Mail, The Ether Ship, MAUs, Guard Towers, The Cash Shop And Chip War Buffs

Six things you can go and do this time, and a pile that stops going wrong.

You can send mail. Write to another player by name, attach gold or an item, and it lands in their mailbox whether they are logged in or not.

The ether ship sails. It runs between each race’s neutral zone and the Ether, on a five minute crossing, and it now carries people rather than just existing.

You can own a MAU. Buy a frame, tune parts onto it, load its magazines, call it out and ride it.

You can put down a guard tower. Build one from a tower kit and the materials it asks for, wait for it to finish, and take it back when you are done.

And the cash shop is open. It has a real balance behind it now, and buying something takes the credits and puts the item in your bag.

The Chip War pays out. Win it and your whole race carries a buff until the next one; lose it and your whole race carries a debuff. Keep winning and it gets stronger.

The one that stops nagging: FireGuard remembers your password now. It used to ask you to set one up on every single login, because the server never told your client that you already had one.

Three things that were plainly broken are fixed with it. Hostile monsters attack you again instead of ignoring you until you hit them first. Casting a buff trains that buff, wherever you happen to be standing. And picking an item up works when you are standing on it, instead of telling you it is out of range.

Features

• Mail. Address a letter to another player by name, give it a title and a body, and send it. If they are in the world it arrives straight away; if they are not, it waits for them.

• Attachments. A letter can carry gold, or one item out of your bag. The item leaves your inventory when you send and turns up in theirs when they take it.

• Your mailbox. Read any letter, take its attachment, and delete the ones you are finished with. A mailbox holds 50 letters.

• The ether ship carries passengers. Three routes, one from each race’s neutral zone to the Ether and back. Buy a ticket from the merchant at the dock, walk aboard while the ship is anchored, and you are taken across when it sails. The ticket is taken as you cast off. You need to be level 35.

• No ticket, no passage. If you are standing on the ship when it leaves and you have not got a ticket, you are put ashore in your own race’s neutral zone.

• MAUs. Buy a frame into one of your unit slots, fit parts to it, fill its two magazines, call it out, board it, and send it back when you are done. All four frames are there with their real hulls and prices, and everything you buy or fit stays bought and fitted across a logout.

• Firing from a MAU. Pick a target and swing: the shot lands, ammunition comes off the magazine, and the monster takes the damage.

• Guard towers. Place a tower from your bag, at the spot you are standing, and it builds itself over the next few seconds. Everyone nearby sees it go up. Take it back and the kit returns to your bag.

• FireGuard remembers you. Set a password and a hint question once, and the next time you log in the game asks you to enter it instead of offering to set one up again. Five wrong answers lock the protected windows until whoever runs the server clears it.

• A race leader can set the message their race sees. Type it once and everyone in your race is shown it, then and at every login after, until you change it. Before this the message was fixed text nobody could edit.

• The cash shop works. Open it and it shows what you have; buy something and the credits come off and the item lands in your bag. Prices, stack sizes and the items themselves come from the game’s own shop table, so what you are offered is what the game says it costs.

• Credits. Your balance belongs to your ACCOUNT, not to one character, so it is the same number whichever character you play and it is still there after a server wipe. Whoever runs the server can top you up, and every movement is written down with a reason.

• Buffs and potions keep their timers when you log out. They pause where they are and pick up again when you come back, so closing the game no longer costs you whatever you just drank. It is on by default and whoever runs the server can turn it off.

• Winning a Chip War is worth something to your whole race, and losing one costs it. The race that takes the war carries Victorious Vigor until the next one; whoever brought the chip home carries Hero’s Roar instead, which is the stronger of the two. The race that lost carries the Stigma of Disgrace and the race that never broke a chip carries the Scar of Defeat. Win the same way three wars running and the buff climbs a level each time, and it starts over the moment a different race takes the win. Dying does not touch it: it belongs to the race, not to you.

  If nobody brings the chip home, nobody gets anything at all, including the race that broke the chip. That is the original’s rule and we kept it.

Improvements

• Whoever runs the server can set how long the ship spends docked and how long the crossing takes, and the change takes effect on the crossing already in progress rather than waiting for a restart. The default is five minutes each way.
• MAU prices, repair costs and ammunition costs are server settings too, and take effect the same way.
• Two new server settings, “Carry buffs across a logout” and “Carry potion buffs across a logout”. Both are on by default. They are separate because they are different bargains: a buff you cast cost you a cast, a potion cost you an item, and an operator may want to keep one running and not the other.

