New client release

Finally, after a week of work, there is a new Official Alter Aeon Mudding Client for all to use! This version fixes a huge number of bugs in the previous code base, and has faster scrolling among other improvements. Beeping in the input window has been killed and control-c now works again.

It has been a long, hard five-day-slog to get to this point, but using a custom window class has made so many things better. Gone are all the hacks I had to put in to make the old libraries work; now they're back to the nice clean code they should have been. Scrolling works right, select works right, context switches work right - and best of all, it's fast as hell under Windows. I really wasn't expecting this level of performance.

The final hitch was getting the input window working reliably. Through some stroke of luck I found the event handler responsible for intercepting control C and the backspace events. With some really nasty state-handling code and about two hours of experimentation, I finally have an input window class that traps out all the beeps and handles selection copy without stupidity.

If I had known this to start, it would have saved me so much time and effort. Time lost that I could have spent elsewhere; such is life. But going forward, it's so liberating - no longer am I at the mercy of crap that can't be made to work the way I want it to.

If it fails, its my own fault. And I can live with that.