Beta 48

Note: A game engine restart is NOT required, but you may want to do so at the earliest opportunity to get a bugfix for some inconsistent capitalization on titlecased skills and such.

How to Upgrade

Page Revamp

• You can access pages from the web portal.
• A conversation thread is defined by a group of characters. So if Bob and Mary are chatting, that’s one thread. If someone adds Harvey to the conversation, that starts a new thread.
• Pages can be sent to a char who’s offline, and they will be notified when they log in.
• The page/review command lets you review pages from your conversations. Conversations time out after a period of time (60 days by default; customizable by game) to prevent database clutter.
• There is not an admin command for reviewing pages, but you can report harassment via page/report and include a verified log of the conversation.

Other Features

• FS3 now allows XP spending via the web page character page (in the system section).
• You can now read a range of forum posts at once. (suggested by Clockwork)
• Chargen now lets you configure blurbs for demographics, groups and rank. (suggested by Yam)
• Roster fields are now configurable like census and who. (suggested by Yam)
• The web chargen rank selector now shows both faction and rank. (suggested by Yam)
• The character page now lists scenes in order of IC date, not share date. (suggested by Ren)
• Pose order times are now periodically updated on the live scene pages even if there's no activity. (suggested by Ren)

Fixes

• Profile history wasn't showing relationship changes. (reported by Ren)
• Location description wasn't copied over when you do scene/start here. (reported by Ifrit)
• detail/edit was putting the wrong command into your buffer. (reported by KarmaBum)
• Scene watch lists are now cleared when a scene goes private. (reported by Ifrit)
• Chargen review screen wasn’t showing custom review steps. (reported by KarmaBum)
• Changing scene location caused a weird Thread message in the portal. (reported by several folks)
• Role-based exit locks were getting unlocked automatically. (reported by Seamus)
• System messages about people changing the title and summary were lingering in the log. (reported by Tat)
• The login notification wasn’t showing unread requests properly for job admins. (reported by Tat)
• The event detail command would sometimes read the wrong event, particularly if one just started. (reported by KarmaBum)
• People with access to certain job categories (e.g. app/build staff) could add an admin comment via the portal even if they didn’t have admin access to that category. (reported by Tat)

Little Things

• The top navbar now has better error-checking so if you specify a route that doesn’t exist, it won’t crash the portal.
• The My Scenes page will now scroll to bottom when switching between scenes. (suggested by Tat)
• Dark theme improvements for code blocks. (reported by Seamus)
• The combat summary web page now links to the character page. (suggested by Tat)
• Location areas are sorted properly now. (reported by Seamus)
• bbnewgroup shortcuts were wrong. (reported by Seamus)

Dev Notes

• The FS3Skills APIs for raising abilities and spending XP changed. They no longer take in a client to emit error messages directly.
• The FS3 chargen no longer supports “notes” for starting skills. The feature wasn’t used much, and no longer worked nicely with the new web changes.

Beta 47

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Note: This version requires a game restart.

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How to Upgrade

Features

• Web chat now autoscrolls to the bottom when switching channels. (Suggested by Tat)
• You can now add a url to the wiki [[image]] helper. (Suggested by Lotherio)
• The web forum is now more fully functional, with the ability to edit and delete posts and replies..
• You can also now delete replies in-game.
• You can now restore messed-up config files to their default values. See recovering from config errors.
• Added hooks for custom app review and custom approval steps. These both require custom code (it wasn’t really practical to make them configurable) but give you flexibility to do things like setting IC start location based on faction, or making sure a character’s group values go together.
• The game now comes with a starter setup for a dark web portal theme. See using a dark theme.
• You can search for characters who have a relationship to someone on the characters search page. (Suggested by KarmaBum)
• New command scene/webstart to create a scene without moving you there. For scenes you intend to play through the portal. (Suggested by skew)
• Hovering over the damage indicator on the web combat page shows what current damage someone has. (Suggested by Tat)
• New page ‘groups’ lets you browse group values. Note: You’ll have to add this to your top navbar manually if you want to display it. (Suggested by Yam)

