Fuzzball MUCK / News: Recent posts

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The source is now hosted under GitHub, and Wyld has taken over the lead devel position as of this time. Thank you, all!

The winner for the 8-bit clean patch (well, really, the only entrant :P) is Sarusa@FurryMUCK, Vash@AnimeMUCK!

While reading through the affected code does not point out any glaring errors (except for one, but it was caught and fixed), I'm giving this a period of at least two weeks for bug testing before making a full release out of it.

The database version number has been bumped. If you have last used version 6.05 or earlier, you will need to use the fb-olddecompress program included to decompress your database before loading it into this version. Because the database version has been bumped, you will NOT be able to use the version of your database that comes out of this one in any prior version of the driver; thus, I recommend you maintain backups and be willing to revert to them in the event that a bug that we didn't catch comes to light.... read more

Okay, so I'll admit it. I'm lazy, and I've been lazy. This doesn't mean that I don't care, though, and it's high time I put my money where my mouth is.

I'm offering a bounty of $10 USD, payable via PayPal, to the first person to submit a patch against current CVS that:

1) Removes Dr.Cat's compression code from the main server, and moves Dr.Cat's decompression code into olddecompress
2) Bumps the current database revision number
3) refuses to load databases with the compression flag set with less than the current db revision number
4) gets rid of all instances where a character in a string is ignored because it has its high bit set (i.e. chars of value 128+ -- NOT control characters or the ESC char)
5) Does not introduce new security holes or other bugs, does not adversely affect the behavior of any other MUCK function or primitive.... read more

As of the next release of fbmuck, the behavior for things that are owned by God (#1) is going to change -- specifically, NOBODY except God will be able to manipulate them, in any capacity. This includes blessing, unblessing, moving, setting, unsetting, and literally everything else

If this is going to become a problem for your MUCK, get everything that needs to be editable by other Wizards owned by a "placeholder wizard" -- that is, a Wizard player (probably named after your MUCK itself) that nobody logs into and nobody plays, and has a (relatively) random password.... read more

Since there haven't been any RWHO servers running for a long, long time, we're finally getting rid of the RWHO stuff. This is just a note to let you know that once we do this, the database will not be back-portable to the previous version. This is slated to be in the next release, 6.07.

Hi, just wanted to let you all know that I just created a community on LJ called fbmuck_devel, for discussion of features, misfeatures, and implementation issues... as well as a roadmap for future development. (For an open-source project, this one has next to no communication going on -- and I want to change that.)

Feel free to join!

Please be aware that the program requirements for Wizard programs (they now need to be set at least M1, plus Wizard, to run) also apply to Wizards themselves -- Wizards who own code must be set at least M1 for their code to be executed.

This is in keeping with the idea that setting a player M0 should stop all code owned by that player from running. This extends that concept to include players who are already privileged for other things.

fb6.05 is now available. This release fixes a bug with MPI {force}. It also changes existing behavior in ways that Wizards need to be aware of:
1) If GOD_PRIV is set, then Wizards cannot @chown anything to #1.
2) Programs that previously ran with only the flags FW will no longer run in that manner: All runnable programs now must carry an M1, an M2, or an M3. If W is set on the program object, the program will still run with Wizard permissions, no matter what the mucker level is -- but setting it M0 will cease its functioning until it's re-flagged.... read more

I've just released FuzzBall 6.00 beta3. It includes a small bugfix, plus a major crasher bugfix, and a slew of new MUF primitives swiped cheerfully from ProtoMUCK. (Acter all, it works both ways. :-)

I've released FB6.00b2 for public consumption.
We're getting fairly close to full general release.

To ring in the new millenium, I'm calling it Soup! I've packaged up the beta1 release of the Fuzzball 6 MUCK server code. It's really been more or less Beta for a while now, anyways. It's high time I called it. Over the next three weeks, I plan to settle the code down and fix bugs. I'm aiming at a Golden Master release about January 21st, 2001.

The a33 release of Fuzzball MUCK has been packaged and released. This version finally adds support for muf READ events, and expands the abilities of the muf event system. @tops et all is finally merged in. O(1) connection optimizations are merged in. MPI should now use a lot less memory.

I've finally merged the profiling @tops code from the fb5 branch into the fb6 branch of the muck server. I've tested this and it all appears to work, but please pound on this code to make sure I haven't missed anything really obscure.

Fuzzball MUCK version 6.00a32 has been packaged and released.
This release includes more 64-bit and arrays code bugfixes, as well
as an EXPLODE_ARRAY primitive.

I've released a stabilized a31 checkpoint of the FB6 code base.
This is starting to look a lot stabler and nicer. One of the cool points is that we now appear to be 64-bit clean.

Fuzzball Muck 5.67 has been released as a bugfix for the old stable fb5 branch. The fb6 development branch is still advancing independantly, and is at fb6.00a30.

I've just checked in some new primitives to work with the EVENT_WAIT muf event system... EVENT_COUNT lets a program see how many events are pending. TIMER_START will create a timer event that will be sent after a given time expires. EVENT_SEND will send an arbitrary USER event to the given process id, allowing inter-process communication!

I've added a fbmuf MUF source heirarchy to the CVS tree. These files need to be updated for FB6's new abilities. In particular, I'm working on upgrading the message board and lsedit. I'll set up a Task area for this.