Merc Release 2.1
Sunday 01 August 1993

Furey	mec@shell.portal.com
Hatchet	hatchet@uclink.berkeley.edu
Kahn	michael@uclink.berkeley.edu



=== 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 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.

We usually rework code contributions into our own style, just as we've reworked
100% of our released code into a consistent style.

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

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!

Glop contributed Mega-City One (from the Judge Dredd comic books).



=== Code and Idea Contributions

Zrin contributed an 'auto-exit' function.

Alander contributed the 'stats over 18 from magic items', as well as the
new 'who', 'visible', 'commands' commands and some shop code.  We first
saw a donation pit on Alander's 'Rivers of Mud'.

Grodyn contributed the 'configure' command.

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.

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

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.

Trienne contributed the makefile changes for Solaris 2.1.

Oleg contributed the Macintosh port.

Jdpierce contributed the Interactive Systems changes.



=== Bug Reports and Bug Fixes

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.

Alander of Rivers of Mud has published *many* bug fixes and changes for
2.0 on the Merc list, which we've picked up.

Tony Chamberlain published a correct, recursive implementation of
get_obj_number.

Tuan Doan pointed out a bug in 'check_parry' and 'check_dodge',
as well as some other rough edges.

Alex found the right fix for the act() problems with channels,
the 'rstat' problem with room exits, and some other bugs.
