Beta 18

Ruby Upgrade

Ares now uses ruby 2.5 as default. You’re able to continue using 2.4 just fine, but if you get a weird rake error you should upgrade. To upgrade to 2.5, run these commands in your server shell, then restart the game:

rvm install 2.5.1
rvm use 2.5.1
gem install bundler
bundle install

Features

• Significant improvements to the live scene playing via the web portal. Switch between scenes, add simple rolls, change location, and edit/delete previous poses.

• Overhauled the web portal chat page. The interface is better and you can now do things like join/leave/gag channels.

• Set up your website theme colors more easily with a new screen. Note: If you have shortened hex codes or color names in your colors.scss file, you’ll need to change them to a full #aaaaaa; format to use the new screen.

• Add a nickname feature for displaying multi-word names. See Demographics Config (Based on suggestions from Altair/Ixokai)
• Regular players can now access their requests on the web portal. (Under Help->Requests)

Bugfixes

• New rooms weren’t copying over the area from the room you’re building from. (Fix submitted by TheStranjer)

Miscellaneous

• Chat history is now cleared daily.
• You can start a scene from the location view on the web portal.
• You can display idle time in room descs, and the format for AFK display in the rooms has been tweaked. See Describe Config.
• Games will not register with AresCentral until they go public or you manually do so with game/register. Handles won’t work until a game is registered. It’s totally fine to register private/in-development games to enable handle features; I just got tired of cleaning out test installs (mostly my own) that weren’t actual games :)
• I nixed the ‘web watcher’ feature for live scenes. You won’t get notified when someone is just watching the scene from the web. The (Via Web) just indicates people who are participating via the web portal, even if they’re not online at this precise moment (since web portal RP can be sporadic).
• The “your server needs to be rebooted” message to staff jobs, both in game and on web portal, to make it more noticeable. This is important for security updates.

Beta 17

Special Upgrade Notes

1. A reboot is required for this version due to some login code changes.
2. You’ll want to modify ares-webportal/public/robots.txt file to add Sitemap: <your game URL>/game/sitemap.xml - for example: Sitemap: http://bsgu.aresmush.com/game/sitemap.xml. If you already added the sitemap line for 0.16, just change it from .txt to .xml.

Big Feature - Area/Map Overhaul

Areas are now treated as first-class objects in the database. They can now have a description and ‘parents’ so you can set up an area hierarchy. The web portal lets you navigate the areas and rooms more conveniently, hopefully adding more of an immersive navigation than a simple list of rooms.

As a result of these changes, the maps system has been removed. Maps can be included in the area descriptions. Thanks to Faye@BSGU for help brainstorming.

Features

• adminnote command is now named admin/position and documented better. (found by Rucket@AresCentral)
• There’s a new config option to control whether a divider line is placed between poses in scene logs on the web portal. (suggested by Altair@AresCentral)
• Various improvements to the scene view while RPing via the web portal, including the ability to do both poses and emits and showing the scene set and room description. (Faye@BSGU)
• A load styles command lets you reload the CSS without redeploying the whole web portal.

Bugfixes

• Chargen error saving description in web portal.
• Music player wasn’t working on Chrome. (Soph@AresCentral)
• Profile formatting when ranks are disabled. (fix submitted by Altair@AresCentral)
• Scenes are no longer stopped just because the temproom is empty. This is particularly important for web-only scenes, which won’t have anybody in the room.
• Optional demographic fields were being required by the web portal profile save. (Altair@AresCentral)
• Web client cuts off long lines. (Faye@BSGU)
• Advanced config editor wasn’t automatically triggering a config reload. (Ixokai@AresCentral)

Minor Miscellaneous Changes

• New handlebars library for formatting the wiki extensions. Hopefully more efficient.
• Fixed sitemap generation to hopefully improve Google search further.
• Moved the connect screen code to the login plugin instead of the engine for easier customization.
• Added a library to the install script to support Linode. (found by Rucket@AresCentral)
• System chars no longer show up on the admin list. (suggested by Rucket@AresCentral)
• scene/set and emit/set commands have been combined.
• A few minor documentation fixes suggested by folks on the forums.

Beta 16

Restart Required

This upgrade requires a restart due to improvements in the startup code.

