Server Crashes
A bug is causing servers to crash, about two per day.
This bug has been difficult to track. The crash is the side effect of an error that is introduced by code that does not crash. The errant code drops a little land mine in the data and some time later the server goes in face first.
This update has some slight changes that may eliminate the problem. It also has some additional error messages that may help me to find the problem, if those slight changes aren't effective.
Emojis
Someone asked for emojis.
At first I resisted this idea because I don't have time to paint thousands of emoji images and there isn't a library of free ones. That is what I thought, anyway.
It turns out that emojis are defined as part of the unicode character set. With a little searching, I found a file that categorized them nicely and I wrote some code to import the information.
They are painted using a font so they are the font color, instead of full color little pictures. This also causes some of them to be represented as sequences of multiple unicode characters, like when a face is selected that has a skin color.
I tried to paste an example here but it translated the combination into the appropriate full color emoji. That also happens when emojis appear in the galactic chat on the Hazeron.com main page.
Not all of them have representations on my computer, running Xubuntu 18. Some appear as an empty box.
I haven't seen these on Windows. It is likely they will appear a little differently from what I get on my screen.
The communications channel now has an emoji button next to the box where you type messages. The user interface is primitive but functional.
A bug is causing servers to crash, about two per day.
This bug has been difficult to track. The crash is the side effect of an error that is introduced by code that does not crash. The errant code drops a little land mine in the data and some time later the server goes in face first.
This update has some slight changes that may eliminate the problem. It also has some additional error messages that may help me to find the problem, if those slight changes aren't effective.
Emojis
Someone asked for emojis.
At first I resisted this idea because I don't have time to paint thousands of emoji images and there isn't a library of free ones. That is what I thought, anyway.
It turns out that emojis are defined as part of the unicode character set. With a little searching, I found a file that categorized them nicely and I wrote some code to import the information.
They are painted using a font so they are the font color, instead of full color little pictures. This also causes some of them to be represented as sequences of multiple unicode characters, like when a face is selected that has a skin color.
I tried to paste an example here but it translated the combination into the appropriate full color emoji. That also happens when emojis appear in the galactic chat on the Hazeron.com main page.
Not all of them have representations on my computer, running Xubuntu 18. Some appear as an empty box.
I haven't seen these on Windows. It is likely they will appear a little differently from what I get on my screen.
The communications channel now has an emoji button next to the box where you type messages. The user interface is primitive but functional.