- A new race: Rakshasa: tiger-headed stalkers, quick and quiet,
who see in the dark and are hard to reach by mental attack -- but
holy power bites them harder than anyone, and always will. They
unlock at Paragon 57 at the Adventurers Guild. See help
rakshasa.
- Wilderness traders priced everything as though the shelves were
bare: a daily stock-keeping slip emptied their inventory instead
of trimming it, and prices followed it to the ceiling. Stock now
settles where it should, and so do the prices.
- Naming the second of something finds the right one: 2.bob
and the like could occasionally act on someone other than the one
you named.
- Spotting a trap tells you how bad it is: the level was always
meant to be in that message and never made it.
- A cyclops can see in the dark again: cyclops are born with
infravision, sense life and sense object, but those were granted
only at character creation -- so the first time you logged back
in they were gone for good, and no spell would bring them back.
If you have been casting crystal eyes and still could not see
your own dark items, that was why. (Found by Gary.)
- Queue depth on your prompt: display queue shows how many
commands you have typed ahead that are still waiting, and only
appears when there are any. (Asked for by Ainzu.) If your
client reads the MSDP QUEUE value, note it had been counting one
short and now reports the true depth.
- Colour codes no longer leak into GMCP: item names sent over
GMCP carried raw colour markup, so a client could show the markup
instead of the name. (Reported by Sanla.)
- Creatures keep the weapon they were built with: a wandering
creature handed a random weapon could destroy the one it was
scripted to carry. It keeps both now, so the scripted one still
drops.
- Your client can read the game directly: Kallisti now speaks
GMCP, so a client like Mudlet can be handed your health, mana and
stamina, what you are wearing slot by slot, the room you are in,
who you are fighting, your group, your affects and your account
progress -- live, without scraping the text. If you build
interfaces or scripts, this is for you; if you do not, nothing
about how the game reads has changed.
- whois showed a stale last-logon: the account login time was
not written to disk until later, so whois could report a login
days out of date -- and NEWS used that same stamp to decide what
you had already read. Both are correct now. (Reported by
Spencer.)
- Item details read in the right order: an object with several
things to look at returned them reversed, so looking at one detail
could show you another.
- Right-leg gear now says right leg: equipment listed an item
worn on your right leg as being on your left.
- If you converted an old character and it vanished, try again:
last release brought the 4.0/4.5 import back, but a converted
character was not being attached to your account -- so it looked
like nothing happened and you had no one to play. That is fixed.
Convert again (account menu, C) and your character will be
there and ready. (Thanks to the returning player who reported it.)
- Quest companions can no longer be renamed: renaming a quest
follower such as Kalare could quietly break the events tied to its
name. Those companions now refuse renaming. (Reported by Gary.)
- Your old characters can be brought across: if you played in
the Kallisti 4.0 or 4.5 days, the game had stopped reading those
old character files and could not restore them. It can again.
At the account menu choose C to convert a legacy character,
choose the version, then give the character's name and its old
password.
- The crash on the 27th is fixed: at 03:49 that morning the
game went down and everyone was disconnected. Something in the
world managed to kill itself, and the code that handles a death
could not cope with the killer and the victim being the same.
Found, reproduced and fixed.
- A charged enemy can no longer flee the instant it stands:
a mob caught by a charge is meant to be pinned for a moment, but
one that scrambled back to its feet could slip away and run
before that window was up. It stays put now. (Reported by
Mizarra.)
- Godhammer now ends when you camp or die, which is what the
spell's help has always said it does. It did not: the enhancement
survived both and stayed on the weapon indefinitely. If you are a
Templar who has been carrying a blessed weapon between sessions,
it will need recasting now.
- Losing your link no longer risks the game: if you were
following a group leader and their connection dropped, the next
death beside them took the whole game down with it. That is what
happened at 01:39 on the 25th. Fixed.
- Teleport picks its destination differently: the spell was
drawing from a random source that other parts of the game reset on
purpose, so it was not as random as it was meant to be. It now
uses the game's own generator. Whether that is what made teleport
feel repetitive in the wilderness is NOT settled -- we could not
reproduce it in testing -- so the spell now records where it sends
you and we are still looking. (Reported by Gary.)
- The wilderness no longer freezes the game: a hunting creature
working out a route through the deep sea could send the world into
a loop it never came out of -- a counter that was never counted.
The game stopped answering and then restarted itself. Fixed, and
the route-finder now notices when it is somewhere it cannot map
instead of guessing.
