Group Project Management news

Map Maker for B5 (20100629) released!

A new mapmaker package is now available from the download page.

This is the latest B5 release of the public maps, arches, and server, and Gridarta.

In theory you can just unpack this mapmaker over your existing B5 one. In practice, this may overwrite some of your changed maps and arches!

Due to the nature of some of the changes in this release, more care should be taken when upgrading than normal.

In fact, you should backup your entire previous mapmaker and copy this one to a new location. While arches, maps, and characters from older versions are not incompatible with this release, you may get complaints from the server in some cases. These can be fixed, should they even occur, but the best thing is to avoid them in the first place.

For this reason too, Map Wizards must do a SVN update to be sure they havevalid copies of their maps/arches (I fixed them all a few days ago).

This release sees some big changes, in particular to Gridarta, the editor. These are mostly detailed in editor/ChangeLog. Gridarta is a separate project from Daimonin and while the two projects have a great relationship, we cannot (and don't really want to) dictate the direction of development of Gridarta. Personally, I haven't had time to really use Gridarta much over the past months but when I have used it I've found that the changes, of which there are plenty, have been ultimately beneficial. If you do have a problem with any of the changes or find a Gridarta bug, please report it to the Gridarta tracker.

Daimonin-specific changes have been made to the server, maps, and arches, and (minorly) to project_tools. Apart from the usual boring technical fixes, these include:

• 6 new prayers have been added: remove slow, remove fear, remove snare, remove paralysis, remove confusion, and remove blindness! However, this is very much an ongoing WIP so while they are genuine prayers which will do (more or less) what they say on the tin, they're still not necessarily practically useful in several respects. For example, remove blindness is all well and good but currently there is no way to become blind in the first place! Also, currently there are no scrolls, potions, etc of these prayers and no priests offer them or quests teach them as a reward. So wait a bit yet. :)
• The magic attack/resistance has been renamed to channelling and actually works as a distinct attack now, calculating it's damage on the current mana of the attacking player or mob. This calculation needs tweaking yet. Currently it tends to inflict massively unbalanced damage.
• The attacks psionic, corruption, and lifesteal are now 'leech' attacks as they were always meant to be. A leech attack is where the damage done to the target 'heals' the hitter somewhat. Currently they leech mana, grace, and hp, respectively. Again, this still requires some tweaking.
• Examining applyable lights (lamps, torches, candles, streetlights, etc) gives more useful info.
• Minor fixes to the Utility scripts data_store.lua and quest_manager/lua/quest_builder.lua.
• The GM command /eavesdrop has been added.
• Logs have been optionally separated to technical and chat logs.
• The MW/MM command /setstat has been added/re-enabled.
• Death sickness (stat loss on death) has been tidied up considerably, which includes the possibility to run a server where higher level characters lose multiple stats/points on death.
• The Lua methods object:DecreaseNrOf(), object:Destruct(), and object:Remove() have been tidied/better defined/fixed.