a nice little crash bug that they were having problems with. And all while I was updating my own thing to the latest... :P

Server Upgrades

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:20:03 MST

By Alara: Good news! I've done another server upgrade, so we're up to r1289. Also I did a major MySQL upgrade on my computer today, which took FOREVER..ugh... But it's all good! I got MySQL 5.5 working and all the data migrated over, so we're back up and running full-time! -Alara

Registry is Finished

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:01:27 MST

By Alara: The Registry is at a good finishing point. Guests may now request characters within the Guest Housing using the registry object. REQUEST = sets an entry, and then wizards will use a few commands to create, view or delete those entries. Winamp has also been tasked with emailing these people once their player has been created, so now it's got to be online even MORE than before. Really, I'm just proud that the entire system is boiled down into about six commands, all of which are extremely simple, and yet it will attempt to create the player, let you know if the player is not in the database, email the player, generate a random password, and all sorts of things. One more off-topic note: I learned that all rooms must be @chowned to me. Otherwise STATUS attributes cannot be detected. I should force STATUS attribs to be visual, but having them private might come in handy one day. -Alara

Werewolf Transform

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:01:30 MST

By Alara: I've added a new little werewolf skill. It's a little backward from popular methodoligy. Rather than transforming ones self INTO a werewolf in the light of a full moon, instead you are granted the ability to transform yourself into any OTHER race while the moon is NOT full (or nearly full, as I'm allowing Gibbous which constitutes about 3/8ths of the phase possibilities). So really, when the moon is NOT full or gibbous, you as a werewolf can transform yourself into any other race and walk around as any individual. You will NOT be granted that race's skillset, but any +finger/+score will list you as that race. It will be up to you to work out your wardrobe's alternate descriptions. However, if you are morphed when the full moon or gibbous stages arrive (on the hour), you will be forced back into your wolfish state and will not be permitted to morph back out until the third quarter is reached. Enjoy! -Alara

Merry Christmas!

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:46:54 MST

Christmas season is upon us! Actually it's just a matter of me pulling out the box from upstairs in the wizard's attic and transporting all your favorite friends down to the world below. So you can now enjoy a month of festivities all you want with the folks like the sugar plum fairy, Rudolph, the snowman and our newest member of the gang, the peppermint fairy who, uninhibited by riverbanks or mountains will wander just about anywhere she's allowed, spreading her minty-freshness everywhere she goes. -Alara

Moon Update

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:38:38 MST

By Alara: Okay. So the moon line in the DATE function now pulls from a static phase value set on the calendar. Once an hour, on the hour, the clock will perform its tick functions (the stuff that "announces the progression of the day") and will set the current phase of the moon based on moon_phase() onto the calendar while it's at it. So via this perception, a phase of the moon is FORCED to last at least an hour, even though it might ACTUALLY change and come in range of a new phase sometime WITHIN the hour. Exact phase of the moon without this variation will be still accessible via moon_phase() and its internally-called functions.

Moon

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:09:03 MST

By Alara: Moon functions have been created and implemented successfully. DATE will now echo the current phase of the moon. I've chosen a period of three RL days to be one moon "year" or revolution of the moon around the planet..whatever the planet is. During this time, there will be the standard 8 phases. The plan is to somehow program up a few werewolf skills surrounding these phases, namely Gibbous and Full Moon. However, I still have yet to create a tick-based function which will alert the rest of the world when this function actually switches from one phase to the other. I'm thinking about somehow working this into the quarter-day tick listen which will then compare it to the current cosine function and set the appropriate phase number as an attribute on the calendar and ALSO maybe send out world messages of moon phases changing. But...more on this later hopefully. -Alara

Pseudo-wiki

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 21:44:21 MST

By Alara: Okay, so I've decided that -- and == are just a little too difficult to get used to for making a wiki-type linking system which will be parsed by the news webpage. Thus, since I cannot use the standard of double-brackets (Example: pennmush.org, I've decided to use double-angle-brackets. They work just fine! I'll just need to make sure the news page reads them out of the database correctly. And I need to finish up a little in-game +HELP or AHELP page on this system. -Alara

