I know it's been quite a while since the last RP on Sabrous, and that there's been some who've expressed interest in getting it going again. So, I figure it would help attendance for an RP if I posted it here, as well as the basic overview of what's planned.

Since it's been such a long time, plus the whole RP restart, it'll be just a Tavern RP. To start it off, it'll be the introduction of Farmer John, the brother of everyone's favorite punching bag Ala.

This'll start at about 8:00 PM EST on Thursday, May 2nd. If anyone's interested, could you please post a comment so I can get at least a rough idea at how many people still want to RP?

long time no post germs and ladies - finally moved and settled in, and hopefully that will mean i can fit sab work back into my schedual.

in the meantime there's a small new area, the Bishirii Hospital at the end of the main street in bishirii.
while it's not super-great for leveling, it has some good equipment which you can actually stack over your existing eq...so might be worth checking out. also if you feel like some hospital related RP there, there's both the psyche and medical wings. but please try not to overly angst it up, mmkay?

there are several user created areas i'm still working on installing. if you sent one in and i haven't mentioned it in an update yet, it's because i'm still ironing it out and finding the time to install it. so no worries, i've got it, just haven't plugged it in yet.

this also might be of interest - a new MUD client written by rainbowcemetery is available here for download. it looks like Gmud, but is far more stable. it includes most standard gmud features but also...
-a colour indicator for when logging is on/off
-a colour indicator for when your active scrolling is off/you've scrolled up and missed something
-text colour changing when you reach the word wrap (desc, bio, etc) line limit as well as the channel (say, chat, emote) line limit. you can toggle this off in setup if it bugs you.
-active logging as well as back-logging.
-unlike gmud, you have the full history of what you've said/done since you logged in
-way more font support 8B
-NO MORE CRASHING WHEN YOU OPEN NEW WINDOWS EH EH EH :D

i highly reccomend it myself. if you have any features you'd like to see implimented or if you find a bug, let me know and i can pass them on to rainy to see if they can be sorted out.
the sab main page will now also include a version of this, but the most updated version is on rainbowcemetery.com.

ooosh - sorry for the downtime. an attempt to install a user-made area (daos' nikitak clocktower) caused the MUD to crash...which means the area needs some serious examination before it can be put in. anyway, she should be back to life ASAP. phone is ringing like crazy over here, so it may take me a bit.

and what were you doing online on xmas day anyway? it's still even hannuka! shame on you.

anyway. doing my best, etc, not sure what made it crash yet so trying to untangle it is turning out to be a pain in the butt. i thought it was repeated vnums (most common problem) but for some reason, she will not come back to life yet.

if i can get her up by tonight, there's going to be a small holiday thing going on. if not...maybe new years.

//EDIT

okay, we're back! not sure quite what caused that, but it was deffinitly something in daos' new area. i'll check it in more detail when i have the time (hopefully later today, but ...don't get your hopes up)
there appears to be a *small* amount of lag. BUT!
holiday thingie
everyone (alts included, within reason. please don't apply like...5 alts) may ask for a single custom item for their holiday gift. this item may not contain bonuses, and bonuses may not (at this time- maybe later) be used to buff the item. it can be custom armor, a custom weapon, a random item, etc.

the only rule is keep it simple. for example...
-a flaming sword (a long bladed weapon simply called 'a flaming sword') is okay
-a sword that is programmed to randomly speak or to shower sparks at the entrance of a guard to the room? is not.

you can either leave your holiday wish-items in a comment here (on this entry) OR
post them as a note to the north tek noteboard.

hope your holidays are happy!

check it out! Mantid's first area, the Honeybee Fields has gone in.

it's a relatively low level area (from the time you leave the city -> your early teens) and is located through the low fields. Remember those gates that mentioned a farm, but never lead anywhere? farm's there now!

being a first area, there's a few glitches...mostly related to monster location. these will be ironed out later on, but for the time being if you want to siiiiiidle on in there and slaughter every living thing, it'd be very helpful :D

make sure you thank mantid and check it out for her sake!

