Merc Release 2.0 Beta Sunday 04 April 1993 Furey mec@garnet.berkeley.edu Hatchet mitchell@ocf.berkeley.edu Kahn michael@web.berkeley.edu === Contribution Policy We welcome contributions to Merc. You can send us areas, spells, skills, bug reports, bug fixes, code, ideas, comments on our documentation, interesting stories, or anything else, to any of our addresses above. We particularly would like to get copies of 'bugs.txt', 'ideas.txt', and 'typos.txt' from any site running a Merc mud. If we use your contribution, we will credit you for it in this file and in the source files. The 'areas' command lists authors within the game, and 'help merc' credits major contributions as well. 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. === 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 free, with source. === New Area Contributions 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. 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 Zrin contributed an 'auto-exit' function. We got the 'stats over 18 from magic items' idea from Alander. Diavolo contributed the gruesome 'death_cry' function. Many other imps and players gave us hundreds of suggestions, some of which are now realized. Thanks to you all! Aod and Cauchy of Generic gave us permission to use Generic code. John Brothers of Silly gave us permission to use Silly code. Although we haven't used any Silly code yet, we appreciate having it available. === Bug Reports Mud Lite, Vego Mud, Final Mud, Rivers of Mud, Ruhr Mud, and Chase Mud 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. Hind and Quin (not the original Quinn of Diku, another Quin) helped on the Ultrix port. Vic helped on the Linux port and 386/BSD ports. Diavolo helped on the RS/6000 port. Alander helped on the NeXT port. Shephane Haechler helped on the Hpux port. During the course of the Linux port, Vic isolated some mystifying memory management problems. 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. === Mailing List Thanks to Zrin for administering the Merc mailing list. You can join the list by sending e-mail to merc-request@testeng.amdahl.com.