[Nov '22] Improvements & Bug Fixes
Change log for November 2022

The 'burn' command on this one use item was broken. Not sure how many people have attempted this, had only one bug report. However, this code never worked, as it was calling an internal verb on an variable that was not defined (a typo most likely). Not sure how this made it IC without testing. I've resolved the issue and it should work now.

E-NOTE DIRECTORY RENAME

This was not working because while the code was attempting to support the operation, it was checking file extensions on a directory, which obviously, does not have a file extension. I've fixed the issue and this has been tested and works.

Someone crafted something and got more than one item. This is not a bug, it's a critical success. I've added a help file that is pretty basic right now but it does outline this so that others don't think it is a bug if they encounter it.

This had an incorrectly set hardpoint, it has been fixed.

Some tires improve your traction to the point you won't see 3-point turn messages. This isn't a bug. It's how these tires work I guess. I'm only assuming because there isn't any documentation on how it is supposed to work.

When the fixer term was created it was done with different discount %'s than the Job object specified. This was leading to confusion as the employment term would say something like 5% discount and the fixer terminal / NPC was using 10%.

I've brought these in line so that there is no longer confusion and rewritten how the job object presents the information so it is more clear as you rise through the ranks.

There was a bug where slotting an e-memory module with a broken filesystem into your chip reader and then checking the filesystem with /fs and then unslotting it would cause the module to disappear because the cache was caching an error instead of a filesystem. I have resolved this, though the issue with e-mems having broken filesystems still exists. Looking into that next.

(Edited by Slither at 6:02 pm on 12/1/2022)

There was a recent thread on this, but I had actually planned to implement this change a few weeks ago and then it fell off my plate and I forgot.

If you are employed at a Mega Corp (PRI, VS, NLM, WJF) and you are CORPORATE (non service) worker, and have moved beyond Junior (or whatever the first tier of employment is), you will no longer be able to run errands for NPCs topside.

By errands I mean you can't walk up to the NPC and ask them if they need something, they are going to say no, very politely, because you are too high status to run bullshit errands.

Nothing is stopping you from using Juniors at your corp, or service workers, or whoever, to hand items over on your behalf for a cut, if that's a hustle you want to go after though.

There was a bug in the parry code due to a fork() where if two attackers attacked in the same phase, against a person who was guarded and using a weapon that can parry, and successfully executed a parry on both attacks, they would potentially get two counter attacks where they should only have gotten one (since we rate limit counter attacks).

I've found the source of this bug and fixed it. This further balances weapons that can parry, especially when someone goes guarded against multiple attackers.

This means in big fights where there are a lot of attackers, you are still going to parry the same amount, but you will not get more than one counter attack.

If you try to shower while in a cube and you are sitting or doing something else, it will stop you before taking your money now, instead of after taking your money.

These attacks no longer reference 'glock 20' and reference 'pistol' instead. If you come across other guns that are showing the 'old' names for their attacks during combat, please @bug the name of the weapon and an example of the message.

Some deck of cards were broken when adding to the community pot of cards that appears in the room. I've resolved this issue and they should be working as expected now.

Photos of art were very broken in some cases, with colors not showing up, artist name not showing up, etc. I've implemented a new photo capture verb for art that will capture them properly, such that they will present the same in a photo as if you looked at the art itself. This is a FORWARD FACING fix and will NOT fix old photos of art. Those were captured badly and we can't fix them now.

You can't typically put a disassembled gun into your inventory, but there are ways for this to happen (like getting your gear back from a landlord). When in your inventory you can't drop the item and you can't assemble it. I've made it so you can now assemble it from your inventory -- for situations where it ends up there.

(Edited by Slither at 1:06 pm on 11/9/2022)

Previously the telepresence avatar that spawned when you called someone with your telepresence unit was locked to the description you had when the call started. I've fixed this so it now proxies the description of the avatar any time it is looked at, meaning if you wear/remove something or update your @describe, it will be reflected in the avatar right away.

Holo strippers now have a job!

There was a bug when trying to stock this type of room with the stuff that knocks people out. Some of these were manually fixed but the root cause was not addressed. The property that held the stock was misconfigured and that resulted in the TB. I've fixed it for all of these mobile medical rooms and that specific stock command should work again.

This command has been broken for about a year. I've resolved the issue with the code and it should function again.