Wiki-like Links

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:19:55 MST

By Alara: Okay. Sorry about that previous post. That was a test, as the title suggested. I've just completed a prototype of a psuedo wiki-linking system. On the website, a string convention [[ stuff ]] is taken and parsed into a link and text. Based on a prefix inside the brackets, these links will automatically route to different places including Drupal nodes, external websites, wiki links and specific player links on the new players page. As you can see from the older posts on the website, the database has been already updated to reflect this standard. However, I just NOW edited the news writer to insert these tags automatically, as well as strip them off for the in-game news reader. Okay. I have to run. But I'll return later and maybe finish this article up! -Alara

Test

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:13:21 MST

By Alara: This is a quick test to see if wiki links will work. What SHOULD happen if we add various links to things like Alara or websites, they SHOULD show up in the website news as regular links. However, in the in-game news (NEWS <num>), the convention used to write in these links should disappear. If this works, perhaps I'll make the convention a little nicer, such as converting them to html-tag-like strings and converting them that way. Anyway, if this doesn't work, I'm taking a break from it. Maybe. -Alara

Players

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 00:31:57 MST

By Alara: Yet another nice little addition: a player table to the SQL database. This table holds information about each and every player such as name, age and race. On the other side, this is then read into the new webpage located at https://tfgmush.org/players

Time and Date

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 23:02:00 MST

By Alara: The time and date functions like year() and month_name() have been updated. These functions (listed in +HELP TIME), can now take an argument of a dbref. If this argument is given and the dbref is valid (existing), the function will calculate based on the creation time of that object. In this way you can see in what year you were created. Of course, these functions ONLY rely on creation time of an object. They do not take your starting age into account, nor do they automatically calculate your age (your creation time based on the PRESENT time). They only calculate at what in-game time the object was created based on the creation time of the first object ever (#0). It's like saying I was born in 1986, not that I'm 25. Of course, you can always set up a bit of math to calculate an object's age. I could work this into the main equation, but it's a little more work than I'm ready to tackle at the moment. Oh, and the DATE/SCORE/+FINGER commands have been converted over to account for this new system. -Alara

Updates

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:25:04 MST

By Alara: Sweet new upgrades. We are now fully integrated with the new 1.8.4p8 patch plus quite a few revisions beyond that. Here are some of the things that have been integrated: -PCRE (regexp stuff) is now an external library. This was a hardcode change put through by Raevnos a week or so ago, but was just now fixed up by myself for the Windows server. This basically means that we can update the PCRE libraries directly from PCRE.org, compile them separately and update them without having any direct updates to PennMUSH itself -In the same way, we have also integrated the external libraries for OpenSSL, another requirement which will be committed by Raevnos soon. Of course, now that it actually works ANYWAY is pretty nice, although I can't get full functionality out of it, simply because I don't want to go paying Verisign for pointless certificates. At least decode64() and encode64() work. -I've updated the Huh? replacement object, and migrated custom Huh? messages over to their own separate attributes. This'll make them a lot easier to handle and we'll be able to store a lot more due to buffer lengths of a single attribute. -Winamp has undergone another set of nice changes which give me the capability of texting back if you've run TEXTALARA. Winamp will now check a specific email inbox for messages that I send it from my phone and relay them into PennMUSH. Messages from this inbox are parsed based on subject line. If the subject contains the words 'suggest', 'typo', 'bug' or 'echo', they will do those tasks automatically. Echo just sends an email-based text back to me for me to see if it's working. Any other subject line, and it wil assume it's a player name and attempt to page that person with the body of the email as the message. That's all for now. Have fun, everyone! -Alara

Huh?

