This page generally only reports the most notable changes. You’ll have to explore to find the additions to the world.

Latest What’s New

12/15/2010 v681
There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness. — John Buchan (1875–1940)

• Happy Bawkmas!
• No crashes in 10 days and counting. There was a single (as yet unexplained) server crash on 25 November, which had the side effect of revealing a hitherto-unknown flaw in our server monitor tools. That flaw, in turn, triggered a number of unnecessary and annoying server restarts, every ten minutes or so, during the evening of the 25th — until a smart GM deduced what was happening and assassinated the misbehaving monitor. The monitor tool has been repaired, and diagnostics have been installed to try to discover what caused the original crash.

11/24/2010 v678
An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day. — Irv Kupcinet (1912–2003)

• Mazika has shooed the more dangerous fungi from his hut.
• No crashes in 656 days and counting.

11/3/2010 v675
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies. — Groucho Marx (1890–1977)

• Certain minor mystical annoyances have been alleviated.
• Pirate Henrik relearned an old trick.

10/13/2010 v672
Yeah, I know I’m ugly... I said to a bartender, “Make me a zombie.”
He said, “God beat me to it.” — Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004)

• You’ll have to explore to discover the rest of this Chaos Storm’s changes.

9/22/2010 v669
It’s good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me. — Ashleigh Brilliant (1933–)

• Ranger morphs and Champion petrification should now be back to normal.
• The gerbil responsible for distributing Arindal ranks was discovered to be facing the wrong way round in its cage, which had so upset it that it had silently failed to distribute any ranks at all during v666. The gerbil has been chastised and reorientated.
• Master Hekus cleaned his ears.

9/1/2010 v666
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate. — Dante Alighieri

• Some types of inadvertent “health poisoning” should now be fixed. “Advertent” health poisoning is a whole ’nother matter, of course.
• For those transitioning Arindal players who had registered with GygesGM, your characters should start receiving accelerated ranks this update.
• Development continues on new projects.

8/11/2010 v663
What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens. — Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)

• Pebbles, in the temple, has been dismissed for gross incompetence. Luckily we were able to hire a replacement, her identical twin sister, also (confusingly) named Pebbles. Despite the apparent similarities, the new Pebbles is expected to be much more helpful than the old.
• Many minor bug fixes.

7/21/2010 v660
Climate is what we expect; weather is what we get. — Mark Twain (1835–1910)

• Welcome Arindal players!
• Splash screen now 134% splashier.
• Mannequins should now remember the /name of stored clothing, and also display belts properly.
• Whiteout snow conditions no longer cause whiteout visibility.

6/30/2010 v657
Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers. — Howard Thurman (1900–1981)

• If you don’t like the weather... wait a minute.

6/9/2010 v654
Some people change their ways when they see the light; others when they feel the heat.— Caroline Schoeder

• Lava hurts... but only when it’s supposed to. (All you need is lava?)
• Mac client:
  • Character Manager dialog now more reliable
  • Movies should now record and play back correctly.

5/19/2010 v651
There’s always room for improvement, you know — it’s the biggest room in the house. — Louise Heath Leber

• Development continues on new areas.

4/28/2010 v648
Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence. — Hal Borland (1900–1978)

• Several construction projects around town have been completed.
• A metaphysical gerbil has been retrained.
• Great swords are once again merely ‘great’.
• Bank tellers now understand “withdraw all” and “deposit all” for personal accounts. (Fiduciary regulations require that banking commands for clan accounts continue to use explicit, numeric amounts.)
• Fixed a silly bug that caused the Mac client (under OS 8/9) to quit immediately upon launch.
• Numerous other bug fixes. Please continue to /BUG any problems, comments and suggestions.

4/7/2010 v645
I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult. — E. B. White (1899–1985)

• Now that we’ve moved to our fancy new fast server, the “prime-time slowdown” from 6-9PM is no longer needed, and is hereby abolished.

Some players have reported a new type of severe graphics corruption, apparently arising from the recent Mac OS X 10.6.3 update. So far, it seems to affect only a limited subset of video cards — we haven't seen it ourselves. If you’re experiencing this issue, turning off Open GL (from the Advanced Preferences dialog) should clear it up. (We’d also like to know what type of Mac and graphics card(s) you use, to help narrow down the range of affected systems.)

3/17/2010 v642
There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody. — Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)

• Mushrooms?
• The widely reviled “balance tax” has been waived in certain cases.
• The Hunting Preserve is, uh, reserved for hunting. In particular, management reserves the right to refuse to serve the vitally-challenged. It’s all part of the conservation service! Please observe all posted regulations.

Note: As previously announced, we’ve stopped building the Mac “.ppc” client. If you had previously been using that client under OS 8.6 or 9, you may be able to use the Carbon (“.osx”) client. Despite its name, that one is supposed to be able to run under OS9 & CarbonLib — but no promises: we’re no longer able to test this assertion... which is exactly why we had to drop the PPC client.

Also note that if you log into the game using the v639 PPC client, it’ll attempt to auto-update itself to v642. But that attempt is doomed to fail, since there’s no v642 PPC client available for downloading. Instead you should download the Carbon client yourself. You’ll need to use something like Stuffit Expander to decompress it.

On the other hand, if you’re a daring thrillseeker, and you’re using Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you might want to try out this preview of coming attractions.

2/24/2010 v639
Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun. — Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959)

• The Puddleby Zoning Board has reviewed and approved permits for several shovel-ready construction projects.

Note: After v639, we intend to drop the Mac “.ppc” client, for OS 8-9. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to build and maintain that client. The Carbon (“.osx”) client will not be affected: we’ll keep making that one.

2/3/2010 v636
Listen, lad. I’ve built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. All the kings said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show ’em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. An’ that’s what you’re gonna get, lad — the strongest castle in these islands. — Monty Python and the Holy Grail

• New quests, new monsters, new areas. Have fun exploring.

1/13/2010 v633
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)

• Wuchagott has trained with Mentus, and should now properly identify items in storage.
• A (harmless) crashing bug in the Mac client, at the very end of the autoupdate process, has been fixed. If you were affected by this crash, then you may expect it to recur, one last & final time, as you update to v633.

What Was New Last Year (2009)