Aabahran
I wanted to finally, formally, announce FL 4.0.
Six months of 4.0
Forsaken Lands 4.0 went live in February. I had a couple of years (closer to six months actually...) of quiet work before I decided to just drop it into the game at once. During that time of my small hiatus, @Kassieti and @Xultantris (and others, I'm sure) did a good job hanging onto the ship and I appreciate that.
The six months since went to fixing what needed it and building on what didn't.
Here's a bit of what changed, and why I called it 4.0:
The 4.0 launch (February)
The core game moved off flat files and onto SQLite for player data, helps, tomes, notes, communication logs, pkill records, bans, loans, challenges, bounties, and pacts. Saves are smaller and more reliable and the game recovers from a crash without losing important things like rares/uniques on players. Crashes, before, could also eat ground objects like pc_corpses which felt pretty bad for those affected. That doesn't happen anymore.
The MUD started speaking GMCP and MXP. Modern clients can pull structured game data for prompts, minimaps, group status, room exits, and clickable links instead of scraping the text in the terminal or using regex or carefully timed commands to build a useful UI.
256-color terrain-tinted rooms landed were added, but are gated behind autocolor due to some very interesting players using very old clients like GMUD. Some terminals don't use 256 colors, either.. which begs the question: do people not update software anymore? We also implemented a minimap toggle, the fprompt combat-only prompt, the new score sheet, and the account-based login where you log into one account and pick which character to play. In addition to that, you can now quit to menu, without having to login again.
A whole new web frontend launched alongside it. I've dabbled in websites all my life, and I've always wanted everything to be cohesive and sit together in one place. The forum (with characters, bug tracker, prayer room, notifications), wiki, a new item browser, helps browser, a new pk log viewer, world map, and a donations page all live at theforsakenlands.com now. Before, they lived in various subdomains (if they even existed) and were hard to truly navigate between without losing context. The old Invision forum got imported and lives under those archives, too; no more having to pay a third party forum service. Building tools, immortal admin tools, and player tools all run through the same site, too, and are connected deeply within the game itself.
The months since
I want point out a few things that might have been missed, by theme, since the launch.
Speech rewrite. Tells, group tells, says, yells, and the failure paths around them share one delivery path now. Foreign languages garble consistently across listeners, so two non-speakers comparing notes see the same text. Language proficiency scales fairly now, too. Notes can be tagged with a language, and you pick up vocabulary by hearing repeats. Because of this, you can actually create a rosetta stone of each language in FL; the same word looks the same when someone speaks, no matter what, which is the original way I wanted languages to work when I implemented them so many years ago.
Item database. New filters for rarity, weight, spellforge, damage type, and damage noun, in addition to everything else. I wanted to call out @BigMac here for creating their own item database (without actual access to the game) which used a list of IDs uploaded by several different players. I appreciate it, and it wasn't unnoticed! The items database came directly from your work as an idea, and we all have you to thank for that.
PK logs system. Implementing PK logs was probably the most difficult part of the past six months. Several renditions still to come, I'm sure, but some improvements so far (and more to come, as you report issues): Fight transcripts no longer flood with room descriptions when fighters move mid-combat, POVs are preserved when a mob lands the killing blow during a player fight, sharing a fight carries over the snip toggles you set on the detail page (suggested by @Zaen), and the PK logger no longer eats the opening flavor line of an attack now.
Weather by climate region, and weather affects. The continent splits into Temperate, Coastal, Desert, Tundra, and Mountain zones. In addition to this, and I'm hoping everyone has seen, rooms are affected by weather in different ways. Each region runs its own pressure, sky, and precipitation. This means that casting control weather in one cluster no longer shifts the sky across the entire world.
Loans and the Syndicate. Loan defaults track owed amounts. So now, if you get a loan and fail to repay it, you'll have a very annoying, increasingly difficult Syndicate collector trying to collect from you. Repaying at a loan office clears debt, and dying (it doesn't kill you; it just mercies you) with debt seizes a portion of your gold. A Syndicate kill on a defaulter clears the loan/debt.
Where we are now
The full changelog is here if you want to read every individual fix. I know there isn't a Git repo that everyone has access to anymore, but believe me when I say there's around 1,500 commits since November.
I also updated bug reports to be a bit more intuitive, so I don't miss them and can triage them more effectively. Believe me when I say that posting on the bug forum is the best way to get my attention, and get a fix out for any issues you run into! I appreciate those who use it already!
Thank you to everyone who've come back, and those who intend on sticking around. A special thanks to those who have donated, too. I can't express enough gratitude.
Ya'll are awesome. We have a lot more coming!