Fixes

• Hostile monsters attack you again. They only ever fought back: a mob that is supposed to hunt would stand in its patrol while you walked through it, and nothing happened until you swung first. The server had no way to notice you at all. Monsters the game marks as aggressive now look for the nearest player inside their own sight range and come for them, and the ones the game marks as passive still leave you alone. A monster that spots you also does the little animation it is supposed to do as it turns on you.
• Casting a buff trains it, anywhere. Skill and force experience was being thrown away inside the three nation towns, so a buff cast where you would naturally test one advanced nothing. That rule was ours and it was wrong. The original suppresses this only for a player under a penalty, and it has no such thing for a place. Reported twice, as “Tempo did not increase exp” and as “Wild Rage does not add to Wild Rage PT”, and both were this.
• Picking up an item works when you are standing on it. Loot refused with “Item looting Failure
  • Range limitation” far more often than it should, because the distance to a box was measured in three dimensions while the game measures it flat. Any height between you and the item ate into your reach, so a step, a slope or a corpse at the bottom of a drop put an item you were standing over out of range.
• Some buffs were doing nothing at all. Forty-nine effect slots across the game’s skill, force and class-skill tables pointed at stat positions this server had no room for, so the buff went on, the icon appeared, and none of it changed a number. Siege Mastery, Maximum Animus, Buildup Defense, Hypnotic Power and Excel Charger are the class skills that were affected, along with every monster wave buff.
• Monsters drop loot again. This was reported as “Young Flems drop nothing”, and the truth was larger: no monster anywhere on the server had ever dropped anything. Drops now come from the game’s own drop table, which was sitting imported and unread the whole time, so what falls off a monster is what should fall off that monster.
• Converting dalant to gold could carry you past the 500,000 gold ceiling. The money changer now refuses a conversion that would cross it and leaves both your balances alone, the way the original server does. Landing exactly on 500,000 is still allowed.
• New characters no longer start with 10,000 dalant. We had picked that figure ourselves and the game never handed it out, and it made the early economy meaningless. You start with nothing and earn it.
• FireGuard used to accept any password and forget it immediately, so the lock never actually locked anything. It does now, and the password is stored the same way your account password is: hashed, so nobody can read it back, including us.
• Extra bags stay bought. Buying a bag and using it grew your inventory until you logged out, and the extra pages were gone when you came back. The bag was spent for nothing. The extra pages are saved now.
• A debuff lands on what you aimed it at. Spells meant to weaken your target were being applied to the caster instead, so casting one at something else weakened you.
• Each force now carries its own experience. Casting a force advances three separate things in RF: that individual force’s own proficiency, the mastery line it belongs to, and your character’s force stat. We were reporting the mastery line’s number in all the places the individual force’s number belongs, so two forces of the same element looked like one bar being counted twice. The per-force counter is real now and is reported where it should be. The shared line is not a bug: eighty-eight forces really do feed twenty-four mastery lines, which is how the base, expert and elite tiers advance.
• A brand new character was greeted with “You have not logged in for 30 days. CP 0 has changed.” A character that has never been played now carries the day it was made, so the game stops believing it has been sitting idle since 1970 and the notice no longer fires.

For Anyone Running Their Own Server

• The control panel serves plain HTTP by default, and works at http://localhost/ straight away. It used to try to obtain an HTTPS certificate for a domain that was not yours, fill the log with handshake errors, and never serve a page. Set TLS_DOMAIN in settings.cfg to a public hostname that points at your machine and it will get a real certificate itself; leave it empty for plain HTTP, which is the right answer on your own machine or LAN.
• Leave COOKIE_DOMAIN empty unless you serve the site from several subdomains. It used to ship with our address in it, which meant your players could sign in and be signed straight back out.
• Keep the db folder even if you use MySQL. It holds the game’s content, and on MySQL the server imports it the first time it starts. Deleting it leaves you with no monsters anywhere. This was signposted badly before, and the server now says so plainly if it happens.
• Unpacking a newer download over an existing MySQL install used to stop the server from starting. It now keeps the content it already has and carries on.
• Dropping a database to start clean really starts clean. An old file left over from before you switched to MySQL is left alone instead of being loaded back in.
• Credits, and a ledger you can read. Three ways to move one, all the same shape: %credits 1500 <reason> in game (a negative amount removes; Super Administrator only), gmadmin credit <email> <amount> "<reason>" from a shell, and an Accounts page in the control panel where you can browse every account, open one, and use the ”+/- Credit” button. gmadmin credits <email> prints the balance and its whole history.
• A reason is required on all three, with no way around it. It is what somebody reads months later when a player asks why their balance is what it is, and the person who needs it is not the person typing it.
• Nothing changes a balance without writing a ledger row in the same breath, so a balance you cannot explain should not be possible. If you ever see one, that is a bug worth reporting.
• Reading balances needs Administrator; changing one needs Super Administrator, the same level as handing out staff access.
• gmadmin unlock <email> rf2232 clears a player’s FireGuard password for them. There is no in-game way to recover a forgotten one, on purpose, so this is the way back for anybody who locks themselves out.

Coming Soon

• Other players cannot see you riding a MAU yet, and a ridden MAU still uses your own defence and speed rather than the machine’s. Handing one to another player, scrapping one, and being forced out of one are not in this update.
• There is no way to BUY credits yet. They can only be added by whoever runs the server, by hand. Wiring up a payment provider is the next piece.
• Cash-shop items that are meant to expire after a while are handed over as permanent. Nothing in the game’s data says which ones are timed, and guessing would quietly delete something you paid for, so they all last forever until that is known.
• A guard tower does not shoot yet, and nothing can shoot it. It stands, it looks right, and it comes back at full health however long it was out. Towers fighting is the next piece.
• A guard tower comes down when the player who built it logs out.
• You can only mail a whole stack of something. Sending part of a stack is not in this update.
• Deleting a letter that still has an attachment destroys the attachment. Take it first.
• Returning a letter to its sender is not in this update.
• The ship does not yet call out a last boarding warning before it leaves, and renewing an expired ticket is not wired up.
• FireGuard’s “I forgot my password” button is not answered. Recovering it would mean the server keeping your password in a form it can read back, and it does not. Ask whoever runs the server.