Various updates

It's been a while since I posted, so I thought I would just drop a general overview of what's been going on in the last couple of weeks.

The largest major change, at least in terms of useful functionality, has been updates to the grouping code. I've been playing a lot, and I've noticed that putting together groups is a lot harder than it really should be. This is a social game, after all. Getting people together into fun, functional groups is part of the process.

After that are changes to the who listings. I quickly prototyped a 'who idle' command on request, but within about five minutes of first using it I was in love. I ended up adding a bunch of who list configuration switches; see 'set who' for options and status. You can now change from the default who display to idle time based, list short or long form, and enable or disable microlevels and titles. I haven't even gotten any complaints about it.

One big yet unobvious change had to do with the PRNG (pseudo random number generator) upon which the game is based. For quite some time now, I've been using a pretty fast lagged fibbonacci generator instead of a linear congruential. On a whim, I downloaded the diehard PRNG tests and tried them out. As expected, the old random number generator failed a lot of them horribly.

So, I ripped the old one out and put in a new one that does actually pass the tests. Other than monster lore sends changing, noone will ever notice - and I can rest slightly more assured that there's not hidden correlations lurking in my generator that are causing weird behavior.

Last on the list of big ticket things is, of course, mapper updates. We've got global area maps that are almost ready for general public display. I'd really like to have oceanography working first, so maybe I'll work on that a bit tonight.

All in all, a lot more getting done than I expected. It's been a good week.