DREAMURLfurc:// To find out your Dream's DREAMURL, you type dreamurl .
This is one I thought up about a year ago, and asked Felorin to put in. You can say them aloud or put them in your desc, and they become clickable links. Once you've installed Furcadia, you can enter it in a browser. You can also use them on web pages:
a href="furc://theriopolis/"
Note: If you type 'shield within your Dream, it will disable joining via furc://.
WIDE CHAT & WOOD:
A SKIN WITH TEXT BOX ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE BOTTOM
In Furcadia's predecessor, Dragonspires, which ran for a year, I had the text go all the way across the bottom. That game had combat but no uploading. It was two years before Furcadia had Dreams, at which point we added the Tabs feature. Alas, it cut into precious screen "real estate" for talking. Now, at last, I've made a skin that restores the chat window.
widechat.skin.zip
matching woodgrain 640X480
TIP: When creating a marbled.pcx, choose a color that isn't likely to contain pixels from the switching ranges. Or, if it does, you'll have to weed them out when you place a butler.
Finnish
Data for Hair Color "Ranges"
Something like eight years ago, I constructed this system. Hair is five colors and the "ranges" are really selections of 5 colors to give the impression of that color. (Furcadia's palette being only 256 colors, it didn't really have 45 actual ranges.) That was two computers ago, and I lost that little text file when a computer died. NullFlux asked me for it a month ago. As it was too much hassle to dig it up out of the source code, I reverse-engineered it from screen-captures. (That's a little tougher than it sounds, which explains why the data wasn't available before now. It took me about 4 hours.) This will allow the construction of proxies and alternate clients with accurate hair colors.
Hair
TANTALIZING TIDBITS FROM THE UPDATE
Greetings, Silver Sponsors. We're so very close to the update and I'm naturally very excited. After initial testing by the core staff, the Beekins were all sent a letter, with instructions on how to enter the test world to help find bugs. Before you start envying them too much, let me share some of my own experiences. ;)
After downloading a test version, everyone helping has to install the test version over all existing copies of Furcadia. The Beekins are not allowed to talk about the update; it's considered confidential. (I can tell you a little 'cause I'm speh-shul.) Before they can return to the regular world, they have to re-install the old Furcadia, and overwrite all copies with the old version. It's a pain in the patoot.
Thinking I could dodge this procedure, I tried to install Furcadia to just one directory. The primordial installer promptly exploded itself onto my desktop. I was picking stray .DS files outta my fur for a week...
While in the test world, I tested something new I've invented, called "Localrace". In short, it lets you add one new character, and, with DragonSpeak commands, you can change friends into or out of that form. The form I wanted to test is the dracosaur, a quadrupedal dragon-oid.
This is a walkabout .FSH I'd been working on for a long time. It's also one of the largest. It's so wide/tall that if you enter a Dream using the current pre-update client, it will lock up. That's one of several reasons why I've never released any avatars this big. It works great in the update. So I changed myself to all orange. I think I make a fine orange dracosaur.
Just then, the news flashed on my screen: Sanctimonious was releasing another version, with many more bugs corrected. So I logged off, and re-installed.
One of those fixes was just a little cosmetic touch: I put the label "Furre Editor" on the FurEdit.exe program's background. It seemed fine... until I logged back in to the test world and wanted to change back to my regular colors. I ran the furre editor and it was almost all black. Black buttons on a black screen, marked with black labels. I bet there were tooltips that were black words on black rectangles too but I couldn't tell. So I'm stuck looking like Tigre the Lonely until next release. My own fault, for forgetting to check that it was using the Furcadia palette.
Alot of folks want to be professional playtesters. You get to play video games all day, and then they give you money. What could be better than that? But, what they don't tell you is that you're playing... a broken game. Imagine playing Tetris, and 1 out of 8 times, when you make the L shape turn clockwise, it crashes.
...Now imagine that after you report this, somebody orders you, "Keep doing that until you can get it to happen 8 out of 8 times." You might be able to figure out what else happened, and you might be able to isolate the circumstances. Then again, it might be so obscure that no matter what you do, you can't get it to happen predictably. And if that's true-- you don't know how to avoid a crash. Meanwhile, you have to go on playing Tetris, 'cause, well, that's your job. Playtesting isn't just farting around, it's quite a feat of discipline.