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:57:14 MST

By Alara: Huh? messages can be customized! HUH_COMMAND has been @hook'd to a new object which customizes huh? messages away from the default "Type 'help' for help." Take a look at AHELP HUH (if you can), or +HELP HUH to see how you can return to default or suggest your own messages. -Alara

Social Links

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:17:46 MST

By Alara: Social feeds have been added to +finger code. You may now set attributes on yourself such as SOC_TWIT, SOC_FB, SOC_BLOG, SOC_DIGG just to name a few. The contents include only your username, but when +finger'd your information will display the entire URL in a new section. If none are set, that section will disappear entirely! -Alara

Expanded Timezone Strings

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:30:01 MST

By Alara: Well, I've finally been able to test out Mountain Standard Time as it is defined on the server - timefmt($Z,convtime(time()). Seeing how this is for some reason always expanded, I've written a separate switch on the News Writer to abbreviate the timezone if it is expanded like this. [u(#1866/abbrev_zone)] if you want to try it. -Alara

Quicklook

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:26:01 MST

By Alara: Oh. And just to make everything nice and reverse-logic friendly, I've also (already before upgrading the room parent) created a QUICKLOOK command. Aliases for this are (+QL, QL, +QUICKLOOK, and QUICKLOOK). This should show everything in a nice and condensed format if you have SCREENREADER off and want to see the room without descriptions and statuses. -Alara

Screenreader

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:22:11 MST

By Alara: I THINK I've finally upgraded the entire system enough to be screenreader friendly. I had to do a major overhaul on the object ancestors, particularly the room parent, so that while walking around descriptions would be cut out (since most of them are rather redundant anyway in any particular area). The nice thing about this is that you can set the SCREENREADER flag yourself by running @set me=screenreader. Once this is done, the lisbar will cut out the -_-_-_ bits (which screenreaders OUGHT to do anyway, but I don't want to assume anything), as well as the full room descriptions. Also contents status will be cut and defaulted to the regular name. However, if you're curious as to the full appearance of the room, you can still bring that back using the +LL command (+LL, LL, +LONGLOOK, and LONGLOOK). This will (hopefully) display everything as it is (minus the pretty title bar) for a non-screenreading client. This command includes the full room description as well as statuses on objects. Note: With SCREENREADER set, only the DESCRIPTIONS of the rooms will be removed. Special outdoor/indoor flourishes, regular event flourishes, and desc_contents will still be displayed even when SCREENREADER is enabled. This is because these attributes are special and don't usually carry over from one room to the next. Besides they are fairly short and won't take any time at all to read. So if you have ANY questions or concerns, please let me know. I'd be totally willing to make changes if for some reason any part of the system is wreaking havoc. -Alara

OMG!!

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:10:35 MDT

By Alara: I can't believe it! I woke up this morning to discover that I'd totally missed a guest popping in and actually requesting their own character! Then about 2 hours ago they jumped in AGAIN and I was actually there to catch them. So I'd like to invite ya'll to welcome Lorien, our first drop-in, to the Fairy Garden! Welcome, Lorien! -Alara

Database Entry Fixed

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:39:45 MDT

By Alara: I BELIEVE that this database entry thing is fixed. Commas should no longer make the whole thing die because sqlescape() considers them illegal. Very nice indeed. :) Actually, I ought to test this thing, so there are two right there. Hopefully...wait. I wanna put more in. Hi, everybody! There's one right there, see!? And another. YAY!! Okay. Take care, ya'll -Alara

Test

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:49:26 MDT

By Alara: For some reason MySQL didn't update properly, so I'm running another test post to see if it does it right with the sqlescape() function around the description portion.

