Panumbra Newsletter #5 January 9th 1998

Panumbra Newsletter

No. 5, January 9, 1998, Friday

Happy New Year!
I hope all of you had nice vacations. We are back from our holidays and moving ahead with full speed again. Here are the promised updates:

1. Demo release date: January 19, 1998, Monday. From the development point of view it looks like we can make this date. We may have a problem if we do not receive the memory for the server in time (see next point). We will keep you updated. 
2. Server problems. Our brand new server stopped working the next day after the preview. We had to return it. The new server arrived yesterday, but we are still waiting for more memory, that should arrive middle of next week. It better arrives on time, or our release date may slip! 
3. Bug fixing and testing. We finally finished running all of our system test cycles. We uncovered a lot of bugs, and we are continuously fixing them. Panumbra is getting into a good shape, the testers rarely encounter serious bugs any more. There are quite a number of smaller errors, they are also getting cleaned up slowly, but surely.
   Some of the more important bugs we fixed were:

   	World areas were taking up a huge amount of memory (50 MB each). We successfully cut it down to one-fifth. The fix may slow down movement, we should test that when the demo will be up.
   	We did several fixes to eliminate server lock ups. One of them reduces the possibility of lock-ups, others fixed actual errors. Lock ups are the nastiest errors, they are really hard to find, and usually occur only when lots of people are using the system simultaneously. We obtained a software which helps diagnosing such errors during run-time. We need your help to find them during beta testing.
   	Text messaging has been redesigned: the entry field is now cleared after send and you always get an echo of your own message. Now you can send a private message to one specific character by typing in "to charname:" e.g. "to Bonky Dog: Hi" would send a private message to Bonky Dog. Do not forget the colon after the name! We also made some layout changes on the text messaging interface.
   	We now have a compass! It is simply a letter indicating the direction (N, E, S, W) in the lower right corner of the graphics.
   	Monsters used to hit a lot more often and harder than characters at the same level. We found a bug that generated their statistics about 5 times higher than normal! That has been fixed, but we at least know that statistics really make a difference :).
   	Now you get messages from effects which hit you more than once, e.g. poison would take off some hitpoints every once in a while, and now it will tell you every time how much damage it has done to you. (Before you slowly died with no apparent reason.)

These are just some of the fixes I thought you may be interested in. We corrected tons of other errors as well, ranging from spelling mistakes to wrong template calculations.

4. Graphics and data. Chris is making really cool looking caves, get prepared! The demo will have 6 mine levels and 2 cave levels, as we already mentioned. The cave levels may not be completely finished when the demo is released, but we certainly have them done very soon afterwards. Some of the monster types still have no graphics, so you may see the generic monster (two eyes in the dark) sometimes, in that case you need to read the monster name to know what it is. We will add the graphics as soon as they are finished. Brian has finished most of the mine levels. He also made a new, small starting world area, a map of which we will publish soon on the web site, on the request of several people. 
5. Newbie channel. We added a newbie channel, where people can ask questions and receive help. You can turn the newbie channel off using the Options menu (default is on). You can send a message to the newbie channel by typing "newbie:" or "nb:" and your message.

Thank you for reading our newsletter! Cheers

Marta Gabnai - lead designer