====== Crossfire Traffic, March 2006 Edition ======
This is crossfire traffic for March 2006

Crossfire Traffic is a means to communicate the activity surrounding crossfire in an accessible and non-technical way, it is targeted at those who are curious about what is happening with the project, but find the existing mailing lists, CVS list. forum, wiki and IRC channels overly complicated, scary, or time consuming to read. As such it does not contain any background details, but instead focuses only on things that are user-visible

====Mailing List====

Discussion and possible solution(s) for an XP exploit on PK servers (aka "Sock Puppetting")

Feedback on server code clean up & function renames, switch comments to Doxygen's format

A discussion that carried over from February was addressed again, Crossfire 2.0+ features/priorities

Early stage of using and writing Unit Tests

First set of Unit Tests written and deployed

Comments on bugs found by Unit Tests

Discussion of Map2 & Animations and what changes are involved with that

Patch was sent for player-owner shop proof of concept

Proposal to move Crossfire to Subversion (SVN) from CVS

Discussion about adding secondary effects to spells

Questions about creating an game trailer or preview for promotional purposes

Announcement of a new map editor based in Perl with the Gtk2 perl module

Suggestion for overhauling the jeweler skill, which would allow a player to change item stats

Discussion on problems with updating maps on a live server when the maps are occupied by players

Protocol & compression and bandwidth savings

Inquiry on a web-based client or portal

Followup discussion about creating a system of dynamic alchemy

Open invitation for a Crossfire get together in Italy

Inquiry about the removal of the random encounter code



====Changes that occurred this month:====

Crossfire has started to get a unit testing framework, this should allow for automatic testing of bugs in most cases.

===Gameplay:===

fix a crash with forked lightning on map borders

fix a crash with random map generation

fix a crash with material name changes

fix a crash with monsters who have scrolls with no spells in them

Improve speed of archetype lookup

exp penalty at death is now configurable in the server settings file

fix an abuse with alchemy skill

make inscribed scrolls merge better

===Items:===

a new ice tile that deals cold damage to anyone walking on it.

===CFJavaEditor:===

objects are saved in the same way as crossedit.

fix a threading related crash

reduce memory usage

===Clients:===

update auto-completion of commands (using the tab key) to work on all of them

fix a memory leak

==cfclient:==

Fix a crash that could occur when pressing tab at login

==gcfclient2:==

make the main window resizable down to 800x600

==jxclient:==

add spell listing support.