PUSH WHEELCHAIR NO LONGER FUNCTIONS LIKE GO

The command previously functioned like 'go' where you could string together a a go string style movement queue. This no longer works due to the changes made to how movement is processed for vehicles. The result was that the player was left behind in the original room and didn't attempt to move until the wheelchair reached its ultimate destination. There is no easy way to carry this functionality forward with the movement code that is in place now, so I have disabled this feature.

I've fixed @bug so that when you submit a multi-line bug report it doesn't put it all onto the same line when it comes into Jira.

I've finished my review of all bugs submitted last year around this time (see above) and have resolved all but 6 of the 42 submitted during that time. The 6 remaining require me to test with a player and I'm waiting to see the right folx online.

REVIEWED ALL BUGS - 309 REMAINING

I've finished a cursory glance at all the bugs in gojira, and have closed out more duplicates, things already fixed, or things so specific to a situation that they are not replicateable now that so much time has passed.

I've updated the taste message to NOT mention smoke, because these messages can show up in drinks that are drugged with things like th-2c.

I've added a few more rooms to the 'ignore list' for ambient reports of crime (like assault) topside. These are rooms where corps typically have some amount of combat that the WJF doesn't need to be aware of.

CHIC / DASHING

If you are attractive and have chic / dashing as part of your automatically calculated short description, you will now also get your attractiveness added to your shortdesc, instead of it being over-ruled.

Any vehicle with all off road tires has been able to drive into any room (including indoor rooms, up stairs, etc) for a while now apparently.

I've resolved the issue. Off Road tires will let you drive on dunes in the badlands. They will no longer let you drive in the ocean, through a mountain or forest, into a shop, into an elevator, up stairs, down a sewer hatch, etc.

Fixed a dune dragon attack miss message that had 'n' instead of '%vn' for the victim's name.

TERRA PCS UNINTENTIONALLY PERMING NPC TERRA AGENTS AND JUDGES

A few times now, we've created persistent TERRA and Judge NPCs. You probably know the ones. And a few times they have inexplicably gone missing. Retired or recycled and we didn't know why.

This was because PCs put in charge of NPCs can tell them to 'go home' or 'back to base' or 'dismissed' expecting those NPCs would return to their homebase.

What was actually happening was that these NPCs would 'retire'. AKA be recycled. This was fine for the memento NPCs that were not persistent, and that was the intended use of the command in some cases. However, persistent NPCs were created with the same parentage and thus, were subject to the same rules.

I've removed this. Which defaults it to the default behavior which up until now was for the NPC to say they didn't support that command on local OOC. Bringing me to...

ORDERING NPCS TO GO HOME

If an NPC has a valid home that isn't a coffin or OOC area, and you can boss them around, they will attempt to 'go home' to that area, if they are able. If they don't know how to get there, they will tell you so ICly. If they are already home, they will tell you they are where they need to be. This should make it easier to send NPCs back to base when you need to. They will also refuse if they are busy doing other stuff like being puppeted, or doing a dispatched task.

BADLY SPAWNED MEMENTOS

I found some badly spawned mementos hanging around, taking up space, still digging into how they got spawned wrong but it was primarily a hidden factions NPCs and memento VS guards. I've manually retired all 25+ of them.

See above update, same change made for wigs. I've added the thickness issue to the staff meeting and will discuss there if we need to make an update to player material to hava a thickness of 1 to avoid issues like this in the future.

There was a TB in crowded rooms due to a task running out of ticks, I've switched to a suspended version of that task which hopefully fixes the issue.

I've fixed the broken color for this location when shown at a distance. It just doesn't have colors now.

TopMudSites has gone into read only mode. I've removed the xtms social and updated the voting reminder for those that have it turned on. I've added xmv for mud verse since they allow voting and we already have votes over there.

Ganger HQs are now considered 'secure areas'. If you're going to go merc someone in the middle of one, best be xhelping so we can have a response prepared. Thanks!

I've hardened the inventory command against those trace backs that would cause your entire inventory to be unlistable. Now you'll either get a little red status under the item informing you the item is bugged or traceback immediately below the problematic item. In either case, your inventory will still work.

There was a bug that cropped up sometimes where when handing an npc an item they wanted the task would run out of ticks. I've added a suspend if needed to prevent this. Hopefully fixes the issue. If you continue to see it, @bug it please.

I've fixed a TB where if you typed /listen here in a vehicle you'd get wonky responses.

If you did key on radio and something was less than 3 characters long it would break things. I've resolved this.

There was code on the radio utils package they didn't update the messaging so it was not using the proper objects to substitute for %t and %n. I've resolved that as well.