Fixes

• Damage modifiers were being rounded inconsistently after healing had started. Impaired wounds were incorrectly rounded down to 0, but will now use a fractional value. (Reported by Ifrit and Tat)
• FANSI wasn’t working on the web portal. (Reported by Tat)
• scene/enablelog disables the log. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• Errors related to improper background skill names weren't making it up to the web portal; it just silently refused to save. (Reported by Ren)
• Forum rooms threw an error if one of their ‘apartment’ rooms was deleted. (Reported by Kezzra)
• Recall command had an error if you hadn’t saved something first. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• Deleting vistas wasn’t working. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• Fixed install script on latest digital ocean image. (Reported by Auspice)
• Fixed a typo in certificate install file that was making it not work. (Reported by KarmaBum)

Little Things

• Teleport now allows partial name matches. (Suggested by Thenomain and Tat)
• The web portal scene notifications now contain the scene ID and character name. (Suggested by Ren and Tat)
• Fixed an error logging in if game can’t find the terms of service file. (Reported by Lotherio)
• Deleting a character will now remove them from things like scene likes and scene watchers. Just a little internal cleanup.
• Cleaned up mobile display of editor forms on web portal.
• requests2/all is now recognized for folks used to the old syntax. (Suggested by Roadspike)

Beta 46

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Note: This version requires that you restart your game engine. See Upgrading with a Restart.

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Features

• Players can now access the state and category filter icons on the jobs screen in the portal, so they can see their old jobs. (Suggested by Cidward)
• request/all and request/active now change your request filter (just like job/filter does), making it easy to navigate multiple pages when you’re viewing ‘all’ jobs.
• Better abuse prevention around scene pose undo/deletion/edit. The scene now saves the old version even if you delete/change a pose.
• You can look at multiple things at once using a comma-separated list. (Suggested by GamerNGeek)
• Web portal pages now have meta tags to let them generate a nice-looking preview when shared on social media. (Suggested by Minaras)

Accessibility

Made some general accessibility improvements (help accessibility).

• New command screenreader to let the game know you’re using a screen reader.
• When screen reader mode is active, the game will not print the top/bottom border lines around commands. (Inspired by a suggestion from skew)
• New command colors <mode> lets you set your color mode. Choices are FANSI (256 colors), ANSI (16 colors) or NONE (Grayscale).

If you have any other suggestions for accessibility, please submit feedback.

Fixes

• Scenes in grid rooms were not resetting pose order when a new scene started, which sometimes resulted in ghost participants with huge idle times. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• Background skills were being stored with inconsistent capitalization, resulting in duplicate skill entries. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• Error building scene pose order data when the scene was stopped or being restarted. (Reported by KarmaBum and tat)
• The scene owner was being given more permissions than other participants, which wasn’t really right.
• Fixed a few things with live scene notifications and the ‘my scenes’ screen.

Little Things

• People in the ‘other’ section of where will now be sorted by room/area name.
• scene/typo wasn’t giving you a success message. (Reported by Roadspike)
• job/search now displays all results on a single page, to make it easier to navigate results.

