So. Once more yet another year has passed, and yours truly has still, despite
all odds, managed to remain in existence and be quite active here for the
whole period (and then some). While it might not always look like it to an
outside observer, many wizardly activities are either partially or completely
hidden from mortal eyes, or are only revealed when announced.

Anyway.. my previous blog post was mostly about the hard numbers - how many
tickets (bugs, typos, whatever) have been resolved in some manner, and how
many there are in total etc - but as noted at the end of that post, wrangling
tickets and fixing somewhat randomish bugs and typos has been only a part of
my activities during this last year. So, what else has been going on?

Well, much of my time and effort has gone to general "cleaning up" of code.
It is difficult to put it succintly what this means in practice, but let's
just say that it has ranged from cosmetics to bigger refactoring.

Sometimes these cleanups have borne out of need to fix some specific issue,
but sometimes it is out of spite. Sometimes the work has uncovered bugs,
and unfortunately sometimes I have introduced new issues too - though those
obviously have been fixed as soon as they've been found.

There have been some on-going bigger projects and some are still on-going,
more about them later. First a itemized list of some of the more visible
changes, most of which have been announced on 'tunes' or so:

 * The old newbie starting city of Pleasantville got a code scrub. A bunch
   of bugs were squashed and the city is also finally now open to everyone
   all the time, not just 1st of the RL month (a remnant from the days when
   it was still the actual starting point for new players.)

 * Plaque rooms recoded, some bug fixes and visual improvements but mostly
   the changes are in the implementation.

 * Boon / bane room was refactored, with 'cost' option and improved listing.
   Same for Abilities room. Also 'cost' option, but also 'train/cost x
   to:max' etc.

 * Many commands were refactored and improved: 'show', 'inventory', 'keep
   list', improvements to 'quote', addition of 'prefix' command, 'eqset'
   foreach/command improvements .. 'equipment' improvements.
   A number of 'ansi' and 'lite' improvements like 'ansi/lite export'.

 * Herb jars and medicine bags (and some special items based on them) were
   refactored and received many usability and cosmetic fixes. Herb jars also
   got a bit of a downtune and medicine bags a bit of uptune.

 * Wanderer vortexes casting was cleaned up and many bugs were fixed.
   They are also supported in 'cast stop' and 'cast info' now.

 * 'Reincer' rank added for people who have reincarnated 100 times or more.

 * A pile of help files were rewritten and/or update either partially or
   almost completely, including 'help getting started', 'help guilds',
   'help backgrounds', 'help death', and many many other help files.

 * Alchemist guild shop recode and bug fixes, using same base code as
   previously refactored druid guild shop.

 * Death effects and "new body" effects visible on show effects.

 * Eye of Loraen refactor with a number of improvements and fixes.

 * Alchemist homonculus fixes and improvements (not that these had any use).

 * Infizinity orb fixes, Infizinity pocket and sphere fixes.

 * Floating disc refactoring. Bugs fixed, with a safety guard for
   dispelling implemented.

 * Many other skills and spells were bugfixed and code cleaned up (some
   changes still pending)

 * Some improvements to generic handling, like '<x glow>' and '<no glow>'
   handles, for example 'give all <red glow> to ggr'.

 * Tarmalen reputation / WotT increase notification.

 * Beehive improvements.

 * Drug pill code cleanup, fixes and improvements (better handles, etc.)

 * Volcano area recode and improvements (2024 mainly)

 * Over thousand miscellaneous tickets (bugs, typos, etc.) resolved,
   e.g. fixed or rejected or whatever.

There would be more, but this list is already getting very long and I am
inevitably probably forgetting something anyway. So what about those bigger
projects? Well, some of these have player visible aspects and some do not ..

 * Refactoring of the nun/liberator/nergal mission target servers.
   This mainly started in late August, but the project got more complicated
   and is still on-going. But there are already some benefits, with less
   of a chance of getting some impossible target. A even larger revamp
   is needed, however, due to the fundamentally flawed nature of the current
   system(s).

 * Some progress was made on the treasure maps stuff, but alas it has turned
   to another one of those "in two weeks" memes, as ironic that may be.
   The project ultimately is in the stage that it needs the "final 10% that
   is the 90% of the work". Hopefully I'll return to it one of these days.

 * A number of lib-side cleanups and improvements that are either not yet
   in game or are partially pending. Some of them may bring some usability
   improvements along. Hoping to slowly introduce these into "production",
   but it takes time because of tendency of things to break when you look
   them wrong.

 * I reviewed / pre-approved Pisano's "Snow Elf Workshop" area and also
   his later Arelium clocktower recode.

 * A secret area revamp / improvement project. This is mostly on level of
   an idea. But at least I like the idea. We'll see. In two weeks.

On the BatMUD-related but not in-game side of things I have continued to
maintain the Pupunen maps data as I have for last 19 years now (huh? has it
really been that long?) and even the venerable GgrTF script set got a bunch
of minor updates during the year. Some of the smaller side-projects also got
some updates, like the herb / plant browser and material/alloy database.

Somewhat unfortunately due to the scourge of AI-scraper bots plaguing the
Interwebs and also my server, I had to put some things behind a password,
at least temporarily. Hopefully a better solution emerges. Same circumstances
have plaqued also BatWiki hosted by Milk and the GMapNG world map hosted by
Jeskko .. I, for one, do not welcome the shitty "AI" future.

On personal level, I visited my first ever wizcon early this year. It was
fun and different from "normal" BatMUD cons, despite the long travel and
associated stresses. Meeting other developers was nice, although not much
was actually achieved there. Maybe be careful of moving "north", though. :P

On similar note, this year also happened to be my first time visiting an
anniversary gala event, the 35th Anniversary Gala, which was .. nice, I
suppose? At least as much as big "fancy" events like that can be nice - they
aren't really my thing. Lots of people from all around the world, but very
little time to actually talk with anyone. And the music was too loud. Overall,
an OK trip - and I got to meet my feathered wizardly fellow, mr. Pisano among
others who I had never seen before in real life! (It was nice to see the RL
faces of many others, but the list to acknowledge everyone would be too long.)

In any case, this post is already getting long and I've probably tooted my own
horn enough .. let's conclude with this: I am just one of the people who have
spent significant time on this game and not all of them bother to report on
their doings. But they all deserve a thank you for their efforts.

So .. thank you to all my fellow wizzurds and archwizzurds for this year.
And you dirty mortals too, you whiny *!*## .. *ahem*.

Peace, and happier new year 2026 to you all.
-- Ggr