CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.01 Cursoring didn't work (except in local mode) -- made the game pretty much unplayable. Fixed a bug that sometimes left a player on the map when he died, instead of replacing his symbol with that of a corpse. This had undesirable side-effects later. There was a bug that sometimes allowed players to pick up and carry corpses (which are actually not pickupable) -- if they were the corpses of players. Changed the syntax for running locally: used to be WIZARD LOCAL ; now it's simply WIZARD, and you'll be prompted for the name. Even in local mode, I'm now going through CKIT for primitive I/O. WIZARD can now generate its own GENERIC.SYS file, should it need one -- which it will, in local mode. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.02 Removed the check for page-length and ANSI graphics status -- they didn't seem to work very well. Modified the map slightly. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.03 Improved semaphoring -- now based on record-locking (although I'm putting off full implementation a few days) Updates to the 'Surroundings' display are now rather faster. SENSE MAGIC and DETECT MAGIC are now a little more informative (allows distinction between spells ON and spells IN an item. Added a 'fast move' option (toggle between moving 1 and moving 3 spaces. Players should no longer be allowed to summon Wimps/Fighters/Heros and kill them for the experience...similarly, controlled creatures can't attack their controller. Counterattacks by non-player creatures worked a little funny. You could end up with a character with HP < 0, which caused all sorts of problems. I allow new wizards an extra 10 AP on their first turn -- I think it'll help people get interested. Hope so, anyway. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.10 Numerous changes in implementation -- shouldn't be apparent to the user/sysop. The ability to register the software has been added. Registration allows the sysop some control over the time the player is allowed in the door, and over the rate of AP recovery. See the sysop docs and REGISTER.TXT for details. Added the ability to define the sysop's name. Won't appear on- screen until the game is registered, however. Added the ability for terrain to issue messages to the user (things like "You are now in a broken-down old temple"). Extensive modifications to the documentation. Extensive changes to the Dungeon itself. Improved the 'overhead view' algorithm for what I hope is the last time. Used newer version of CKIT (registered). Added 'ugly mode' to screen display. Gives more room for the text area, at some aesthetic cost. Corrected a bug -- if you made an item using MAJOR CREATION (which is stupid, since you can make items with the less- exhausting MINOR CREATION), you got "Something Invisible". Added Zombies & Ghouls. Added XRAY, LOCATE and CONTROL. Weekly cleanups will now spread around a few independent creatures. Independent creatures can now live out their rather meaningless lives; moving, attacking players, grabbing stuff. Action points are now calculated a bit differently. If your agility <= 15, you get a number of points equal to your agility. Every two points above 15, you get 1 more. (This ratio of 1 AP for every 2 agility is modifiable, if the sysop registers his copy of the program). I'm not distributing it in PKLITEd form, as I had planned -- the licensing fee is beyond my means. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.11 Added a new command-line option, which I'm leaving mostly undocumented. In short, don't mistakenly put '-F' as an option to the program. You'll get a HUGE and largely USELESS error-file, which will NEVER be cleaned up by the program. Re-wrote the daily maintenance routines. Added a simple 'progress indicator' for daily and weekly maintenance. Added a 'recheck today's mail' command. Disallowed leading spaces in character name. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.12 (First general release!) The characters can now choose their gender. Added Amazons and Heroines. Fixed a couple of display 'uglies'. Disallowed leading spaces in character names. With this version, I'll start distributing the exe in a compressed format. Corrected a bug in 'drop item' code, and another that happened if a player was slain by a wandering monster (under very unlikely conditions). CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.13 Strictly a bug-fix -- if time-remaining was too low, the game would exit, but there would be strange DOS problems afterward. (Nothing tragic, just system lockups). CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.20 (never generally released) This snowballed into a pretty big revision; a couple of bug-fixes, but mostly enhancements (which is why its 1.20 instead of 1.1x). Additionally, I converted over to version 2.0 of CKIT -- this makes it possible in principle to make a foreign-language version of the game (though I have little interest in doing so at this time), as well as clearing up one or two minor issues -- and causing me to modify certain chunks of my code. BUG FIXES: If a character was slain by an NPC during a counterattack, no message about it was posted. Now one is. Fixed a slightly obscure bug involving objects carried by NPCs. (No-one ever ran into it, I guess -- the NPC had to be the first object, which is pretty unlikely). Fixed the grammar in a couple of the messages. Nothing too bad. If the player attacked and killed an NPC, but the game-system decided not to put down a corpse, then the system could corrupt the database and hang. Doesn't any more. There was a memory-management bug, as well; it manifested only with a dozen or so players. It had the potential to mangle the database beyond easy repair. ENHANCEMENTS / ALTERATIONS: Daily clean-ups have been made more complex, to allow for more interesting behavior from NPCs and the rest of the environment. I've optimized pretty thoroughly, but they're still a little time-consuming. I've made a standalone daily maintenance program that you can run use to manually do that