Google Search Improvements

I’ve made some changes that should hopefully fix the Google Search. It seems to be working much better on BSGU. Existing installs need to tweak a few things manually:

I suggest that you set your Google Search “Look and feel” to Overlay. It turns out that if you open it in a new window, any subsequent searches you do in that window add to the original search instead of starting a new search. This is confusing. Overlay doesn’t have that problem.

I added a sitemap to help the google search crawler, but you’ll need to set up your robots.txt file to tell the crawler where to find it.

• Edit ares-webportal/public/robots.txt.
• Add a line saying: Sitemap: <your game URL>/game/sitemap.txt - for example: Sitemap: http://bsgu.aresmush.com/game/sitemap.txt.
• Do either bin/deploy from the web portal directory or website/deploy from in-game to redeploy the website.

Features

• The new server command lets you view server uptime, applied database migrations, database object counts and more.
  -startares will now tell you if the game didn’t start successfuly.

Bugfixes

• Coders can now access setup/management features in the web portal.
• Better error-checking around the disableproxy start option. (found by Goodstarbuck@AresCentral)
• Error in onstage/look commands if room description was missing. (found by Goodstarbuck@AresCentral)

Miscellaneous Code Changes

• The web portal pages now set the browser page title more efficiently. If you had any custom pages, you’ll need to update them. Just ask me for help if it’s not clear how.
• The web portal AdminRoute changed to RestrictedRoute and allows both coders and admins by default.
• No more deprecation warnings when running the unit tests. (Patch contributed by @LukeLaupheimer)

Beta 15

Features

• Vistas allow builders to vary room descriptions by time of day and season. (help vistas)
• The notices command now lets you turn the list of upcoming events on/off in the login notices. (Thenomain@MSB)

Bugfixes

• Made one improvement that will allow Google search to 'see' the web portal. This may not entirely fix custom search but it's a first step. (Goodstarbuck@AresCentral)
• Fixed a few issues with updating game details in AresCentral. (Goodstarbuck@AresCentral)
• Database password wasn't initialized properly during install.
• Fixed help hooks. (Goodstarbuck@AresCentral)

Other Notes

• Overhauled the back end of the descriptions system to make it simpler. Be sure to run the database migration (via either bin/migrate or the in-game migrate command) to convert all the descs over.
• Updated Ember in the web portal to version 3.

Beta 14

NOTE!!! Restart Required - This version requires a game restart due to the exit alias feature.

You can find upgrade instructions here.

Features

• The IC Time system has been expanded. You can now configure a time ratio other than 1:1 and use custom day and month names. See Configuring IC Time for details.
• Exits may now have a single alias. This is set with the alias command, and not the MU version of O;out;ou;outside.
• A RP Preferences system is now available as an installable extra plugin, available through Ares Extras.

Bugfixes

• Fixed display of navbar in mobile view. (Reported by Argentus@AresCentral)
• Increased the default file upload size in the web server configuration. Note: This fixes new installs. If you already have a game installed, you’ll want to update your web configuration as described in this thread. (Reported by Argentus@AresCentral)
• Fixed a problem with the AresCentral game registration if the game details weren’t set up right. (Reported by Argentus@AresCentral)
• Posing from web scene page was formatting weird.
• Viewing a character profile on the web portal when not logged in would cause an error.
• Players watching a scene from the web will be cleared periodically, to prevent edge cases where the watcher would get stuck (usually when the browser would close without notifying the game).

Miscellaneous

• A few of the rooms API methods have been deprecated - Rooms.emit_to_room, Rooms.emit_ooc_to_room and Rooms.clients_in_room now have simpler equivalents like room.emit. The old methods still exist for backwards-compatibility, but you probably want to update any custom code to use the new ones.

Beta 13

NOTE!!! Restart Required - This version requires a game restart due to a couple engine changes. Don't worry, once we're out of beta the engine changes shouldn't be so frequent.

Web API Proxy

The web portal can now connect to the game a little differently, to help people who had trouble connecting to the portal through their work/school firewall.

If you want to use this feature (which is highly recommended), it requires a small change to your nginx web server configuration. See Setting Up The Api Proxy for help.

If you don't want to use this feature, you'll need to start the game using bin/startares disableproxy instead of the default bin/startares.

Features

• New wiki extension for category list (and fixed a problem with categories not working). (KarmaBum@AresCentral)

• The list of colors that the game cycles through for the %x! random color code is now configurable. See Skin Config. (ZombieGenesis@AresCentral)

• Saying 'help' to a channel now activates the 'channels' command.

