Updates coming thick and fast

Posted August 18th, 2007 by Dewi Morgan

Updates to the online Java client have been coming thick and fast in the last few days and it makes me happy Smile

Here's the current state of play.

* The client now resizes to fit your browser
However, if you have JavaScript disabled, or are using Opera, it will not scale vertically.

* Most URLs and email addresses now magically turn into links.
They don't need html around them, though that's usually allowed (but avoid spaces around your "=" in "href=" in that case). As everywhere in the net, be wary of clicking links: mouseover them to make sure they really link where say they do.

* Images are allowed in chat.
I have not yet restricted these to thudgame.com, but I do log it, so if you want to get banned really fast, then just abuse this feature. Otherwise, please avoid posting huge or non-family-safe images.

* New command: /me
Type "/me dances" and you will see something like "Dewi Morgan dances".

* New command: /ver
Type "/ver" and you will see a message like "You are running ThudClient version 2007f.4(std)(main)" - "2007" is the year; "f" tells you how many versions have been released that year (a=1, b=2...); ".4" tells you how many test versions I uploaded before I was happy to release that version, "(std)" or "(debug)" means it's a standard or debugging version, "(main)" or "(2)" means it's running on the main server, or server 2 (the test server).

* Public test server.
You can connect to http://www.thudgame.com/node/990 to see whatever client version I'm playing with at that moment and snoopy people can type "/ver" a lot to see how often I'm uploading to the server.

* Stuff is pretty.
Specifically: your name is bold and italic: everyone else's is bold. Notifications are blue, warnings purple, errors red, debugging stuff grey, and emotes green.

* User badges.
Druids and Admins only for the moment, just as a proof of concept. Anything further will require server-side code changes too.

* Flickering scroll-to-bottom bug squished!
Yes, the window should now smoothly scroll to the bottom without first scrolling to the top. In fixing this, CPU and memory use should also have fallen slightly.

* "User spoofing" bug squished!
You can no longer log in as someone else. I still want to make a more rugged solution to prevent this, as the current fix is fairly "brittle".

* "Carat-space" bug squished!
Your name, if it has a space in, now appears with a space there, not a "^" character.

* "Your/their move" bug squished!
The messges "Your move" and "Their move..." now appear in the correct window, in a smaller, less distracting font.

* "Bad name. Guesting..." bug squished!
Actually, this wasn't a bug, I deliberately placed that message in the name field when you were "guested" - but I found it less useful and more annoying than I expected, so removed it. The name and password you entered will remain in place, so that you can edit them and try again.

You can check out the (to-do list to see the list of things that are worrying me, but probably the most worrying known bugs at the moment are:

* Endgames are poorly detected, if at all.
* Opera often hangs when loading the client.
* Two people talking simultaneously in a game can deadlock the client and hang the browser, even with recent Java versions.
* People can become disconnected ("ghosted") without anyone noticing, even themselves.
* Elerias' reported crash.
* Passwords with spaces in - particularly multiple consecutive spaces - probably won't work, and never have. Only, nobody's reported this as a problem, yet....
* Trolls don't properly clear from their precious location.
* Images and sounds do not load for all people.

--Yet another geek.

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