tbaMUD Continued development of the CircleMUD core

Just to let everyone know, we went through with the rollback to 3.62 (SVN r241 to be exact), and Vatiken ported back important fixes and a few new features. The last revision before the rollback was r281.

The decision to do a rollback was something that we hoped wouldn't need to be done, but there were a lot of issues with code that were left unfinished, and nobody with the time to do anything about it. With the large drop of activity over the past year or so, we decided to take things back to a sane point in the development and focus on stability. It's not that we won't see any of the new features that got dropped come back- this is entirely a possibility (things like protocols that Fizban/KaVir added ARE a priority and something we'd like to see come back!), however:

1.) From now on, before doing anything too radical, we'd like to have some discussion and input from the community about major changes before they get added to the codebase.

2.) Also, before adding anything to the codebase, it will be more beneficial if contributors do more thorough testing before submitting patches. This likely won't completely kill show-stopper bugs from happening in the development cycle, but focusing on adding more polished code before it gets implemented will make fixes easier to focus on.

With that said; I've been going over the newest SVN revision (r283), and so far it looks really good!

I'm still not done going over/testing all of the changes yet, but you've done a great job so far Vatiken! Here's a short list of what's been changed from 3.62:

- The 'recent' command, is an admin command that shows who has connected recently.
- The 'happyhour' command, lets gods accelerate the percentage of quest points, experience, and gold for a specified time period.
- Ordinal directions (NE, SE, SW, NW) are now a built-in CEDIT option (by default, the standard directions are still only N, S, E, W, U, D).
- Hidden exits are now built in (mind you at the moment doors need some general fixing)
- Lots of little cleanups and minor fixes. An actual list will be created by the next release.

I've probably missed a few things, but this message is already getting on in length. I'm just really happy we can start adding features people WANT, and avoid making things a mess for other people to continue working on!