"What in the world is copyover?!?", You ask. Well, it's fairly easy to explain. Do you know how every time you make changes to your MUD's source code, or maybe do some offline building? Then you have to do a "shutdown reboot" to get the changes all read back in? Well, this allows you to do that, WITHOUT kicking the players off! Pretty cool, no? "How does it work?" Basically, it makes telnet clients think they are lagging, and then shuts down the connection, reboots it, and logs everyone back in auto- magically, all before your client realizes something major happened. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the general idea and result. "What kind of problems can I expect with this installed?" Well, if you somehow corrupt your circle BINARY file (located in /bin) and the game can't run it, it dies. This could happen any number of ways: 1) You write bad code that causes segmentation faults. 2) You somehow get the directory paths mixed up. 3) You corrupt your copyover.dat file with meaningless junk (memory leak). "Why won't this patch cleanly into my MUD?" Well, once again, there are several possible answers. I downloaded a fresh copy of CircleMUD 3.0 (bpl17) before I ran diff, to make sure it would patch in okay. The file named stock.diff was made against a fresh, unaltered source. The file ascii.diff was made against a fresh source with the latest ASCII pfiles installed. So, here is why you can't patch cleanly: 1) You are using stock.diff and have made some changes to the files in the /src directory. 2) You are using ascii.diff but you patched ASCII pfiles in by hand. 2) You are using ascii.diff and you have made other changes to your source other than just plain ASCII pfiles. "This isn't fair! It should patch to my MUD!" Well, sorry. I can't anticipate the endless list of changes that someone might make to their own copy of CircleMUD. I was going to make one that patched cleanly against OasisOLC, but I realized that if I did that, I'd have to make one that patched against OLC and ASCII, and someday I'd get an email asking for one against Easycolor or something similar. This WILL work with Oasis, you'll just have to hand-patch the whole thing in. All I can say is that you are better off adding this by hand anyway. I hate patches, but since this isn't my original code I must attempt to follow in the original spirit of the author's work. ######################################################################### Okay, here it is. It's a bit late, I know. Especially considering that bpl18 is due out any time now, but I'll worry about that when it gets here. This is NOT my code. All I have done is update Erwin's code to work cleanly for bpl17. Well, in stock.diff I made a few minor changes to make it look a little neater, but that's all. Peter Ajamian has made some suggestions for a much cleaner approach, but that will have to come in the future. For now, we'll stick with the workable, bug-free (unless it's something YOU import) original. The files contained herein are: stock.diff <-patch for stock circle ascii.diff <-patch for ascii pfiles If you have made any changes to your MUD, the patch will not install cleanly. This also applies for ascii.diff, except that I installed the latest ascii pfiles on a stock circlemud codebase. Please address all concerns, comments or flames to me: <tacodog21@yahoo.com> The original author may be contacted at: <erwin@andreasen.com> He also asked that you visit this website for a look at the original: http://www.andreasen.org/snip.shtml I submitted this code to Erwin before releasing it, and he has approved of it, however please don't bother him with questions or bug reports. As always, be sure to mention Erwin in your credits somewhere. It's not fair to claim this as your own, and it's widely enough used that the players wouldn't believe you anyway.