Did you know?

Now that the introductory stuff is out of the way, I can post some meat.

Soon after becoming an IMP, I posted a change to everyone that in fact was not a change at all. It was entitled "Did you know?" (a name inspired by a series of emails that used to be sent out by a dean of mine) and it contained little features that existed in the game that were underutilized or undocumented. The original change posting is still in the game (change search know), and I think another round of fun insider info is past due. Here goes.

Here are some fun facts:

• The chance to get were is not 5%. Although it has long been stated as such, the truth is that it's been 7% for a long time--longer than I've been an admin. Granted, a 2% difference isn't that big, but all you statisticians who want to recreate for were twice in a row might find this useful to know.
• We have an online who list. It's still in its beta testing stage and will probably always be that way, but it's a good way to see who's on so that you can decide which character to log. A link is also provided on this blog's sidebar there.
• There is no cap for hit, dam, or saves. Hitroll and saves work against other factors, so there is no hard cap on them. For example, having higher hitroll decreases your opponent's ability to parry. At some point of having absurdly high hitroll, your opponent's chance to parry cannot get any lower--sure, that's a cap, but it's different depending on who you're fighting. The same applies to saves. Damroll, on the other hand, never stops being useful. Its effect becomes less apparent the higher it gets because the ranges between the different damage indicators (eg, <<< ERADICATES >>> and <*>_MORTALLY WOUNDS_<*>) widens. That extra +5 dam helps no matter what, but it may not be enough to show up as a change from eradication to mortally wounding.
• Clerics do not get any sort of casting bonus over any other spellcasting class. They may have at some point, but they have not since I started coding.
• Barbarians heal much faster than any other class. This is a relatively recent change, but keep this in mind the next time you consider poisoning your barbarian before going into pk. Sure, you might get maladicted up and put in an exitless room, but you'll also be at full health when you wake up, even if your opponent is quick about it.
• You can get experience while leveling for completing in-game miniquests. Miniquests are being added to the game every day, and completing each one typically rewards you with 1000-5000 experience. The next time you create a new character, check out the sewers area. It has been redone to have quite a number of very cool and very lucrative miniquests.
• Contrary to how it used to be, the %l tag in prompts will now accurately indicate whether or not you're in latelog. If your prompt does not say you are in latelog, you are not in latelog, period.
• You can send notes to... admin, brawler, immortal, imm, any guild, any player, any race, any class, and any brood. You can also send notes to Snitch to submit gossip and it'll get read by someone.
• There is an open bounty on crashing the game. If you can crash the game, you will get a restring token. In the year of 2009, the game has only crashed twice--in both cases, the offending crash bug was identified and fixed in less than ten minutes after the game booted back up.
  

Here are some goofy and dorky things that most people won't care about.

• The mud's source is written in C and compiles readily on GNU/Linux systems and Sun Solaris using both GNU and Sun compilers. This cross-compatibility is necessary due to one of the game's testing platforms being a SPARC-based Sun system. The game which everyone actually connects to runs on a regular PC server and is compiled with GNU.
  
• There is a limit to how much gold you can have deposited. Because the game stores bank accounts in signed long integers (32 bits), it cannot count past 2,147,483,647 gold. If you deposit anything in excess of this, you wind up having negative gold.
• As of this writing, the game currently takes up 35.5MB of physical memory. This is not to be confused with how much disk space it takes up; that figure is somewhere in the vincinity of 250MB.
• Since I have become the coder, Dark Risings' official policy is to not use code snippets, ever. All new code is written specifically for Dark Risings from scratch, as the time it would take to properly audit, port, and test others' code (which is often amateur and unreliable) would take far longer than just writing it correctly from scratch.

As people come up with more goofy rumors and outrageous claims over the OOC channel, I will post more of these little clarifications and fun facts. Of course, this isn't to say that us admins are going to disclose how everything works; some aspects of the game (such as what role intelligence plays in spellcasting) will remain deliberately ambiguous.