Beta 45

Features

• Overhauled the way that scene activity was registered on the live scene pages. Now the room desc will update if it changes, and it’ll tell you if the scene changed state (stopped/restarted) and so on.
• Overhauled the way pose order works to better accommodate web players.
  • Instead of auto-removing somebody when they’re not online, it will emit a message telling you that it’s that person’s pose. You can then choose whether to wait for them (if they’re playing via web) or skip them (if they’ve left the scene).
  • Pose order now shows up on the web portal near the pose box.
  • Unwatching a scene will remove you from pose order.
• New command: scene/leave will remove you from pose order and return you to your designated scene/home location.
• The music player now just opens a new tab to the youtube video page. The youtube video api was just too flakey, and also it turns out that playing the music without the video was a violation of youtube’s terms of service.
• Added new character/wiki page extensions for pinterest, spotify, and youtube videos. (Pinterest inspired by Tat and Spirit Lake folks using them.)
• You can now add NPCs as scene participants. (Suggested by Tat and KarmaBum).
• New command: owner/list to show the owner of a room, or the rooms owned by a character. See help owner. (Suggested by KarmaBum).
• New command: idle/note to set a note on someone who idled out, like what killed them or where they went. See help idle sweep. (Suggested by Tat).
• The jobs screen will now add the ‘unread’ flags next to jobs that have new changes, and notify you if new jobs are available.
• New command: mail/report for reporting abusive mails. See help mail report.
• New config option for the brackets in mail folder titles. (Suggested by KarmaBum)

Fixes

• Creating a request from the web portal with a different submitter was giving an error. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• scene/undo only works on real poses, not ooc comments (Reported by Ifrit)
• The ‘gone’ character gallery tab was incorrectly showing rostered chars. Also separated dead and gone into two tabs. (Reported by Tat)
• Rolling attr+skill instead of skill+attr gave the wrong number of dice for background skills and languages. (Reported by Roadspike)
• Hitting enter on the registration page gave an error. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• Searching by db# (e.g. ex #r-183) is no longer case-sensitive. Note: This fix won’t take effect until you restart the game engine, but you can do that at your leisure. (Reported by Tat)

Little Things

• scene/replace on really long scenes was replacing the wrong pose.
• Improved navigation on the character page ‘source’ history.
• Channel messages will no longer allow linebreaks, which can mess up spawns. (Inspired by Roz’s request about the FS3 roll messages.)
• Fixed some issues with the HTTPS cert install process and documentation. Should work more seamlessly now for new sites, but doesn’t affect existing games. If you haven’t yet switched over to HTTPS and want to, contact me for guidance.
• The aresmush.com documentation now addresses telnet extensions (including MCP/MSSP) and how to configure editing in BeipMu (instructions contributed by JinxLuckless).

Beta 44

Features

Web Scenes

The way you interact with ‘live’ scenes on the web has been overhauled.

• If you like to have one scene per browser tab, click on the scene name to open just that scene. You will not be notified of activity in other scenes in that tab.
• If you like to have all your scenes in one place, click the Play button to open the new “My Scenes” page. Here you can switch between all the scenes you’ve joined or watched, without needing to reload each time.
• You can join or watch scenes from the Active Scenes page. This is how you get things to show up on “My Scenes”.
• You can also now stop watching a scene from either the scene page itself or from Active Scenes. This replaces the short-lived and confusing “mute scene” feature. You can watch/unwatch a scene even if you have participated in it, to control whether you receive notifications.
• You cannot watch or join private scenes unless you've been invited.

Upgrades

Cleaned up the upgrade process for future releases.

• For upgrades with a restart, startares will now automatically run migrate, so you don’t have to manually remember to run it. (It’s fine to run it more than once; the game checks to see what migrations have already been applied.
• For in-game upgrades, there are now just two steps. First do upgrade to get the code (and warn you if there are any conflicts). Once any conflicts have been resolved, upgrade/finish will do the remaining steps. NOTE!!! This command will only be available future releases; for this release you need to still do it the old way.

See upgrades for more information.

Fixes

• Scene temp rooms were lingering for certain web scenes. (Reported by Tat and KarmaBum)
• Places prefix colors were a little wrong. (Reported by Tat)
• jobs/mail will now warn you if you used invalid recipients instead of just failing silently. (Reported by Tat)
• Music player ‘play’ buttons weren’t showing. (Reported by Minaras)
• Tagging a char page with ‘player’ could make any ‘player:name’ tags not work. (Reported by Minaras)

Little Things

• Event create and edit on the web now prompt you with the server time so you can schedule relative to that. (Suggested by Foosa)
• Update is now an alias for upgrade. (Suggested by Thenomain)
• Fixed job/create syntax. (Reported by GoodStarback)
• Fixed various links in the help files to aresmush.com articles whose urls have changed.