long time no update!

sadly, things HAVE been going on...i just forgot to make mention of them. durhur hurhooo good job tochi.

first off, remorting no longer nerfs your stats. now if you remort, your stats will remain the same.
also, remorting removes your tattoos.

in terms of areas, Ronin's new Cliffs of Insanity an be accessed through the low fields ...but be careful, they're not to be lightly jumped off of. and certainly not without the ability to fly! watch out for hidden exits...

also, the South Beach has finally been finished! north of the thieves' forest, south of the coral sea, this beach FINALLY reconnects the map. you can now run round the world, if you so intended! cool, huh? it's level 35-ish, so a good alternative to leveling in the mines if you need to clear that mobque.

okay folks, there may be some server downtime for us in the near-future. there SHOULDN'T be, but it might still happen.

a glitch at the host caused billing information to go "poof!"  and the host admins didn't bother to inform anybody. so rather than automatically bill my credit card, it tried to automatically bill thin air and didn't particularly like that. everything SHOULD be fine, since it was caught in time (DANGER WILL ROBINSON! style) but if for some reason sab appears to die today or tomorrow for a little bit, this would be the cause.

evidently, it'd been like this for quite some time, but donations people had made in the past were keeping it afloat. way to go, host! keepin me informed! well, hey. it's fitting. it's like SMAUG, all the way to the core.

anyway, we SHOULD be fine now. but if sab suddenly stops working, this would be the reason.

Okay! Got the dumb little tweak done. it shouldn't have taken so long, but never underestimate the power of procrastination.

There is now an off-duty guard who appears in the tavern during a few hours of the night. i thought this might spice things up a bit. she also has a very quick miniquest involved for a doll. no killing even required! more may be done with her in terms of miniquests later, but for the moment it's just a real quick fetch-quest.

also: if you notice a spell isn't working, please tell me. i did some edits to the commands, but the 'fun' thing with smaug is that unless you edit the hard code for them, it tends to cause a lot of bugs. and i used their online edit system so...SMAUG! anyway, if you find a spell that isn't working, give me word and i'll try to repair it. until i get back my main laptop, i haven't got all the files needed for editing on-hand. if i'm not online, you can always email me at z AT demon-sushi DOT com.

anyway! the RP PROMPT this week relates to the guard. real simple, no frills, here it is:

Guards sometimes come into the tavern to relax too. What's going on with their shifts? Are they recruiting?
Have they seen anything interesting lately, have anything to report? Maybe they're related to someone
you know, maybe not. But they're Tek citizens too. What news do they have?

attention warriors!

we just ran across something really WEIRD today. apparently there's a special flag some skills can be stuck with called 'secretskill' ...secret skills don't show up on your pr list, and ar not listed on your slist. how many secret skills there are is unknown, we've only found one. that one is for warriors at level 50, and is called hitall.

i intend to remove the secret flag from hitall later, but for now, warriors can run out and practice it. hitall is like backstab in that you can only do it to start a fight.
but what it does is hit every enemy in the room.

pretty saucy, eh?

RP prompt is on hold for now because i've got something up my sleeve for the tavern. nothing amazingly special, but the RP prompt is based on it, so it needs to be in place first.

sorry for the late prompt! i got a little swamped with RL stuff and doing a comic etc etc you know how it goes. anyway, this week i thought we'd go for a little NPC interaction...

This week's RP prompt is...
Seymor's New Bartender

seymor's always been the tavern's bartender, but what if he got a new face behind the bar? it could be an NPC that you guys make up and someone ventriloquates for. Maybe he's still holding interviews for it. maybe your character is actually the (un)lucky individual chosen. maybe there's more than one, and he arranged split shifts. either way, Seymor himself has tired of ALWAYS being around with the yokel locals and has expressed his wish to shunt the responsability onto someone else...at least temporarily.

classes who can ventriloquate are encouraged to hop in here especially to help NPCs "speak" ...but remember, joking about peens and spewing non sequitors does get old if done too often, so just be careful not to irk fellow RPers.

feeling pretty sicky/quesy right now, so just going to copy/paste this week's RP prompt. you guys are welcome to run off and invent your own idea of what the 'secret' is, there's no predetermined canon for it. so if you want to RP cornering the mayor and having him admit to a horrible butter addiction, go for it.

this week's prompt is...