Drupal-Wiki

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:37:00 MDT

I've made a gigantic update to Drupal and Wiki PHP apps. If you login via Drupal, you will now be automatically logged in on the wiki page as well. If you don't HAVE a wiki login, one will be created for you the next time you log into Drupal. Your wiki login will automatically be given regular user status. Also, I've editted the wiki database and have successfully merged the previous "WikiSysop" contributions (everything) into a new Webmaster account so that I myself can be streamlined between Drupal and MW. Thirdly, I've again editted the MW database and added a drupal interwiki entry. Thus, any link to drupal: in the wiki will now redirect you to the Drupal page rather than creating a blank article titled "drupal:". Interwiki is fun. I should use it more often, but I had no idea what it was up until about 20 minutes ago. Anyhow, the website's coming along beautifully! Hope to see you there. -Alara Written by: Alara on Thursday, November 03, 2011 at 06:34PM Mountain Daylight Time

RULES

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:30:09 MDT

By Alara: I've created a new help system for +RULES. The main rules.txt file has been disabled and all information from it moved to +RULES (the RULES command is aliased to this as well). This way I can add/remove based on what happens and what problems I run into after this thing goes completely live. Because I really hate rules. Stuff like 'No chatting on xyz channels' or 'Only IC requests on the wvm channel.' I REALLY hate that sort of thing. So my plan is to detail any rules and restrictions based on what I like, and moving it to a softcode system will make that easier for me to do (no editting the txt file and then rebooting every time I make a change). That was a bit too long-winded. Anyway, there you are! -Alara

Patch

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:40:05 MDT

By Alara: Again we have a nice little treat for ya'll. 1.8.4p8! It is now up and running, though there aren't a lot of terribly exciting new features with it. -Alara

Wizard-only maps

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:35:15 MDT

By Alara: With a sort of maze that I just built, I updated my mapper machine. Now it is possible to set maps as wizard-only. This means that if you are not a wizard, you will not be able to see the map. Instead you will see the false message that 'There is no map in this location.' However, if you ARE a wizard, you can type WMAP or WIZMAP and see the map that everyone else thinks doesn't exist. Note that if the area you are mapping does not have a wizmap lock in place, WMAP will display the main map just as if you typed a plain MAP. However, a title bar will appear if the map in your location IS in fact wizmap-locked. Have fun! With my maze, I mean ;). -Alara

MORE SQL..GAH!!

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:37:52 MDT

By Alara: Had to move the post_num addition bit after the SQL INSERT INTO statement. Otherwise, the Post_num in the database reflected the up-and-coming post number rather than the one just posted... Oh and just to remind you, Oct. 22 is national caps-lock day. I should make a function to capitalise EVERYTHING here. :) -Alara

SQL News Update

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:35:23 MDT

By Alara: Okay. So here's yet another. I've added a Post_num field to the SQL News table, so in-game news article numbers SHOULD show up in the database entries now. This will be nice if somehow the text is chopped up in the main description field or users want to come in-game to see the whole article. In any case, we'll see! -Alara

Crash Bugs

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:25:20 MDT

By Alara: This morning I spent a ton of time trying to figure out what was crashing the server. Unfortunately it was something due to a recent update in the code...so I've had to downgrade back to r1200. Hopefully this'll be fixed soon and I can get back up to date.

SQL Test

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:22:16 MDT

By Alara: This is just a test to see if the sql portion of the news is working properly. I'll have to get on my windows machine to fix it up fully..but I just wanna make sure since I meant to a few days ago but never got around to it -Alara

SQL Support

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:37:07 MDT

By Alara: A few days prior, I performed a nice big fixit and managed to actually enable SQL support on the server. With this in place, I can now update the SQL database pertaining to the website's news feed automatically when I post news here! No more going to the website and pasting in the first paragraph of every news post. This reminds me...I need to also update the ahelp news, because I upgraded the news writer to also include article title. This is because RSS feeds like article titles. So now the syntax for writing news is NEWSADD <title>=<article text>. Hopefully I'll be able to address more ideas and problems as they come up. -Alara

New Help

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:24:08 MDT

By Alara: Super duper upgrade! On the PennMUSH SVC system, I found Mercutio's HELP/NEWS system, which lets me add help for new systems without having to run up here to the master room and add them. Besides that, it's MUCH more streamlined. No hiding articles that are basically extensions of a previous. Instead, I now have the ability to just add subcategories to certain help topics. Go ahead and check it out with +help, .help, =help, and even @help! They'll all show the same thing.

