What Was New In 2014
This page generally only reports the most notable changes. You’ll have to explore to find the additions to the world.
12/24/2014 v891
Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors,
and let every new year find you a better man.
— Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
- Some molehills were made into mountains.
- Have a holly, jolly Bawkmas!
12/3/2014 v888
Epigram service unavailable; please try again later.
— Anonymous (undated)
- “Silly Saturday” was a big success. Not least: no more world freezes.
11/12/2014 v885
Time is flying, never to return.
— Virgil (70 BC–19 BC)
- There were a surprisingly large number of internal changes, honest. But none that I’m allowed to tell you about.
10/22/2014 v882
In Rome, the emperor sat in a special part of the Coliseum called the Caesarian Section.
— George Carlin (1937–2008)
- Nearly 100 new animals added to the coliseum whitelist.
- It’s just possible that we might have solved the problem which was causing “Error receiving data from server” disconnections for players using the Windows client. No promises, though.
10/1/2014 v879
I'm still about as pigeon-toed as you can get. But I learned to manage pretty well on a bike.
— Norman Rockwell (1894–1978)
- Numerous pigeon-toed animals have learned to manage pretty well walking around on the ground.
9/10/2014 v876
Is it sufficient that you have learned to drive the car, or shall we look and see
what is under the hood? Most people go through life without ever knowing.
— Dr. June Singer (1920–2004)
Oh, I never look under the hood.
— E. B. White (1899–1985)
- I don’t know if I’m allowed to mention what changed.
8/20/2014 v873
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful
words in the English language.
— Henry James (1843–1916)
- No visible changes this time.
7/30/2014 v870
I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing changed.
— George Carlin (1937–2008)
- The Clan Lord server’s address has changed (or soon will), from server.clanlord.com to server.deltatao.com. We don’t yet know if this is a permanent relocation, or just a temporary change of scenery. For more info on this issue, please consult this Sentinel post.
- The v870 Mac client will automatically make the change for you; you don’t have to do anything.
- However if you’re still using the v867 Mac client — e.g. before it’s had
a chance to auto-update itself to v870 — and if the “clanlord.com”
address has already stopped working, so that you get error messages along the lines of
“Failed to find server at ‘server.clanlord.com’",
then you’ll need to perform a one-time repair, as follows:
- Select the Clan Lord > Preferences... menu command.
- Click the Setup Proxy... button.
- Turn on the “Use a Proxy Server” checkbox.
- In the Proxy Address field, enter this text:
server.deltatao.com:5010 - Click OK to exit the Proxy Server dialog.
- Click OK again, to exit the Preferences dialog.
- Join the game, as normal.
- We’re a little bit uncertain about how the Windows client will fare. Hopefully it should work seamlessly; but if you have trouble connecting, go to Options > Settings... > Advanced, and turn on the “Use server[:port]” checkbox. Enter server.deltatao.com into the associated field.
- From the “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” Department: work continues on at least one project, but that’s all I’m allowed to say about that.
7/9/2014 v867
Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.
— Dean Koontz (b. July 9, 1945)
- No news to report, again.
6/18/2014 v864
I used to think that anyone doing anything weird was weird.
I suddenly realized that anyone doing anything weird wasn't weird at all
and it was the people saying they were weird that were weird.
— Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE (b. June 18, 1942)
- No news to report.
5/28/2014 v861
Wealth unused might as well not exist.
— Aesop (620 BC–560 BC)
- Yet another loophole in the fabric of reality has been mended; those incorrigible spriggins were taking unfair advantage of it. (Never fear; we’ve left them plenty of loopholes to take fair advantage of.)
5/7/2014 v858
Credit is like a looking-glass, which when once sullied by a breath, may be wiped clean again;
but if once cracked can never be repaired.
— Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832)
- Last version’s spring cleaning continues. Overall we hope to have removed more old bugs than we introduced new ones. We’re confident you’ll let us know if we didn’t.
- In particular, some mystics got their boost back. (Not literally true; but they’ll know what I mean.)
- Being the comparatively family-friendly game that it is, Clan Lord tends to eschew four-letter words. But don’t fret; we’ve added a whole lot o’ five-letter words instead!
4/16/2014 v855
A well-spent day brings happy sleep.
— Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
- We did a pretty fair-sized spring cleaning among the scripts: the server now wastes appreciably less memory. In theory, you won’t notice any differences. But in practice, there’s always a chance that we dotted a “t” where we should have crossed an “i”; so if you spot anything misbehaving egregiously, please do /BUG it. (Don’t go cross-eyed, or dot-T!)
3/26/2014 v852
Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.
— Publilius Syrus (1st century B.C.)
- The server was down for several hours on March 18th. The gerbils are claiming that they were all just plumb tuckered out, after too much green beer the day before. But that’s just silly rodent braggadocio: the much more prosaic real reason involved a credit-card renewal glitch, a stale email address, and a ridiculously forgettable “security question”. (Although come to think of it, green beer might conceivably have played a role somewhere in there too...)
- Anyway, whichever version you choose to believe, we apologize for the outage. We’ve awarded everyone three free ranks in grateful recognition of your patience and forbearance.
- Healer pets got a B-A-T-H (shh!), including an overdue ear-cleaning. They should now be much more obedient to spoken commands. (In fact, this happened during the aforementioned outage, while we had nothing better to do; and thus might count as a mildly silver-tinged lining thereof.)
- Some players had reported problems with bard music volume in the v849 Mac client. We can’t reproduce the issue here, but we did some prospective work on that code anyway. Please let us know if things have (or have not!) improved for you.
3/5/2014 v849
There may come a time when the lion and the lamb will lie down together,
but I am still betting on the lion.
— Josh Billings (1818–1885)
- Last time around, we trained numerous gerbils — at great expense — to refit many doors in and around Puddleby. This only served to prove that gerbils make lousy carpenters. So now we’ve trained numerous hamsters — at correspondingly greater expense — to repair the repairs of the gerbils. (That had better be the end of it, because the bids we got from the stoats were frankly extortionate.)
2/12/2014 v846
Never sign a Valentine with your own name.
— Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
- We fixed a bunch of fairly minor bugs. With any luck, we also didn’t introduce any new ones!
- In particular, a glitch had improperly prevented many folks from attempting Rakhee’s reedcat-hunting challenge. That challenge (and its rewards) have now been re-opened to everyone — even those who had already completed it may try again.
- The date-conversion NPCs in the Fairgrounds have had their clocks cleaned, so to speak. The year 2014 is now within the range of their calendars (as indeed are years 2015–2037).
1/22/2014 v843
Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
— Dr. Martin Luther King (1929–1968)
- Happy New Year!
- No changes this version are public.
1/1/2014 v840
New Year’s Day — Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.
Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
— Mark Twain (1835–1910)
- Happy New Year!
- All changes this version are secret.