I'm very happy to announce the release of a new version of CircleMUD:
version 3.0 beta patchlevel 12. It's available from the usual sites:
ftp://ftp.circlemud.org/pub/CircleMUD/3.x, and the web site at
http://www.circlemud.org.
This will hopefully be the first in a relatively rapid series of
releases. I'd like to keep releasing betas every 2 or 3 weeks until
it's no longer beta.
As most of you probably know, the title "beta" doesn't mean a whole
lot any more anyway, except to indicate that the code isn't officially
"done" yet, and to give me license to change the code at any time :-).
When it does get to a point where I'm ready to take the "beta" out of
the version, I'll probably call it 3.1 (instead of 3.0) to avoid
confusion. As it is, the MUD is very stable and largely bug-free.
The ultimate goal of Circle is to create a codebase that is rock
solid, well documented, and easy to modify. This release has mainly
focused on the "rock-solid" part -- it is much more portable, and many
bugs have been fixed. I'm trying to avoid putting in any radical new
features until 3.1 (a.k.a 3.0 non-beta). The "configure" script has
been expanded to search for many more system characteristics, so the
code should compile right out of the box on virtually every UNIX box
out there. The code also has native support for compiling under the
Amiga, Windows 95/NT, and OS/2. People have submitted patches for
native gnu-win32 and Mac System 7 support, which will hopefully appear
in the next release (within a couple of weeks).
OS's that I've tested this release on so far are:
Linux
Intel PPro 233 running RedHat Linux 4.2 (Kernel 2.0.31pre10), gcc 2.7.2.1
Sun SPARCstation 5 running RedHat Linux 4.2 (Kernel 2.0.30), gcc 2.7.2.1
Solaris
Sun Ultra 1 running Solaris 2.5.1, gcc 2.7.2.3
Sun SPARCstation 20 running SunOS 4.1.4, gcc 2.6.3
Sun SPARCstation 2 running SunOS 4.1.4, gcc 2.7.2
AIX
IBM RS/6000 (Model 590) running AIX 4.1, gcc 2.6.3
IBM RS/6000 (Model 590) running AIX 4.1, IBM xlc compiler
IRIX
SGI R10000 running IRIX 6.2, gcc 2.7.2.1
SGI R4400 running IRIX 6.2, gcc 2.7.2.1
SGI R4400 running IRIX 6.2, SGI's MIPS C compiler
Another notable feature in this release is that it generates
significantly less network traffic than previous versions of Circle,
as well as most other Diku-based MUDs. This is a big advantage for
MUDs running on slow machines, and especially MUDs running on slow
(modem) links. Details of this feature are documented in the
ChangeLog.
The next release will again be a bug-fix release; George Greer will be
integrating a large number of his patches into the official codebase.
I will meanwhile be trying to integrate a lot of the other patches
that Circle users have sent to me over the past months, and working on
the documentation.
Enjoy!!!
--Jeremy
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