Beta 43

Features

• You can now add admins to scenes via the portal. (Suggested by Tat)
• The dots_beyond_chargen setting in FS3 XP config is now split into two settings - one for attributes and one for action skills. See FS3 config for details. (Suggested by Minaras)

Fixes

• MusicPlayer wiki extension should work more reliably now. (fixed with help from Blu)
• Builders can now see their own requests on the web portal, like they can in-game. (Suggested by Tat)
• Error when renaming rooms and exits. (Reported by KarmaBum and Goodstarbuck)
• Cleaned up a few little glitches with the scene unread flag on the portal.
• The trending scene post won’t happen if there are no scenes. (Reported by Thenomain)

Little Things

• The config editor pages now show a link to their config help page. You can also configure a custom link for your own plugins (see config_help_links option) (Suggested by Thenomain)
• Added a ‘done’ message when website deploy is finished. (Suggested by Thenomain)

Beta 42

Features

• Web chat will only activate the browser tab icon on new activity and won’t spam you with notices.
• Live scene updates on the web now will show edit buttons appropriately. The lock icon / reload is no longer necessary.

Fixes

• Reading a forum post on the web wasn’t always marking it as read correctly, breaking the ‘next unread’ button. (Reported by folks at Spirit Lake)
• Web client error updating live scenes page. (Reported by Roz)
• Mail reply all grabs extra characters if their names match. (Reported by Tat)
• Web client error logging in or out if the websocket can’t connect. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• You were still getting channel connect messages even if the channel was muted.
• The server reboot required message wasn’t showing up right on the web jobs screen. (Reported by Thenomain)
• Couldn’t start a new private temproom scene if you were in a room with another scene going.
• Unapproved characters could stop scenes.

Little Things

• It will now send a mail when someone is idle warned. See idle config. (Suggested by Tat)
• Live scenes page won’t show last pose activity for private scenes if you’re not participating.
• Scene like button is no longer clickable if you’re logged in. (Reported by Thenomain)
• There’s now a Scenes.start_scene helper method and a SceneShared event.
• Markdown help now lists [[[char:name]]] helper. (Reported by skew)
• Paginator will automatically convert sets to arrays, so you don’t need .to_a.

Beta 41

Noteworthy

1. This patch includes several changes to the way unread jobs/forums/scenes were tracked to improve efficiency and reduce lag.

Be sure to run the migrate command in-game or the bin/migrate script in the server shell after you upgrade the code. This will transition everyone’s previously-read job and forum “read” flags to the new system.

2. I decided that the jumbotron change was a bad idea and changed it back to a regular image. You may need to adjust your CSS back again.

Features

• Several efficiency changes to the way chat and live scenes were implemented on the portal should reduce lag during big scenes.
• You can now configure the size of the channel recall buffer. (See channel config)
• You can now do scene/start here=private to start a private scene using the location/desc of your current room. (Suggested by Tat)
• The web portal will now nag you to log out/back in if your login expires soon, so you don’t lose poses due to sudden token expiry. (Inspired by reports of lost poses from Roadspike, Blu and Tat).
• New job/query command (and web equivalent) to submit a request on behalf of someone. (Suggested by Tat/Skew)
• When a scene is shared, unshared and restarted, the old poses were rolled into a single big pose. This pose now is more clearly labeled as special and can’t be deleted.
• Multi-line poses in a place are now tagged with the same place prefix so you can spawn them correctly.