Remapping

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:04 MDT

I've just started undertaking the remapping project. By parenting all rooms to a single room in a mapped level (upstairs vs. downstairs), I will be able to simplify any map updates by just updating the map on the single parent room. Like I explained before, this will not take into account adding north and west rooms onto a certain level...which would require a complete overhaul of each and every room's coordinate.

DSpace

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 08:21:49 MDT

News 293 - Brand spanking (mmmm) new Dynamic Space system! So far I've only programmed in one grid exit to the City of Darkness. From the main entrance, you can now GO DSPACE to enter. You then move around with conventional cardinal directions, navigating your way across the map. DMAP displays the current map, as does LOOK. If you reach a spot with a dspace exit, you can GO DOWN to exit into that space. Otherwise you won't be allowed to.

Exit Relinking

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:49:00 MDT

I've added a new wizard skill: RELINK EXIT - This allows a wizard to reassign an exit link to any location they wish, but will save the old location for when they want to reset it back to its original state. This will be useful for creating a temporary portal to another location using an already-existing exit.

AWAY flag and Updated +FINGER

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:47:22 MDT

I've created a new flag which is a little like on-vacation. If you are online, but plan on going IDLE for some period of time, you may set an AWAY flag, which is displayed in the WHO list as well as SCORE and +FINGER <person>.

MAP update

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:46:46 MDT

Oh and apparently that means something like 760+ rooms that already have their own maps. Ick. I'll have to clear each one except for parent rooms. Well, it shouldn't be too hard with the MAPCLEAR command I've programmed into the Mapper. But I also have to remember to make exceptions for hidden rooms which will only change a few lines at a time.

Updated MAP to Save Space

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:45:58 MDT

I've been playing around on a secondary server that I'm hopefully going to release sometime soon. However, I was playing around there and discovered that I could set ASCII maps on just parent rooms and then I would only have to change one room in order to fix a map. Of course, I'd need to go through and fix all the position markers if they changed too badly, but the point is that I can actually do this!!! I've already converted over my house and Alynia's house. I've named the front door...

Superzones and Communication

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 11:49:47 MDT

I've FINALLY combined superzones and paging. It is now not possible to page/@pemit to people who are not in the same superzone as you are. This basically means that if they're on an island/other plane, then you will not be able to communicate in this manner. @mail should still work, but paging and @pemit'ing will not. Enjoy! -Alara

Bug fixes

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 10:56:57 MDT

I've updated a few bugs that I found here and there...(continued in NEWS 287)

Date

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:17:25 MDT

(NEWS 286)I've -finally- added month names to the calendar. DATE has been updated to show today's date in a prettier format with month name included. Also, I've done a "+1" to the week value on the calendar, so we don't have this being "week 0 of the month" sort of thing.

Anti-Spam for TEXTALARA

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:44:50 MDT

TEXTALARA <message> will now limit number of texts to one per minute. This should reduce any possiblity of spam in the future, so people won't be TEXTALARA-ing me a hundred times a second or something idiotic like that. When Winamp sends the text (you will receive a page from Winamp), you will need to wait 60 seconds before repeating.

MAILALARA changeup.

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 14:59:53 MDT

I've changed the command MAILALARA <stuff> to TEXTALARA <stuff>. Because that's how I receive it.

Bot Update - SMS!

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:12:37 MDT

I've updated my Winamp bot to also send me SMS messages. If you wish to text me in-game, simply MAILALARA <message> and this will send me a text. No way to do anybody else though. This is MY bot.

Winamp Bot!!

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:07:12 MDT

NEWS 282 - I've added a nice little feature today: a ruby-based bot which controls my locally-running instance of Winamp. Not that it matters to anyone but myself...but the effects are quite exciting!

The World Tree

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:29:02 MDT

(NEWS 280) I've begun work on an amazing new development spawned from Celtic and Gaelic lore, in which Skegonga is very well-versed. I've submitted it as a suggestion so far, and right now I have the basis for the rooms needed to make this possible.

