There are some major core mechanics changes which have required a Lot of testing, but I belive we're ready to drop this thing in.
I'm aiming for tomorrow morning on the following changes.
- Core Optimizations, including:
- Items in houses are not sent to client until the house is entered. This only currently applies to houses.
- OSI Patch Mar 28 1999: "A major optimization was done to houses and boats. You will no longer receive the objects that are on or in houses and boats until you step on them."
- Default Decay time Lowered to 30 mins from 60 mins.
- The total decay time will be 30 minutes less, not halved. So an item that took 4 hours to decay based on it's weight, will now take 3 1/2 hrs, not 2 hrs.
- Items will decay dynamically, not all at once on world save.
- Items in houses are not sent to client until the house is entered. This only currently applies to houses.
- Spawns:
- Creatures in houses should no longer get returned to their spawn points when no one is watching. (sheep)
- Other changes to spawn persistence to eliminate the possibility of creatures getting "lost".
- Some Lost Lands Spawn Updates (thread) (thread) Not all of the changes indicated in these threads have been made.
- Bounty Board will again only display Murderers who have 5 or more short term murders.
- This was inadvertently changed in the last patch.
- Era/Mechanical Accuracy
- You will no longer see a green health bar when others are poisoned. (thread)
- NPC name suffixes like (frozen) (invulnerable) (summoned) are now displayed properly as part of the Creature/NPC's name. (pic)
- MiB's and Treasure maps will be fished up without an accompanying sea serpent.
- Only Tamed/Hired creatures and NPC's or Escorts being escorted will enter a moongate. (thread)
- Invulnerable NPC's will not have Yellow hued names (thread)
- Giant Serpents will no longer open doors (thread)
- Scissors now cut Cloth, Leather and Fish one item at a time. (thread)
- Reduction in spell "missile" animation speeds. (thread)
- Absolute speed limit on all Creatures of 0.25 Secs/Tile (thread) (thread) (thread)
- Immovable and decorative chests can be trapped. (thread)
- Katana speed adjusted to 48 based on the highly plausible Stratics typo theory. (thread)
- Corrected monster Rummaging Message. (thread)
- "Claim List" at stables is out of era and has been removed. (thread)
- Dispelling moongates with Dispel Field will only remove one side of the gate, allowing others to still pass through the other side. (thread)
- Wands should not pause movement. (thread)
- Many skill delays changed to 10 seconds. (thread)
- Cure Spell and Potion success rates corrected. (thread)
- Bugs
- Archery delayed hit now remembers the weapon used, in the case that it is disarmed during the delay.
- Reactive Armor and Protection spells now flag as being beneficial.
- This means you can now be flagged as a criminal or aggressor when casting these spellls on others.
- Camps and Escorts
- Lizardman Camps added
- Camps with gates will auto accept escort when gate is unlocked
- Escorts can be dismissed via <name> dismiss
- Other Features:
- Restart warning now gives warning after last save that saves are not going to happen:
- "The server is going down shortly, there will be no further saves". (thread)
- Optimizations and crash protections for Tournament System.
- Unicode accented characters of Latin languages (incl Portuguese). and characters of Turkish alphabet will be converted to an ASCII representation instead of showing as '?'.(thread)
- Restart warning now gives warning after last save that saves are not going to happen:
We'll get to them. Some may yet make it into this patch. The above list is preliminary and only includes changes which are currently fully tested and queued for deployment.
All of the above changes are currently on Test Center, at test.uosecondage.com