Furcadia is unusual in that nearly all our playtesting is done by The Furres. We don't have a professional QA ("Quality Assurance") department. This time around, all the Beekins are participating, and I'm impressed by the energy and good will shown by them. They're cheerful, patient, and dogged in pursuit of various bugs. When I'm tired, that keeps me going. Thank you, Beekins!
Tafyrn helped me test the saddle shape, which lets a player furre perch on the back of a mighty player dracosaur. Also new this version is the ability in a dream to suppress the emitting of anything beginning with your choice of text string. For example, one of our Main Maps has commands that begin with @. You can type @dracosaur and nobody else will see what you typed.
The computer is listening, though, and I've got a DS command in one Dream that, if you type @dracosaur, it will turn you into one. This ability to do "silent" commands will be a major boon.
Amongst the changes you will find the rather innocuous-looking line: "Latin-1 character set support". In case you didn't happen to know, Latin-1 is an extended character set that many non-English languages use. It includes characters like an a with two dots over it, which is the 'a' in 'hat'. Estonians and others sometimes use a `4' to represent it.
Latin-1 should not be confused with Unicode. Unicode is a system that lets you type in Japanese characters, Chinese characters, and many others. Adding Unicode support is probably non-trivial. The last person I know who implemented it in a game took about four weeks doing just that and nothing else. I'd love to someday have Unicode but we're not ready yet. Amongst the difficulties it brings is, a need for 24/7 staff who speak various languages, and, sadly, the game in which it was implemented had to turn it off a week later!
This theoretically open the doors to patches that work with Cyrillic, Hangul, Hiragana, Katakana, and other phonetic scripts. How about writing in Linear B?
-----
...I was just testing the dracosaur patch and it just gave me fright. I uploaded my test Dream and turned into a Dracosaur. When I moved, the shape went flipflopping up and down like I was being bounced up and down like a giant yo-yo. So Gar came to check out this bug-- but he couldn't see it! The dracosaur animation looked fine to him. Some others came too, and they couldn't see any problem either...
I checked the .FSH file. I checked its .FBJ, but of course, "walkabout" art for avatars doesn't use a .FBJ. I checked to see if I'd accidentally used an obsolete .FSH editor. I checked to see if I'd accidentally logged on using an obsolete Furcadia.exe. After checking 5 other possibilities similar to the ones I listed, I finally discovered the trouble: I'd accidentally put a copy of the avatar patch in the "Skins" folder, so that I was seeing an older version, but nobody else was. Mystery solved!
Item3.fsh is a new file containing "default" objects for your Dreams. That is to say, it'll be in everybody's folder, so there's no need to download that stuff. There's over three hundred new things.
There are also four new sets of walls, in addition to the two we had. One of them is meant more for an interior. My original intent had been to add a pile of Wobjects; we decided to to do "real" wall files instead. Now building walls won't be like choosing chicken meat (Light or dark?).
Latest Silver Sponsor Graphic!
I haven't told you that much about the Update. Alot of it is stuff created by Gar and by Emerald Flame, and I'd hate to steal their thunder. I *will* tell you Sanctimonious's new system for Skins is amazing.
"Skinning" is accessed from the Config.exe program rather than from Furcadia.exe. A new file, Skin.ini, will let you change parameters of where buttons get placed, which Tab ("folder") they appear under, and more. Skin.ini consists of a zillion little things you can tweak. We're offering two Skins with the download: a modern-looking silver "Default" skin, and the familiar Blue Marble "Classic" skin.
As of this release, Furcadia will not be fully resizable. That will have to wait. One nice feature though, is that the text window can be made wider and taller.
The new FSHeditor brings color-shifting into the mix. You've probably noticed all these items made with blazing bright royal red. This new feature of the editor will let you change it to other colors-- and to other *shades* of those colors, in many cases.
----- ...And, alright, the Update is HERE! ----- a Vintage Furcadia Map