maintenance as part of a nightly routine. There's further information in SYSOP.TXT. There no longer is any weekly maintenance; the daily routines now perform all those functions. Added feature to let the sysop reset the console color when the program terminates. When ripping off a corpse, you couldn't change your mind and NOT take some of his loot (other than by picking an invalid selection). Now, 'N' can be entered, for 'None'. Changed the RETRY spell -- when cast on an item, it now lasts four days. Used to work for 1 stroke, but I found that it was pretty useless. Added Orcs and Ogres. Added SUMMON OGRE spell, OGRE STRENGTH and ANIMATE CORPSE. Added ranged weapons (slings and crossbows), and the cudgel (carried by Ogres). Re-documented the errorlevel for daily maintenance (100). Wrote an upgrade program to allow me to extend the database formats with each release (if needed). Further, WIZARD'S ARENA will no longer accept a database whose version number is different than its own -- it'll abort and recommend that you run an upgrade. I changed some of the symbols, and enchanted items are now a different color than mundane ones. The command-line options for the both the registered and unregistered versions have been revised, modified, updated, folded, spindled and mutilated. (Well, they've been changed a bit, anyway). See REGISTER.TXT and SYSOP.TXT. In particular, the -O option may be of interest. Corpses now rot more quickly, and skulls disappear after a few days; I found that corpses/skulls really littered up the place. There's also an intermediate step between corpses and skulls (skeletons). This version of the game has certain 'debugging' aids -- undocumented commands which let me see how the program's doing in place. These are all accessed via a '&' command, follwed by: 'M' shows memory available 'E' dumps out the error log 'S' prints out certain game statistics For sysops who don't want anyone to access these features, the -E option disallows them -- and also disallows the 'remote registration' feature. (Some sysops didn't seem to like the idea.) Anyway, if you're worried about these rather benign 'backdoors', use the '-E' option and they're unavailable. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.21 (never generally released) The program would sometimes redraw the whole "overhead view", and sometimes even the whole screen, even if it changed the contents of only one visible square (for example, during takes, drops, and after attacks which kill the target). It doesn't do this any more. When a player died, any spells affecting him were carried over into his next 'incarnation'. This is no longer the case. Registered users can now set the number of experience points it takes to train; this can have a dramatic effect on game-play. The upgrade program now does a certain amount of error-checking, even if it doesn't need to update the database formats. Line-noise won't cause so much 'gibbering' as it used to. When a player dies, he now has the option of exiting the game, instead of being 'auto-reincarnated'. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.22 (never generally released) Went back to an older version of CKIT. The latest seemed to cause certain problems with the display, and to gradually corrupt the database. The game in now customized via a "CONFIG.WA" file, rather than by the increasingly-cumbersome command-line parameters. See CONFIG.TXT for details. The character's name and symbol are no longer forced to be upper-case. The user's name, however, always will be. The game now uses DOOR.SYS instead of GENERIC.SYS. Unlike GENERIC.SYS, the game doesn't auto-generate one if it needs to; you'll need to keep DOOR.SYS around if you ever want to run locally. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.23 (never generally released) Strictly bug-fixes, for things that turned up in beta-testing. The exact bugs fixed are too obscure to be interesting, and they naturally affected no-one but my beleagured beta-site. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.24 (never generally released) I changed the '?' command -- it now shows a quick on-line help screen. The old stuff is available via a new '.' command. There's also a 'G' (get) command -- it seems that the old method of picking up objects by using the number of an empty slot was counter-intuitive to many people. (The old way still works, though.) There was a bug -- if a player name, symbol or message had a '%' character in it, problems could result. Shouldn't be a problem anymore. There's now an AUTOSAVE configuration parameter. Check it out in CONFIG.TXT. A recoverable error in off-line daily-maintenance will no longer keep the system 'stuck' waiting for input. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.25 The 'rankings' report was added. It is generated by the daily maintenance, so you can't see it until one has been run. It is generated into a file named 'RANKINGS.TXT' (a simple ASCII file). It can be seen by the players via the 'R' subcommand of the '.' menu. The players can now set individual page-lengths, as long as they stay above 19. This is available via the 'L' subcommand of the '.' menu. Minor bug: a skull or skeleton, if spells were cast on it, would never lose them. Didn't have much effect on game-play. Major bug: a monster would keep hacking at a player's corpse, which can and did cause all sorts of problems. Shouldn't happen anymore. CHANGES FOR VERSION 1.26 (second general release!) The sysop can now specify a number of AP as a 'starting bonus' for new players, via the STARTBONUS configuration option. On their first turn in the game, players can't attack other players. This is to keep the STARTBONUS from completely dominating the game. There's an "AUTOVALIDATE" configuration option, that forces database validation whenever someone enters the game. Players who want to use their keypads for movement can now do so by entering the '.' menu and selecting the new option 'Numlock'. This changes the meaning of the numbers to be directions. To use objects, they must use Shift + the number of the object.