IMS: New Features

• Added a server administration tool for control over the server.

• A revised finger player window includes more information.
• As a measure against profanity and spam, each player now has a choice to ignore other players' messages on an individual basis.
• Minimum fan option restricted to between 0 and 5. Also added a choice for min fan = 1.

• In order to save bandwidth, the client and tile images are now loaded on the first click of the applet button. This also works better for using small tile images later.
• More extensive messages informing e.g. joining and leaving tables.

• A new set of smaller tile images (18x24), suitable for PC's running in 800x600 or 640x480 screen sizes.
• A new StringList widget class for player and table lists, it handles vertical and horizontal scrolling better and provides a keyboard work-around for Windows machines.
• An extra telnet port that prints out a list of all the players currently on the server.
• Fixed some other bugs in 0.21.

• Integrating the player list with the finger player feature.
• Integrating the table list with a new table info window, and join/serve/leave table operations.

• A menu-driven interface.
• Users can now change their passwords.
• The ability to configure fonts and size of message windows to suit your taste and screen resolution.
• Per-user configuration can be stored permanently on the server side and used automatically upon start.
• The ability to store and edit personal information like E-mail address, home page URL, and a "plan" file on the server. These information can be queried by other players by the "finger" feature.
• The "help" menu is integrated with the navigator to give instant access to documentation.

Changes...

• Use IDENTD for login name identification. (10/4/96)
• Merged Player and PlayerOutput into one class. (9/5/96)
• New classes ServerAdmin and AdminTool added. (8/9/96 - 8/11/96)
• Finger info now cached on the client side. New finger request is sent when a player is first fingered, or when the finger button is explicitly pressed. (7/29/96)
• Added ignore messages feature to help guard against profanity and spam. (8/7/96)
• Passwords will now be scrambled in the server database. A utility class server.Reformat is used to do this. (7/29/96)
• Hi_scores script now takes an argument for the number of top scores to show. (7/27/96)
• Rewrote much of the Greeting class to do new start-up sequence for 0.23. The client and images now load only on the first click of the applet button. (7/28/96)
• Added messages announcing joining and leaving of tables. (7/27/96)
• Many changes in 0.22 weren't recorded here... D'OH!
• Changes from 0.2beta to 0.21: (5/15/96)
  • A new class TableInfo replaces the old TableOptionWindow. This new component class displays more detailed table information.
  • Home-brew ScrolledList class to implement the player and table lists. These classes are better adapted to our situation than plain old TextArea.
  • Found and corrected a synchronization bug that could be causing deadlocks (hmm, wonder how many more there are...)
• Changes from 0.1 to 0.2beta: (4/21/96)
  • New player database file format. A fixed block size with variable number of blocks structure allows variable length information for each user to be stored and retrieved with good efficiency. A utility class to convert the old file format into the new one is also included.
  • A lot of new classes for the new menu-driven interface.
  • Cleaned up TileWindow class. Got rid of the obscure and pretty much obsolete TileFinder class and its associated methods.
  • Rewrote packet handling code. Instead of one class per packet type, we now use just one Packet class. This is a work-around that's necessary due to Netscape's limit on the number of user-defined classes (too many classes cause Netscape to core dump with bus error). This also brings forth a revision of the client-server protocol.
• Greeting applet now loads Client applet on start-up (4/10/96)
• Minor changes in scoring system (4/2/96)
• Fixed some synchronization bugs that occasionally causes deadlocks (4/2/96)
• Updated the documentation (4/1/96)
• New images for flower tiles (3/28/96)
• First step code clean-up: separated code into several packages, Makefile, a more organized directory structure, final touches (3/20/96)
• Changes from the alpha version to the beta version: (3/10/96)
  • The server automatically kicks idle players off tables when there is a game in progress. Also provided are an "Urge" button to be used occasionally, and a waving "Duke" figure in addition to a "Cookoo" sound (only on systems that can play .au sound files) to get players attention.
  • An entirely new game playing interface. Players are no longer required to group tiles together. There is auto sorting of private tiles. Also, the server automatically figures out the MahJong pattern with the highest score.
  • Now the server uses two threads per player, one for socket reads, the other for socket writes. Hopefully, this will eliminate those nasty server lockups altogether.
• Added time out on dead connections. It usually takes something between 1 to 3 minutes to clear up a dead slot (2/29/96)
• Will now run "Top 10 scorers" regularly (2/28/96)
• Added a backup server, because weird lock-ups still happen, could this be due to some bugs in the Java socket library?? (2/28/96)
• Added the ability to MahJong on someone's fourth tile of quadruplet (2/23/96)
• Show the names of players on your table on the desktop (2/23/96)
• Added round-wind, seat-wind, dragon scores, plus other adjustments (2/23/96)
• Found bug in old monitor code on server side, hopefully fixed now (2/23/96)
• Changed to counter-clockwise player rotation (2/21/96)
• Added 3 levels of play, selected by SOUTH (2/21/96)
• Added simple scoring system and bookkeeping (2/21/96)
• Applet now loads all tile bitmaps before starting (2/21/96)
• Moved documentation to another site (2/21/96)
• Added player database (2/16/96)
• Fixed minor bug in dragging tiles around (2/15/96)
• New game interface: Connect, Triplet, and Quadruplet in stead of a single Grab (2/15/96)
• Corrected the bug where game freezes when someone wins (2/14/96)
• Hopefully more robust monitor usage on the server (2/14/96)
• Added 'Cuckoo' sound when your table is full (2/13/96)
• Corrected tile-counting problem (2/13/96)
• Version 0.1a, hopefully more robust (2/12/96)