Fixes

• Fixed shortdesc/edit. (Reported by skew)
• Forum preference error when using idle/destroy. (Reported by Tat)
• Don’t cut off the login MOTD if it doesn’t fit on one line. (Reported by Tat)
• Place start and end markers weren’t being used. (Reported by Tat)
• Weird wrapping issue when there were too many tabs in the web character gallery.
• Fixed empty non-functional tab on web character gallery if someone didn’t have their primary group set.
• Improved efficiency of the Recent Changes list, which was causing undue lag. (Reported by Tat)
• Remove a participant from a scene if they’ve been deleted, to avoid breaking the scene page. (Reported by Tat)
• Jobs list is too wide for standard 78-width terminals. (Reported by Rucket)
• Admins can’t access role-restricted channels. (Reported by Rucket)

Little Things

• Events stick around for a little bit after their start time. (Suggested by Tat)
• Sorted action and language skill lists.
• Add a warning when setting someone to the idle ‘destroy’ action. (Suggested by Tat)

Beta 40

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Note: You'll have to restart your game to get the new telnet negotiation fixes, but you can do that at your leisure.

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Features

• You can now give cookies from a live scene on the web portal. (Suggested by KarmaBum)
• New search page for locations on portal. (Suggested by skew)

Fixes

• forum/mute wasn’t muting replies. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• scene/clearlog wasn’t checking permissions properly. (Reported by Tat)
• Trending scene format fixes. (Reported by skew and Tat)
• ooc from web portal was adding an extra line before the quote. (Reported by Tat)
• Notifications from the play screen were showing “null”.
• Scene achievement doesn’t trigger when posting a completed scene/vignette on web. (Reported by KarmaBum)
• The new unshared scenes list on the portal also shows ones still active. (Reported by Ifrit)

Little Things

• Tip highlighting quickref at the bottom of help files. (Suggested by skew)
• scene/stoplog is now named scene/disablelog with notes in the help making it clear that it disables and clears the log.
• Better logging of javascript errors from portal.
• Cleaning up some help files.
• Players can now use the ‘rooms’ command, which is aliased to ‘locations’. (Suggested by skew)
• Revised the client telnet negotiation to address certain client preferences on when to receive the data.
• Game registration with AresCentral will now pass web portal URL for the game’s website if you don’t override that with your own site.

Beta 39

Reboot Suggested: A reboot is not required, but is suggested to get a few of the engine improvements mentioned below.

Features

• You can now hide (aka unsubscribe) forum categories. (help forum/hide) (Suggested by Thenomain)
• You can mute forum notifications. (help forum/mute) (Suggested by various folks on Spirit Lake)
• You can mute scene notifications on the web portal for a scene you’ve left. (Suggested by Roadspike and skew)
• Unshared private scenes now show up on the active scenes page to prompt you to do something with them.
• New command scene/home lets you select whether to go to your character’s home, work, or the ooc lounge when a temp room scene ends. (Suggested by Farfalla)
• You can now delete wiki files in your own character’s folder. (Suggested by Blu)

Fixes

• Private scene locations were hidden on web but not in-game. (Reported by skew)
• Weird leaning tower of pose clock icons in system messages. (Reported by Tat and skew)
• Luck point spends weren’t showing up on web portal scenes. (Reported by Tat)
• Admins couldn’t edit scenes that have been shared. (Reported by Tat)
• You couldn’t rename yourself from bob to Bob. (Reported by Tat)
• Fixes to display of trending scene list. (Reported by Tat)
• In-game (non-handle) friends weren’t always showing up on friends list. (Reported by KarmaBum)

Little Things

• You can now do Command-Enter or Control-Enter to submit poses to scenes. (Suggested by Roz)
• Scene number appears in more places, like the log notice in room descs, a few in-game messages, and the web portal scene page. (Suggested by skew)
• You can jump to the end of a forum post. (Suggested by skew)
• Sad Picard web error screen now links to the forum. (Suggested by Tat)

Coder Foo

• Character.find_one_by_name(“Bob”) now has an alias Character.named(“Bob”). You can use either one.
• OnlineCharFinder.find has been simplified and now only requires a name. It no longer does a special match on “me”.