CircleMUD is a derivative of DikuMUD -- the Multi-User Dungeon game system originally developed at DIKU (the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen.) The official CircleMUD FTP site is ftp.cs.jhu.edu. You can be sure that if you get Circle from there, you will be getting the latest version. Also, the JHU FTP site will eventually have additional files you can grab and install, such as aliases, online creation, etc. This directory should contain 3 files: circlemud-README - This file. circlemud-HISTORY - Release history, notes, features list, etc. circlemud-2.20.tar.gz - CircleMUD 2.20, tarred and gzipped. If you have any questions about CircleMUD itself, you can contact its author, Jeremy Elson, at jelson@cs.jhu.edu. If you have general questions about Unix, such as how to uncompress files, please contact your friendly neighborhood Unix guru. The latest version of Circle is 2.20, released on November 17, 1993. Version 2.20 supercedes version 2.11, which was released on September 19, 1993. Changes in version 2.20 (from 2.11): New features: o A completely new output buffering system which is far more network-efficient, and somewhat more memory- and speed-efficient, than the original Diku system. Definitely a major win for people with slow Net links. (Details available by request, but this was discussed on rgmd recently.) Several other functions (such as do_where() and do_who()) have been rewritten to take advantage of the new system. o Redesigned stat screens with better readability o Command-line substitution via the "^" character (works identically to the csh command) o Code sent by Jeff Fink (thanks Jeff!): Help now handles ambiguous cases correctly (i.e., "help color" will give you help for color and not colorspray) o Vstat command to stat mobiles and object by virtual number o Updated documentation And, bug fixes of varying degrees of severity: o SunOS Bus errors on stealing o +hit item bug o Switched immort re-login bug o Mob memory bug o Poison/Stat bug (I think this one is native to Diku Gamma 0.0 -- the function hit_gain was responsible for subtracting hits when a char is poisoned, so you'd lose hits when someone statted you.) o Stat room bug under Solaris and IRIX o Ungroup bug o "goto 3.guard" now works (takes you to the third guard instead of room 3) o various other minor fixes Enjoy -- and, please keep those bug reports, code submissions, and testimonials coming! Jeremy Elson jelson@cs.jhu.edu