• Folks who are brand-new to MUSHing can now self-identify with the 'beginner' command (help beginner) to get extra help. There's also a new 'help beginner' topic.

• Admins are now identified with a tag in room lists (like Faraday [Admin]). You can configure the color of this and the beginner tags. See Desc Config

• "public" scenes are now universally described as "open" scenes to make them sound more inviting.

• You can now set up commands to run when you connect. (help onconnect) The jobs command no longer runs automatically for admins. (Thenomain@MSB)

• There's now a script to set up a new plugin directory for you: bin/script create_plugin,<name>.

• The Ares Extras repository now contains a Cortex RPG plugin and a simple traits plugin.

Documentation

• An new coding tutorial has been added: Adding a Command.

• The Create a Plugin Tutorial tutorial has been expanded. Instead of using the simple traits example, it now uses a full-fledged skill system (Cortex).

• There's a new tutorial topic on creating Wiki Extensions. (Suggested by Tat@AresCentral)

Bugfixes

• Fixed two problems with 'web watchers' for a scene - one where someone would be incorrectly added to the list even if they were denied permission to view the scene, and one where someone would be stuck in the watch list even after they closed their browser. (Soph@AresCentral)

• Wiki edit lock was never being released. (Soph@AresCentral)

• Scene List wiki extension was showing all scenes, not just shared ones.

• Private background and sheet settings were not working as expected. (Soph@AresCentral)

• The hooks command wasn't working right. (Goodstarbuck@AresCentral)

• actor/set wasn't working. (Goodstarbuck@AresCentral)

• Approval message on login was sticking around even after you're approved. (BigDarkLove@AresCentral)

• The installer will now prompt for your git email and name to prevent issues with the upgrade command. (Goodstarbuck and ZombieGenesis@AresCentral) If you haven't already done so, you can manually run these commands from the server shell:

  git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
  git config --global user.name “Your Name”

Beta 12

NOTE!!! Restart Required - This version requires a game restart, as part of the ongoing efforts to make future upgrades easier.

Features

• FS3 now has a concept called ‘advantages’, which let you represent things that cost chargen points but aren’t skills. Resources, ranks, spells, etc. They are disabled by default.
• The web portal forum listing now shows the most recent post for each board.
• As long as there are no code conflicts or major database updates, you can now upgrade the code from in-game commands.

New Config Options

All of these new options will be set to default values by the upgrade migration, but you can edit them if you like.

• Who fields and where style are now configurable. See who config. (suggested by Goodstarbuck@AresCentral)
• FS3 Advantages. They are disabled by default. See FS3 config. If you decide to use them, you can also control their chargen cost and XP costs (and whether they can be raised with XP at all).
• Ranks display can now be switched between the military view and basic view. See ranks config.
• You can now configure a list of restricted wiki pages (which can only be edited by admin or folks with the manage_wiki permission) and wiki page aliases, which serve as redirects. See website config. (Suggested by Soph@AresCentral and Tat@AresCentral)

Bugfixes

• Error when someone had a wiki page locked and someone else tried to edit it. (Reported by Soph@AresCentral)
• The web chargen screens weren’t using the configured ‘blurb’ text for the ability instructions.
• Web chargen wasn’t counting your free backgrounds/languages correctly when preemptively warning people that they’d spend too many points.
• Special chargen notes weren’t being recorded on an initial application. (Reported by BigDarkLove@AresCentral)
• Wiki links with anchors weren’t formatting right. (Reported by Tat@AresCentral)

Miscellaneous

• If you land on a wiki page that doesn’t exist, the create page now fills in the title automatically based on what you were searching for.
• Made a few code cleanups to the web profile request to keep the FS3 stuff all in one section. This will make it cleaner for folks adding their own system.

Beta 11

Upgrade Notes

As with any version, I suggest making sure you have a backup of your game before upgrading. By the way, did you know that Ares can be configured to do Automatic Backups?

This version does not require a game restart. You can follow the instructions in Upgrade While Running with one tweak: In step 4, type load manage then load all.

Release Notes

Features

• Improved the demographics system. Shortctus for group and demographic commands will now be auto-generated, the help file is now generic and refers to a 'demographics' command with configurable help text, and the demographic titles no longer require you to modify the translation files. (Suggestions by AY and Soph@AresCentral).
• Added a 'ruby' command that lets coders execute code from the MU client. (Inspired by conversation with Griatch@MSB about Evennia's @py command).
• Improved the weather system configuration. The weather text is now in the config file, with default versions if you don't specify anything. No more need to modify the translations file.

