Merc Release 2.0 Beta
Sunday 04 April 1993

Furey	mec@garnet.berkeley.edu
Hatchet	mitchell@ocf.berkeley.edu
Kahn	michael@web.berkeley.edu



=== Beta Release

This is a beta test release.  We expect you to look for bugs and report them to
us.  When 2.0 comes out, we expect you to discard your beta software and run
the production release.

Yeah, right.  And everyone who's running Merc 1.0 sent us e-mail, and we've
received many contributions of code and areas.  NOT!

Therefore we've removed certain features from the beta release, particularly
loading of player files.  (The internal data structures have changed
sufficiently so that dumping in the 1.0 save code won't work, either.)

We've also allowed any character to execute the 'advance' command, so that your
test characters can advance to whatever level they need for testing.

There are other beta-only changes in the code, which won't interfere at all
with testing the code, compiling on new platforms, writing new areas, writing
new skills and spells, and so on.

If you want to run a production Merc mud, then run the 1.0 release.  If you
want to help 2.0 Beta become a production 2.0 faster, then send us your bug
reports and bug FIXES so we can finish beta testing faster.