There was another bug where the code was calling a verb to check if the person who had keyed the freq was still in the same room as the radio, this is useful for if the player keyed a freq and then left, and we need to do messaging.

However... that verb simply did not exist. Fixed.

HELP RADIO

I updated the help file to mention how keying works and the fact that it puts your radio on cooldown.

The color on the flarelighter tease message has been fixed.

This shop was not hooked up to the crate delivery service, so it was never going to get any new stock. I've resolved this.

There are currently 272 bugs in the backlog. 13 from November that have yet to be resolved. Most of the November ones are either vehicle combat bugs or I need to talk to specific players to help reproduce / get more information, and I'm just waiting to see them online.

Small update to cover an edge case. When you hide something it is moved out of the room and to a secure storage room, and a record of its location is generated in a registry, then when you search a room it searches the registry. But the issue is if some how an item gets moved out of the storage room by accident or by an admin moving it not realizing it was a hidden item (there is a warning about this but it can still happen), it can't be returned when it is found because it is somewhere else IC.

Basically the registry says the item should be hidden in X room, but the item is actually in some player or NPC inventory or in the market or something. This doesn't come up a huge amount, but when it does there is a GM message about it happening. However, there was no output to the player that it happened. It would just say you found the item and you would check your inventory and it wouldn't be there.

I've added a new OOC message when this situation occurs which explains, provides the object # for GMs to investigate and tells the player to xhelp.

Not a fix, just an update. Skateboards are currently broken. Just like wheelchairs were broken. I had thought that they used the same code as wheelchairs, but nope, they are just copy pastes of the same code, so my fixes for wheelchairs didn't apply to them.

I need to speak with Johnny about how they are supposed to work. I'll do that soon and then fix them once I understand how they are intended to operate (it is slightly different than wheelchairs).

If an NPC wants a drink and you deliver it to them, they will now drink that drink instead of putting it away and potentially spilling it all over themselves.

This also opens the possibility of NPCs that want drinks getting spiked drinks. Though the NPC will only consume 1 use of a drink and then the drink will be recycled (to prevent people causing NPCs to OD without GM intervention). So you could technically drug an NPC this way.

We've upgraded our Postgres DB to a newer version. This shouldn't have any impact on the game or the grid, but if anyone see's anything wonky please let me know. I tested the upgrade on our dev server with a dev instance of the db first, to confirm things worked but I could have missed stuff.

There was a bit of a race condition in the cook verb when cooking meat from a carcass. On the last usage, it would try to silently sheath the item and recycle it, but it's possible the item could have already been recycled (if the player trashed it?) or if some other weird stuff happened.

I've added additional checks to make sure it's still the 'same' object and that it is still on the player.

There was an issue with the supermarket where its exits property was set to non readable. I don't know why this was the case, or if it was intentional, I'm guessing it was not, but who knows. As a result NPCs trying to path through the area were generating tracebacks because the recursive pathing code couldn't access the exits prop, which we expect to be readable, and thus tracebacked. I've resolved this by setting the prop to readable. If other shit breaks as a result, @bug it.

I've fixed the worn_msg on all existing wigs of this type and fixed the code that spawns them. The message read very weird, because of the pattern matching that was being used. Should be better now.

The taxi destinations were set up in a weird way that was not interfacing with the $destinations matrix in a sane way. I'm sure it was setup the way it was for future improvements, but given how the system organically developed, it didn't make sense to have to manually add destinations in two different places. I've made it interface directly so taxis and limos will have direct access to more places with fewer changes. This means taxis should know more destinations off the bat.

If there are places that are not included that you think should be, please put in a service request for CODER with the name of the place that you think should be included.

Taxis and limos were broken at various times.

One of the changes made was to make it so that you had to have hands free to drive. An understandable change but one that none the less broke the hell out of taxis because in checking if hands are free, it has to try to lock the action for a moment before releasing. This, coupled with the fact that taxi drivers try to 'lock back' was running into a situation where the action for hands free was locked as part of the driving check at the same time they tried to lock the back, meaning the doors were never locked and you could just exit the taxi without paying.

I've removed the hands free check on driving altogether as there was no easy fix for this issue and it was probably breaking other shit as well. I think this is fine. Drive with your knees like everyone else.

In another situation, if the destination was not 'reachable' because it was set as say, The Drome (and not the street outside the Drome) the taxi would drive there, and fail to drive INTO the drome, thus never completing the fare cycle because the :do_stop verb was not being called for unpassable terrain. I've resolved this by calling :do_stop properly when this arises.

