Merc Release 2.2
Wednesday 24 November 1993

Kahn
Hatchet



=== Disclaimer

If your name isn't in here, and you think it should be; or if your name IS
in here and you prefer a different name or anonymity; then just e-mail us
and we'll fix it in the next release.



=== Contribution Policy

We welcome contributions to the Merc Mailing List at merc@kpc.com.

You can send the mailing list areas, spells, skills, bug reports, bug fixes,
code, ideas, comments on our documentation, interesting stories, or anything
else.


Merc is devoted to open release.  Once we accept a contribution, it will
become available to the entire mud community.  Also, once we accept a
contribution and integrate it into Merc, we will not remove it later if you
change your mind.

You are welcome to use any element of Merc in your own mud, as long as you
follow the terms in 'license.doc' and 'license.txt'.  If you take things from
Merc we'd appreciate e-mail from you.



=== Mailing List

Thanks to Zrin for administering the Merc mailing list.  You can join the list
by sending e-mail to merc-request@kpc.com.



=== The First Contributions

Merc Mud is based on Diku Mud, with Copper and Alfa enhancements.

When we first started, Impy of Fajita Mud answered a lot of our newbie-coder
questions.

Frag, Tin, Razor, Jordan, Tre, and Matrix play-tested early Merc code.

The Free Software Foundation and DJ Delorie wrote our development tools, and
distribute them for free, with source.  You can ftp them from prep.ai.mit.edu
and grape.ecs.clarkson.edu.



=== New Area Contributions

--- Merc 2.2

Casret contributed Ultima.are.

Mahatma contributed Haven.are.

Andersen contributed Astral.are.

--- Merc 2.1

Glop wrote Mega1.are.

--- Merc 2.0

Vamplestat reworked and extended Miden'nir.

Nirrad contributed the Fire Newt area.

Tyrst contributed Wyvern Tower.

Doctor contributed Galaxy.

Raff contributed Dwarven Catacombs, Dangerous Neighborhood, and Elemental
Canyon.

PinkF contributed the Mob Factory.

Chris Boggs made the Keep of Mahn-Tor available for public distribution,
and gave us permission to use it in Merc.

Aod and Cauchy of Generic Mud gave us permission to use Smurf Village, Gnome
Village, Dwarven Day Care Center, Old Marsh, Draconia, and Olympus.

John Brothers of Silly Mud gave us permission to use Silly areas.  Although we
haven't taken any yet, we appreciate having 2 megabytes of areas to draw on!



=== Code and Idea Contributions

N'atas-Ha and Blackstar contributed on the pager.

N'atas-Ha sent us the versatile MOBPrograms.  See MOBProgram.txt.

Morgenes of Aldara Mud contributed the player settable prompt.

Alander sent in an addition to the note system.

John Daub is porting MERC 2.2 to the MacIntosh sometime soon.  Keep an eye
out on posts.

Many other imps and players gave us hundreds of suggestions, some of which are
now realized.  Thanks to you all!

Onethumb, Baka, and Penn of the Drool Co. sent us a long list of ideas,
which we've included here as 'drool.txt'.



=== Porting Contributions

--- MERC 2.2

	With the additions of MOBPrograms, MERC 2.2 does not have as many
ports available compared to MERC 2.0.  Compile and fix to your system if
necessary.

sgromoll@ic.sunyeb.edu contributed the Interactive and Solaris SYSV ports
for our comm.c code.  Nothing was done in regards to MOBPrograms with
these ports.

Loki ported MERC 2.2 in its entirety for Linux.

--- MERC 2.0

Hind and Quin (not the original Quinn of Diku, another Quin) helped on the
Ultrix port.

Vic contributed the Linux port and 386/BSD ports.

Diavolo contributed the RS/6000 port, including helping to track down a code
generation bug in the AIX compiler.

Alander helped on the NeXT port.

Shephane Haechler and Frederic Benedetto contributed the Hp/UX port, which is
one of the more painful machines we've encounterd.

Alan Drew contributed the Mips Risc/OS port.

Torsten Spindler contributed the makefile changes for Solaris 2.1.

Oleg Etiffin contributed the Macintosh port.



=== Bug Reports and Bug Fixes

--- MERC 2.2

Alander sent in the fix for the vicious bind socket problem.

Da Pub pointed out the switch and purge problems.

Ikee, Chaos, Kraze, Maxx, Thoth, Zolstead, Zavod, VampLestat, Cyric,
Kelvin, and Jackal extensively playtested prerelease MERC 2.2 and
provided constructive input.

Many others have sent us tweeks which have been put in.


--- MERC 2.0

Mud Lite, Vego Mud, Final Mud, Rivers of Mud, Ruhr Mud, Chase Mud, and
Mystic Realms sent us their 'bugs.txt', 'ideas.txt', and 'typos.txt' files.
These were VERY helpful and we ask that all Merc-based muds e-mail us these
files from time to time.

While porting Merc to Linux, Vic isolated some mystifying memory management
problems in the base code.

Abaddon proofread our comm.c and reported several bugs and weak spots.
Of course, any remaining problems are ours, not his.

Kalgen reported bugs in the 2.0 Alpha release.

Lincoln Myers found an array-read overrun in 'do_pose' in 2.0 Beta.

Grodyn of Mystic Realms sent us several high-quality logs, core dump stack
traces, and bug reports for 2.0 Beta.  Many other people, including Loki,
also sent us good beta bug reports.

Morgenes found and fixed the nasty 'aligned object drop corruption'
in equip_char.

Rivit play-tested the post-2.0-Beta version.