THE MAYOR'S SECRET!

Hey, did you see? The Mayor of Valburg came through town last
week! He spent a long time at the Sandbox, then visited the
Sun Guards, then ditched town. The whole time he was acting
really suspicious, wouldn't you say? Maybe that's just the way
he always acts. I mean, he is a politician. Then again, maybe
not...

Greetings Sabrousians!

it's time for the weekly RP prompt update. this week's prompt is:

MAFIA RUMORS

hey, did you hear about jimmy? i heard they pushed him out of a four story window! it didn't matter, since he was a muti, but still! i heard they have supoib dining in the sandbox in a members-only area. i heard they torture anyone who crosses them by hanging them upside down over a room full of bonus gnomes. i heard the new don murdered the old don in cold blood and threatened to do the same to any who crossed her!

...what have YOU heard?

if you still want to use the ghost prompt, you're more than welcome to. this is just the 'theme' of RP for a week, and not a requirement that everyone stick to. so if you still want to go ghost hunting, hey, you're more than welcome! same rewards will apply! we did have some fun with the ghost theme, i think.

again, if you have any ideas for RP prompts, feel free to submit them~

just an FYI for thursday, the host is going to go down for a bit for maintenence. here's the note they sent:

On September 11th, 2008 at 11 PM EST we will reboot the servers for
regular maintenance. The expected downtime is less than fifteen minutes.

so hopefully it won't even really be noticed, but you never really know. so, when the game goes down on thursday, don't go getting any WIIIIIILD IDEAS.

Hey sabrousians!

many folks have been talking about how they want to RP lately, but haven't had the time to come up with ideas or just don't know what to do. they don't want to be the 'single driving force' for any one RP, but they do WANT to RP. Myself being kind of all over the place timewise also, and thus unable to run quests, Velesti and I came up with this alternative:

Weekly Roleplay Prompts.
basicly, this is the 'talk of the town' for the week. the gossip on the street, the in-thing, etc. the whole town won't shut up about some random thing. it's a good springboard for starting off roleplays which could have ongoing plots, without laying all the responsability on the shoulders of one individual.

so tavern-up and RP with the weekly prompt! if you save and post logfiles, PR will be rewarded (as was in times of old) AND if you are ESPECIALLY inventive with your spin on the talk of the town, you might even get bonuses or glory.

these prompts will be released on SUNDAYS. if you have ideas for prompts, feel free to submit them either here or in e-mail.

This Week's "Talk of the Town" RP Prompt is: GHOSTS

has your character seen a ghost? do they swear they were haunted last night? are you intent on hunting ghosts? studying ghosts? do you not BELIEVE in ghosts? are you fiercely positive you can MAKE someone believe in ghosts? are you thinking ghosts are a great cover to play some spooky tricks on your gulliable friends? who knows! but everyone's talking about ghosts in town this week, and it's spilled its way into the tavern.

so, what does YOUR character have to say on the subject? shall we find out?

added khtall's gaki-bandaid :B sorry it took so long, i didn't get a lot of sleep the past few days and it all caught up to me last night.

anyway gaki should be just fine now. no more literal divide by zero crashes :D ahahahaha...ha. here's how khtall described it to brass, if that code was over your head:

It's trying to calculate the mana cost, which is what it figures out the cost in blood from.

It takes the maximum of a) the minimum mana cost, and b) the explodey math up above (100 / 2 + level - level you get the spell at).

So at level 29, trying to use a level 31 spell, it tries to compare the minimum cost (whatever it is) with 100 / (2 + 29 - 31) and divides by zero and destroys the universe.