1.8.4p6 IN FULL!!

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:59:22 MDT

With a bit of help from Talvo, I've fixed up the Windows compile of patchlevel 6. We're all set for the new 24-bit ansi() upgrades which are hopefully coming soon! Yay!! And I got even more help from him, because he explained just exactly what was wrong with it. Thank goodness for patient people. -Alara

Wizards channel

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:58:52 MDT

I've added a new Wizards channel. For those who are wizards or royalty, you may @channel/on wizards. This is going to be used primarily for the Event machine for socket and dump notifications.

Card Deck and q-reg

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:58:30 MDT

Currently coding up a new 52-card deck system. Thus far, I'm only going to use it for a rummy or Twister-style game where you take the top card and do it.

@hook to replace restricted_to=nobody

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 17:32:12 MDT

I've discovered yet another built-in command that has made my life 100x easier. This is the @hook command which takes built-in commands and reroutes them to softcoded object commands. So I can redefine the SAY command and put any code in it I want, and the previous "say" command will now be disabled in favour of the new one....continued in NEWS 276

@func and Seasons

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:38:56 MDT

(NEWS 275) With a few inspirations from Shangrila and my newfound knowledge of the @attrib command, I've also looked into the @func command, and converted a few common functions to global standards...

News Script

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:31:33 MDT

A wizard-only update to the news adding script which will now reflect the number of the article you just added.

1.8.4p6

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:21:19 MDT

newsadd I finally was able to upgrade to 1.8.4p6. Got the devs to fix my Win32 error, so everything should be working now. However, there were two latent errors. I fixed them the easy way by rolling back to a working revision. -Alara

Exit Aliases

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:31:01 MDT

All out/in exits have been aliased with o/i respectively.

@attrib locking 2

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:30:18 MDT

For reference, I am @including #1587/attr_access into the #1587 (startup machine)'s startup. If other attributes are found that need to be locked, add the stacked command to this attribute and @trigger #1587/startup. Note: you will be able to @<attrib> now. Not just &. And on top of that, if PREFIXMATCH is included in the list of flags, you will be able to @<attrib> for @<attribute>. Like, for example, @hon will match for the HONOUR attrib.

@attrib locking!!

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:27:35 MDT

With the help from the wizards at M*U*S*H, I've discovered the @attrib command! I can now lock certain attributes on anything, even if they aren't set yet! This will be wonderful for things like sex, race and a new language system I'm coming up with. As of now, I have created the following attributes in the attrib table: RACE, RACE_PERM, LANGUAGES. They and the SEX, HONOUR, PHONOUR, ANTITHEFT, and YEARS_BEGUN attributes are all wizard-locked.

Room Portal linked to Darkness

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:28:29 MDT

I have linked the City of Darkness to the Room Portal (where you build your house from). The two main exits should block you from going through if you have the flag of the opposing faction.

Hidden Exits Update

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:27:40 MDT

Oops. I forgot to actually apply the @exitformat to the room parent. NOW if the three flags are all unset, you should not see hidden exits.

Hidden Exits!!

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:58:26 MDT

We have a new little thing! I've updated the default exit line to include hidden exits. However, one may only see hidden exits under the following circumstances: they can set the ON-DUTY flag (they are staff of some sort), they are vampire or they have purchased the CANSEE flag. (More in NEWS 267)

Auto-TvN Halt

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:57:33 MDT

I've halted the main listener on the TvN wizard. When it scans through the lists on a tick, it lags the server far too much. Thus, I've shut down auto-migration feature. However, those who can access the nexus objects will be able to spread their respective virus manually. Enjoy! -Alara

New Chargen! New Races!!

Tue, 17 May 2011 11:24:43 MDT

Here's hoping. I recently performed a giant update on the chargen system. It now more closely matches that of a standard vanilla server, giving you an OOC room with a few instructions and finally a final notes room. Actually, it's not much different from what it was before. The BIGGEST change is the race choosing (more in NEWS 265).

Guest Login!