- Short forms of commands work again: typing par in a
fight said Unknown Command instead of parrying. So did
ban for bandage, stat for stats, for for forage,
and 26 others. Each was quietly reserved by a command only
immortals can run, and the refusal looked exactly like a typo, so
nobody reported them. An abbreviation now finds the command YOU
can use. (Spotted by Rickrat.)
- CB reaches your cabal: if your account belongs to more than
one cabal, cb announced the cabal you were tuned to but
delivered to a different one -- so you heard everyone else while
nobody heard you, and the game told you nobody was listening. It
now goes where it says it goes. (Reported by Freya.)
- The room you are shown at login is the room you are in: if you
had been idled out, the game showed you one room and your first
command ran in another. (Reported by Kelemvor.)
- Idling out no longer strands you where you idled: being idled
out and auto-rented now returns you to the temple, or to the
Gummton Church Narthex if you idled out in the wilderness.
- A short link loss no longer pulls you out of the world: once you
had idled out even once, any later disconnect sent you to the void
within seconds instead of leaving you the usual time to reconnect.
- Rakshasa show their name: they were listed as other on
who. Fixed.
- Refused healing no longer costs mana: casting heal,
power heal or full heal on someone already at full
health told you they did not need it and took the mana anyway.
It is given back now. (Reported by Vinculus.)
- The who list no longer claims zero remorts: characters who
have never remorted were showing r0. They now show nothing.
- mobsearch can filter by area: for example mobsearch name
kender area midgaard. Part of a zone name is enough.
(Requested by Kroil.)
- The hourly hitch is gone: once every game hour the whole world
paused for around half a second -- longer on a busy night. If you
have ever had a command hang just as the hour turned, that was
this. One piece of the world's clockwork was counting every
object in existence to answer a question it could answer without
looking. The pause is now about a tenth of what it was.
- Reconnecting shows you where you are: if your link dropped and
you came back after a while, the game used to tell you nothing
until you typed look, and what it showed before that could be
wrong. You now get your surroundings the moment you reconnect.
- Praying for order reaches its end: pray order refused to take
anyone past the last stretch toward a pure alignment, and could
leave you stranded partway with no way forward. It now carries
you all the way. Pray chaos was the same and is fixed with it.
Reported by Gary.
- Under the hood: the scheduled jobs that back up your characters
now report their own failures instead of failing quietly, and the
manor and clan logs stopped rewriting themselves from scratch on
every single line.
- Manors no longer stall the world: putting a single item into
a chest in a well-stocked manor used to lock the game up for most
of a second, while the whole room was written out. The heaviest
manor we have -- some thirty-eight thousand items -- cost 714
milliseconds for one barrel. That writing now happens in the
background: the same action costs 135 milliseconds, and the
pause is gone.
- Unenhance no longer welds an item shut: taking the last point
of power off an item left it at zero, and an item at zero could
not be worked on again -- along with a gap in the qpoints you got
back. Unenhance now stops at one. If you have an item stuck
this way, tell a staff member and we will repair it.
- Yell and ask need you sitting up: both could be used while
unconscious or dying, which no other spoken command allows. They
now want you at least resting, like say and the rest.
- Under the hood: your belongings are now recorded item by item
as you play, manors included -- they were the last thing carried
only in their own files. Nothing about how you use them changes.
- Materials: hides, bones and meat cut from a corpse do not
survive renting or a reboot. This is not new -- they have always
spoiled -- but they used to vanish without a word, which made it
look like a bug. Now it is a rule, and the receptionist will say
so when you rent.
- Work makes it permanent: tan the hide, carve the bone, or
craft it into gear, and it keeps like anything else you own.
Refined materials were never affected and still are not.
- Your manor still works the way you use it: raw materials can be
dropped in your house and donated there, so piling up hides for a
crafting session is fine. They clear at the next reboot.
- Under the hood: the game now measures how long each tick really
takes and how often it runs over. Nothing you can see, but if the
world has felt sluggish lately, this is what lets us prove it
rather than guess.
EXP works again, and we are finally measuring group experience
- Bugfix: EXP works again as shorthand for EXPERIENCE. An
immortal command was quietly claiming those three letters, so you
got Unknown Command -- the same thing that happened to T and
V last night. We have now checked every abbreviation in the
game and found twenty-seven more doing this, including PAR for
PARRY, BAN for BANDAGE, and AT for ATTACK. Those need
a deeper fix and are being worked on properly, not one at a time.
- Under the hood: we have started recording exactly how group
experience is divided -- every share, every bonus, and anything
that goes nowhere. Nothing about how you earn experience has
changed in this release. If we do change it, it will be because
the numbers told us to, and we will say what they said.
