Mobiles (NPCs and Prey) Improving!

The good news on that front is that we tracked down the bug that was causing it to crash after a few hours. So the prey and NPCs should be running around like normal and stay running around. Let us know if you spot something amiss.

Those of you familiar with programming can think of the problem as a 'memory leak'. If you're familiar with stack-based languages, it was actually a 'stack leak'--stuff getting left on the stack that shouldn't have been--accumulating until the stack overflowed!

We've also made some progress in the longer term plan of replacing Animazing. Animazing is a great (dare I say it? Amazing) program. But. It was written for entirely different variant of the TinyMUCK family of muck servers. And it was never written with Narnia or GlowMUCK in mind. So it isn't a perfect fit for us.

Last Spring, we started a replacement program. We got it to the "very very early testing" phase before AFD, and some of the mobiles for AFD were managed by it. It was still very much an alpha test at that stage.

I'm pleased to announce it has moved out of the "alpha testing" phase and into the "beta testing" phase. If you have a character that plays in the Sted Cair area and hang around in Satyr's Hoof Tavern long enough, you might see Blatherskite stop by for some mead. Unlike all the other mobiles on the muck, Blatherskite is being handled by the new program (heartbeat-mobiles), instead of Animazing.

As always, let us know if there's problems using the in-game commands or the web-based request system (http://requests.narniamuck.org/).