So, in these cases, Taxi's will actually charge you for using them. This was broken for a year, and we only had a few reports of it, people probably not realizing there was a bug, or enjoying a free taxi fare. This fix should push people more towards PC taxi drivers at any rate.

The code that was showing if people were sleeping handled the driver sleeping, but never removed the driver from the list of sleepers after showing them sleeping in the drivers seat. As a result a sleeping driver was shown twice. I've resolved the issue.

When the new e-note file system was first rolled out you could create files without file extensions. This was later corrected. However, these files that are created without a file extension cannot be read by the existing code. I've gone through all the files created and manually added extensions to ones missing them. This is something that should have been done when the issue was fixed, but it was not.

Plants were blooming with blossoms that were BlackFlat or YellowCanary, because those are the names of the colors. This was builders bolting 256 colors onto the plant system which was designed before we had 256 colors.

I've redesigned the system to support setting props on the flowers like this: {"BlackFlat", "black"} or {"YellowCanary", "sunshine yellow"} where the second item in the list is what is displayed to the player who looks at the plant.

This means builders can use all types of purdy colors with minimal difficulty.

I've reviewed the bloom messages on all 173 plants in game, to confirm they all appear as intended. If anyone notices any issues, please submit an @bug.

xslither

The verb logging incoming calls was calling 'do_incoming' but the verb was actually named 'do_incomming' because I can't spell for shit. This has been renamed and will get called properly. Meaning incoming calls will be logged.

These did not have an integration message previously, which meant that if you installed them unhidden, they would not show up in the room desc and not be found when searching. I've added one that reads:

A surveillance microphone shaped like a palm-sized small mesh dome hangs from the wall.

They will now function visually the same way that unhidden cameras do.

This room was freezing, but not preserving cyberware left in it. I've changed it to a proper parent so it will preserve stuff like corpses and cyber.

There is now a rate limit on how fast you can chute items to prevent someone chuting something multiple times super fast and getting multiple credits for the same item.

I've done another full pass on all the @bugs we have. I've marked a number of them for review by Johnny (mostly aero / dynamic space stuff). I've flagged a bunch of others for investigation by staff to confirm they are still issues and get me more information on how to reproduce.

I've also started the process of scheduling a bug bash day for sometime in December. Waiting on responses from Staff for when they will be around.

I cleared out a bunch of bugs today, and resolved a bunch more that were duplicates of ones I've already fixed, or that were already submitted.

Currently, there are about 100 bugs that I've only glanced over a few times and that still need me to heavily review them.

Current Bugs in Backlog: 205

These were displaying only certain vehicles (on purpose) but the 'touch name on billboard' was pulling from a list of all vehicles. I've modified this to only pull from the list of vehicles the billboard is configured for.

This resolves an issue where you could view details on vehicles not for sale at that location.

These can now be closed after they are opened.

(Edited by Slither at 9:13 am on 11/29/2022)

You now need to be wearing your mechanics toolbelt in order to use it to repair vehicle parts. This should prevent a situation where you consume scraps, but then get told later in the process that you aren't wearing the belt and thus the repair fails.

This command will now work when there are N vehicles with the same name in the room. So you can do things like 'estimate 4th honda'.

Unlike Jacuzzi's, which defined a special integration verb to show you people that were in them, you couldn't tell if a pool was occupied without going into it. I've moved the integration verb to the Generic Pool, and tested shallow and deep pools. They now function just like jacuzzi's and will show you who is in them integrated with the room description.

These were spawning with 15 rounds but had a max rounds of 10. I've reduced it so they spawn with 10 rounds. I also checked all other ammo clips in the game to confirm no other generic ammo had this issue.

Deleting a directory previously required confirmation, I've extended this to deleting files as well.

Pets and such will no longer say actual words in response to some commands (like if you told them to stop following someone and they weren't following someone). This will make it harder to know why they aren't doing what you are told... but ya know, animals be tough to understand sometimes.

I fixed an issue with memento spawning where there could be a TB if the memento recycled/retired before the spawn code finished. I dunno why NPCs would retire so quickly, but it's technically possible, and it happened at least once.

Cubes now have a 'rentcheck' verb which calls the same code that you get when you log in within a cube, telling you how long the cube is rented for.

(Edited by Slither at 4:41 pm on 12/1/2022)