Bugfixes

• Fixed error in app command caused by improperly-saved chargen config. (Reported by Goodstarbuck@AresCentral).
• Made a better error message if you removed an action skill from the config but somebody still had it in their skill list. (Reported by KarmaBum@AresCentral)
• Web Chargen wasn't marking people as needing a reset.
• Weapon specials were failing silently if you picked an invalid one. (Reported by Tat@AresCentral)

Miscellaneous

• Events in the web portal events directory will now be sorted by event date. (Suggested by Tat@AresCentral)
• Clarified scene help. (Reported by Tat@AresCentral)
• Limited the git commands that could be run from the in-game 'git' command, since interactive ones can't work.
• There's a new 'load all' command to make updates easier.
• A few style improvements (some suggested by Tat@AresCentral).
  • The input-text and input-background color options have been removed. In hindsight they're unnecessary. I made them match the regular text/background color by default, and anybody who really wants their input boxes to be a different color can just override that CSS.
  • Cleaned up the default panel style so the background and border colors are consistent.
  • Blockquote now uses border-color by default for its background style. Which technically isn't a border but making a separate color config felt like overkill.

Beta 10

Upgrade Notes

There are a few extra steps required for this release. It's a temporary inconvenience that will make future upgrades easier.

As with any version, I suggest making a backup of your game before upgrading. I tested the upgrade script as much as possible, but you can never be too careful.

1. Make sure you are already on version 0.9 before attempting to upgrade to this version.
2. Shut down the game before upgrading. Use the shutdown command in-game.
3. After getting the latest code but before committing the changes to your fork, connect to the server shell and run these commands:

    cd aresmush
    ruby beta10_gamedir_shuffle.rb`

If you have any questions or problems, just ask for help.

Release Notes

Game Directory Changes

Why all the upgrade craziness? The aresmush/game directory was causing too many merge conflicts, making upgrades more difficult. I had to do some gymnastics to move the directory around so it wouldn’t be tracked in GitHub but also wouldn’t be deleted locally. The upgrade script fixes that.

New Config Options

There are a few new config options added by this version:

• In the skin config, you can change the colors of the lines with text (like in the scenes display).
• The colors config now lets you easily change the text and input box colors. There are also more instructions in the tutorial for changing advanced things like the selection dropdowns.
• The welcome text and tagline are no longer used. You can now set both, along with multi-line formatting, via the website.txt text file (also editable on the web portal config screen).
• In the website config, you can now move the sidebar to the left and configure which wiki pages show up on the Wiki dropdown.

Miscellaneous

• Improved some customization settings (suggested by Tat@AresCentral and Soph@AresCentral), described in config options above. Wiki TOC and collapsible buttons now have their own CSS class.
• The config editor screen has some new edit features, like adding/removing keys and a full-file YAML editor.
• Streamlined the process for future code upgrades.
• AresCentral now looks better on mobile view.
• The server wasn’t being properly set up to restart the game after a reboot. New games will be set up correctly. You may want to double-check to make sure your game is set. See restart after reboot.

Beta 9

Upgrade Notes

After getting the latest code changes from GitHub, you’ll need to run the database migration:

bin/upgrade 036-0.9_upgrade

This adds a timestamp to any channel messages.

Don’t forget to upgrade your web portal code too and do a website/redeploy to deploy the changes.

Release Notes

Features

• Add recent forum posts to web portal sidebar.
• Add profile, relationships and damage to the character backup command.
• Add channel who and timestamps to web portal chat.
• Add timestamps to in-game channel recall and report features.

Fixes

• Wiki links with dashes in them were handled inconsistently. (Reported by KarmaBum@AresCentral)
• Plot delete button was giving an error. (Reported by KarmaBum@AresCentral)
• FS3 screens weren’t being hidden from web portal chargen when FS3 was disabled.
• website/deploy was acting flakey. You should see a lot more output now, and a clear ‘Built project successfully…’ message if it worked.

Miscellaneous

• Tweaks to the markdown editor preview and help buttons.
• Added scripts to help set up local development environments. See Setting Up Ares on Your PC or Mac for details. (Suggested by Thenomain@MSB)
• Added a script to help install (future) community plugins.
• Forum descriptions now show up on the forum list.