Okay, it seems that Mistwalking only crashes the MUD when you're level 29. Why? I have no idea.

Now that we have some specifics on this I'm gonna see if I can find out why in the code. Updates pending as I discover more about one of the weirder bugs Smaug has thrown at me.

---

UPDATE ONE:
14 [main] smaug 3556 _cygtls::handle_exceptions: Exception: STATUS_INTEGER_DIVIDE_BY_ZERO

Okay, so that's a clue of some kind. Smaug divided by zero somewhere and it exploded EVERYTHING.

---

UPDATE TWO:
Found it. Problem line is this:

mana = IS_NPC(ch) ? 0 : UMAX(skill_table[sn]->min_mana, 100 / ( 2 + ch->level - skill_table[sn]->skill_level[ch->class] ) );

The bit we want to look at is this:

100 / ( 2 + ch->level - skill_table[sn]->skill_level[ch->class] )

A level 29 character is attempting to use a mana-requiring skill they don't get until level 31. Do the math.

Smaug divides by zero and goes Kaboom. This can screw with any mana-requiring non-spell skill (vampire skills are the only ones I know of), not just mistwalk.

Now the main problem is what to do about this...

---

UPDATE THREE:
I've sent gogoicarus an e-mail detailing how to duct tape up this problem. Stay tuned to sabrous_lands as and when they arrive.

In the meantime, if you are playing a remorted gaki, avoid the use of Mistwalk at Level 29, Grasp Suspiria at Level 48, and Bloodlet at two levels before whenever you get it.

codewarrior was codewarring tonight~

some people noticed when you remort gaki, it doesn't reset your blood. well, blood now resets. if you remorted from gaki to gaki, please speak up so your blood can be fixed.

we also tested the alleged crash which was connected to remorts using mistwalk, but couldn't reproduce the crash. as such, we're inclined to think it was something else, what with SMAUG being a house of matchsticks :B

khtall also fixed a weird bug that RPers with pets/familiars have probably noticed.

before, if you ever ordered your pet to do anything containing the letters "mp", you'd be told "no..i don't think so." this is due to an old, old SMAUG bug that was probably exploited on RoD. we figured out why it was used and repaired it. now, unless you order your pet to (for some reason) MPsomething, you should be able to order your pet to emote anything. So thumping, humping, bumping, clomping, stomping, whomping, and pumping are all fair game for your pets to emote. wait, that makes it all sound dirty D:

just a tiny update (well, tiny depending on your opinion of tiny)

tonight two things happen.

Items that are higher than your level no longer vanish when you log out. This means that you can store things in your lockers. You still can't wear anything too high a level for you or buy anything too high a level for you, but if a nice level 50 gives a level 5 a bag full of level 10 healing potions, the potions will not vanish when the level 5 logs out. He will still have them. The reason for this is because of Thing Number Two.

REMORTING goes live!
( What is remorting? What does remorting entail? )

again, thank our wonderful codelizard khtall for her dutiful work in this realm. and if you are curious about coding, be sure to check out smerg_devel, Khtall's MUD codebase in progress development blog.

Greetings, fellow Sabrousians! This is Kh'tall. You may or may not be aware that I have been working on writing my own MUD code base (ie, the stuff behind the scenes that makes the game work) code-named Smerg.

It's an official project now, and I've started an LJ community to post updates on the progress of Smerg's development. This includes but is not limited to screenshots, explanations of new features, and technical stuff. If you're interested and/or would like to be a tester once I can find a host, check out smerg_devel!

we're experiencing some downtime at the moment. our host has some technical difficulties (that they didn't forsee) so there's no real telling when we'll be back, but hopefully soon.

in times of sab going down, we do as we always do. and pchat.

join the pchat!

and she's back! still no idea why.

some people heard me 'wtf'ing about this yesterday so i will share it.

basicly, a complete stranger whispered me and started up a conversation in which she was utterly convinced some other MUD she'd played was sabrous...
( despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary! )