Release Notes for EmberMUD v.030 -------------------------------- Wow, has it really been almost a year since my last EmberMUD release? I'm sure the EmberMUD faithful out there have been wondering whatever happened to the EmberMUD coding team... Did we just get fed up with bug-chasing and decide to quit? No way! I live to hunt down bugs! (well, not really) So, what DID happen? Well, I can only speak for myself, but I believe the main reason was real life happened. Zane moved out of town and got a GOOD job, Thexder moved out of town and got a girlfriend (YEAH Thex!), and me, I got married and had a baby girl! Next, of course, would come the disinterest in EmberMUD. Until very recently, I was under the impression that no one cared about EmberMUD anymore. I can't say as I would blame people -- Ultima Online, Hexen 2, etc... I knew the day of the graphical MUD would come, and it would now seem that it is close at hand. So, the next logical question is why did I come BACK to EmberMUD? One day, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from Rindar (Ron Cole). He said he was putting up an "Unofficial EmberMUD Homepage". Well, naturally, I had to check it out. It was very well put together (although not super fancy), and had something that immediately caught my eye... An "Unofficial" new EmberMUD release (this would be EmberMUD.029b, for those who don't know). Also, several other bugfixes and snippits ready to plug into my code! Wow! Aparently someone WAS still interested in EmberMUD. I asked Rindar for some stats from his site, and in the short time it had been online, several people had looked at the bugfixes and had downloaded the "Unofficial" release. After a little nudging from Rindar, and my own careful consideration of the options (I was also thinking about working on my own Unix based BBS system), I decided that I at LEAST owed the world a new official version of EmberMUD that incorporated the bugfixes Rindar and Raven had worked so hard to produce. Well, here it is -- along with some of the new stuff I was working on when I stopped making EmberMUD releases. Will this be the last of EmberMUD? Well, I certainly hope not! I still hope that one of these days I will be able to release EmberMUD v1.0. 8-) However, I don't forsee a lot of new releases the way they were produced in the past. Since the EmberMUD team has basically dissolved, I will be working at this pretty much alone. Also, time permitting, I want to spend some time playing Hexen 2 and coding on that BBS software I've always dreamed of writing. The address of Rindar's EmberMUD page is: http://www.concentric.net/~Clogar/ I am working on putting an official page up at: http://www.iquest.net/~fcs/Ember Most likely, Rindar's site will be the primary source of snippits and bugfixes as he spends much more time working with those aspects of the code than I do. My focus will be on implementing some new features that I have wanted to do for a LONG time. If you have bothered to read this far, please send me an e-mail to let me know you're interested in EmberMUD (for whatever reason). Let me know what you'd like to see me do with the codebase... Let me know what's wrong with the codebase... Let me know if you'd like to have an EmberMUD admin mailing list set up. Lastly, I would like to note that most of the work that has gone into this official release of EmberMUD was not done by me. The credit goes to Rindar and Raven -- without whom, I would still not be looking at EmberMUD code at all. Later everyone, -Zak (zak@supernova.org)