- Bugfix: donating to your manor requires a donation room again.
Last night's crash fix accidentally switched on an old fallback
that sent the item to your vault instead. That fallback had never
actually worked, so this puts things back as they were rather than
taking anything away. (Spotted within the hour by Spoony.)
Two crashes, a deathgrip that would not let go, and your name back
- Crash fix: donating an item to your manor could crash the game
if you had not built a donation room yet. It now tells you so
instead, which is what it always meant to do.
- Crash fix: falling could crash the game when you landed
somewhere with a way down that led nowhere. You now land and stay
landed. Both of tonight's interruptions were these two; our
apologies for the bumpy evening.
- Bugfix: DEATHGRIP lets go when the fight ends. It was only
counting down during combat, so if the fight ended some other way
the grip simply stayed on -- and while gripped you regenerate no
hit points, mana or movement at all. If you have felt inexplicably
stuck after a fight, this was why. (Reported by Tulip.)
- Bugfix: new characters get a capital letter again. For a few
days it was possible to create one without.
- Bugfix: T and V work again as shorthand for TELL and
VISIBLE. Two immortal commands had been added in a spot that
quietly claimed those letters, so typing t got you Unknown
Command -- which looks exactly like a typo, which is why it went
unreported for days. Our fault, and sorry. (Noticed by Rickrat.)
Your plugs stay in, and your bags stop rearranging themselves
- Bugfix: plugs no longer fall out of crafted weapons when you
rent. Your gear recorded what KIND of item something was packed
inside, and a crafted item has no kind to name -- so anything set
into one came back loose, and quietly stopped granting its bonus
until you noticed and re-seated it. Both halves of that are
fixed: it stays put, and it keeps working.
- Bugfix: items packed in a bag no longer migrate into an
identical bag stored inside it. Same cause wearing a different
hat -- two bags of the same kind were indistinguishable, and the
inner one always won the argument.
- Neither fix reaches backwards. Anything already shaken loose is
sitting in your inventory and wants re-seating once. From here
it stays where you put it.
- Bugfix: searching a container with a great many items in it
could crash the game. This is what took the realm down tonight,
and our apologies for the interruption. Fixed -- and it was not
the container's fault, so search away.
- Bugfix: paladins casting SANCTUARY were told only that they
lacked the mana, while PRAC showed a figure that was never the
whole cost. The refusal now names what you actually need and what
you have, and says when your alignment is adding to it. Angelic is
the cheapest it gets. (Reported by Kelemvor.)
- Bugfix: characters returning after a long absence could load
with the wrong experience total -- sometimes wildly too much,
sometimes none. Old character files store experience differently,
and the conversion was not carrying it across. Now it is. If you
came back recently and your experience looked wrong, this was why;
speak to an immortal if it still does.
- Bugfix: CUTCON never actually disconnected anything. Imm
command, but it has been broken for a long time.
- Behind the scenes: work continues on storing player equipment
in the database alongside the existing rent files. Nothing about
your gear changes: the rent files are still what the game loads
from, and every item was checked to make sure both copies agree.
- Bugfix: several problems in that second copy were found and
fixed, including one that emptied it whenever you rented. Your
actual equipment was never affected.
- Note: if you have not played in a very long time, some of your
items may show odd creation dates. Old rent files never recorded
them, so the game invented one each time you logged in. That will
settle once the new storage takes over.
- Bugfix: GWHO could crash the game when someone in your
group had a charmed follower. This is what took the realm down
that night, and our apologies for the interruption. Fixed.
- Bugfix: Clan coin amounts were shown incorrectly. The costs
quoted for inducting and for changing rank titles were the wrong
numbers, not merely badly formatted. They now show what you
actually pay.
- Bugfix: Clan trophies and power displayed the same
value. Each now shows its own.
- Changed: Large numbers are grouped for readability, so
1,234,567 rather than 1234567.
- Bugfix: OBJSEARCH could crash the game. This is what
took the realm down shortly after the last reboot, and our
apologies if it caught you mid-fight. Fixed.
- New: NEWS is now split up by release instead of one long
file. NEWS shows what changed since you last played,
NEWS ALL shows everything, and NEWS 5.3.52 shows a
single release. Older news is still there, under NEWS ALL.
- Changed: EAT, DRINK, SIP, TASTE and POUR now tell you they
looked in your inventory when they cannot find something. They
only ever searched what you were carrying, so "you can't find
it!" was misleading for anything lying on the ground.
(Reported by Ainz.)