Mon, 02 May 2011 01:12:53 MDT

Boy oh boy that makes me happy! I just got a guest login from someone unknown in Missouri. No idea who or why, but it looks like they picked up on the site and then logged in from somewhere somehow. And I think they are Achaean or something for a few specific reaasons. But it's exciting! Someone anonymous visited! I, of course, was distracted, so I didn't get to say hi.

Maintenance and MUSH spirit

Sun, 01 May 2011 17:27:51 MDT

I've performed a few maintenance updates. All thing objects should now have a proper lock or specification. Also, the service list has been updated, since service 2 was completed some time ago (I believe). (Rest is in NEWS 263)

News - Ambiance Object

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:29:19 MDT

I've updated the ambiance object. Players now with the Silence flag will not receive ambiance messages. You can still turn off just ambiance with AMBIANCE ON|AMBIANCE OFF, but Silence will now cover it too.

Two New Systems

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 11:21:46 MDT

I've started work on two new things: a dynamic dbref command application and M*U*S*H's +dbsave system. Two completely different things, but I think both will be nice to have around. (cont. in NEWS 261)

TvN Application

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:22:17 MDT

The TvN system has now been applied worldwide. You can see functionality of the system at https://tfgmush.org/wiki/TvN or I'll write up a new in-game +HELP file for it. You know, though..this'll require me to create new races to exist within the City of Darkness. Submit your ideas and I'll see what I can do to integrate them. So far I've thought of gargoyle, human (the Other), lich, witch...and...

WebBot Part 2

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:17:22 MDT

I forgot to mention though..this php script will only work if -I- am online and my MUSHClient is open. Otherwise it'll be outdated. I want to figure out a web bot, but at the moment, this is not really possible, as I can't make a php script to get the relevant information, nor can I program one up in any other language (at least, not with my limited knowledge of programming).

WebBot

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:16:14 MDT

At last I've updated my client to write a php file every 30 minutes or so. It will calculate various website-based variables that offline users might find useful. Take a look at the sidebar on https://tfgmush.org to see what I mean!

RPSLS Part 2

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:12:02 MDT

Cancel that. There is no 10-second limit on the RPS challenge. Player 1's challenge will stay globally active until another person (or the same person) comes along and counters it. Have fun! -Alara

RPSLS

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:10:53 MDT

I've finally finished writing the Rock-Paper-Scissors game, only we're using the official ThinkGeek upgrade of that game. Not only will Rock-Paper-Scissors work, but you can also use the choices of Lizard and Spock. (continued in NEWS 254)

Influence Part 2

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:09:10 MDT

I've been developing more on the infection Taint-vs-Nature system. So far, the natural infection works just fine. Once an hour rooms adjacent to fully consumed rooms are converted once more toward that alignment. Also, conversion objects have been created. All you need do is stand in an uninfected or partially infected room and either BLESS HERE or TAINT HERE and one more unit will be added to that room's alignment. The system isn't perfected yet, and I still have some ideas, but everything s)

Influence

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:07:30 MDT

We are currently fleshing out a new overarching virus-spread game that will be interactive with the historical accounts of the game. This will be (from what I understand) a sort of Lusternia-based idea, with good rooms and bad rooms and an ability to convert rooms to good or bad..with the main goal being to convert everything to your side. (continued in NEWS 252)

DSL

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:04:52 MDT

This post probably belongs between 250 and 249. We have gotten High-Speed internet at the house via DSL and are nwo hosting primarily from there. Of course, the router I have does not have DHCP lease time options, so the connection will reset every 12 hours or so and require me to reboot the server. Although at this very moment, I'm waiting on a Youtube video to upload before I try something else that might work. In any case, all connections can be made via tfgmush.org:3349, tho!

Patch 1.8.4p3

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:02:24 MDT

1.8.4p3 has been implemented. HELP CHANGES for the new stuffs. Oooh! And I'm very excited about trying the new Events system. HELP EVENT to see what it's all about. Apparently I can have some fun here. ;)