Changes and fixes since the 19 October build. If you reported one of these, thank you.
This update changes a lot under the hood, so we recommend starting a new save. You can start over from the BIOS setup menu, and turn on Skip Prologue there if you have already played it.
New
- Objectives as notes. Your current objectives sit in the top-right corner as small yellow notes. A note appears only after you have read the mail or seen the IRC line it comes from, and it does not change until you have read what changed it. Up to one main note and three side notes show at a time. The new Notes program keeps a log of everything you have been told and brings back any note you closed.
- Time skips. When the story moves the calendar forward, you see a short "days later" card, then your screen comes back locked, the way you left it. Your windows, sessions and drafts are still there.
- Start over from the BIOS. BIOS setup can erase your save and start a new game, prologue included.
- ShadowWatch in its own window by default, one per host. The old terminal tab is a Screen setting in the Style Manager.
- Workspaces keep your sessions. Switching workspaces no longer closes terminals or apps, and the keyboard stays on the workspace you are looking at.
- IRC remembers. Conversations survive closing and reconnecting the client, and Zircon offers back the channels you joined.
Commands
- Wildcards and braces. *, ?, [...] and {a,b} expand before a command runs, on your box and on remote hosts, the way the shell you are logged into did (sh, bash, csh or tcsh). You only see files your account can read, quotes and backslashes keep characters literal, and dotfiles need the dot typed.
- cp and mv take several files at once into a directory (cp *.log backup/), keep going past a file they cannot copy, and cp -r copies whole directories. New files belong to you; overwritten ones keep their owner and mode.
- scp copies directories with -r, keeps modes with -p, copies between two remote hosts, and reports errors per file.
- grep has -E, -F, -x, basic and extended regular expressions with back-references, and works across several files.
- pgp writes ordinary output files, has -o and -m, and keeps public and secret keyrings apart.
- ssh-keygen and ssh use SSH1 identities in ~/.ssh/identity, with passphrases.
- id takes a user name or number, and cat prints every file it can read instead of stopping at the first error.
- find tells you when a path comes after an option (find . -name *.txt used to search the wrong place quietly; quote the pattern).
- Man pages and help match the commands. The pages for grep, cp, mv, id, scp, pgp and ssh-keygen were rewritten from the period manuals, and their examples run as written. man pgp now explains encrypting, decrypting and keyrings, and man scp explains remote and local paths. man ps and man uname describe the system you are logged into, so a Linux, BSD or SunOS box shows its own page.
- No more pages from the future. A man page footer was sometimes dated after the day you read it, including in the 1996 prologue. Footers now follow the in-game date, and the workstation's pages, boot screen and System Monitor say MoonOS 4.1.2.
Changed
- Story pay is what it should be. The early missions paid a hundredth of their real amount.
- A way back after a NetCom ban in the second mission, if you get burned there.
- Better teaching for the first exploit: its syntax and the anonymous FTP login are explained before you need them.
- The terminal behaves more like 1997 UNIX: cd - works, ssh asks for your password three times, ssh and ftp say what their real versions said, errors use the period wording, and ps and top show your shell.
- Full-screen programs (top, vi, less, lynx, IRC clients) no longer wipe your terminal history when you quit them.
- telnet to an open port now connects and shows the daemon's greeting, matching what nmap reports.
- Gridwalk shows only what you have actually observed about a host.
- Job mail answers tell you why. A report sent too early, to the wrong person or for a closed job now gets a real answer instead of a generic bounce. Replying in a job's thread never takes the job; apply through the posting.
- Store purchases are charged in the right currency, all at once.
- Toasts appear and disappear instantly.
- New sounds: mail and IRC share one notification sound, and objectives have their own.
- Period accuracy: many sites, tools, versions and hardware listings now match their real dates. SecurityFocus and Packet Storm open on their real launch dates, and the shops no longer sell hard drives that had not shipped yet.
- The sendmail exploit only works on Sendmail 8.8.3 and 8.8.4, the versions its 1997 advisory covers. Boxes that upgrade to 8.8.5 are closed to it, so check the version in the mail server's greeting first.
- Your own machine has no compiler or scripting languages. gcc, perl and python were never installed on it; your setup notes now say so.
Fixed
- The game could freeze while quitting in rare timing, before your save finished.
- Two commands could crash the backend. Fixed, and a crash in one command no longer takes the game down.
- BIOS setup could not be opened after a reboot with Skip Prologue on, which blocked installing the modem. The boot screen also shows your real disk size now.
- Closing a terminal during a trace left the trace running. Closing, killing or reloading a terminal now disconnects it properly.
- Ctrl+C at a password prompt now hangs up.
- An ssh key let you into every account on a host. Keys now only open the account that lists them.
- The fourth mission could get stuck if you ran route too early.
- Objectives showed up before the story offered them, in the corner and in the Notes log.
- Reopening the game in the middle of a conversation could lose its last lines or repeat a reply.
- The Greenfield Dental job now explains what "export" means and counts the sendmail reload.
- The prologue stays completable even if you delete files it needs.
- Danny no longer nudges you about steps you already took, and never offers a reply you already sent.
- The first page in Navigator no longer shows "Server Not Found".
- Ed's setup notes describe the network you are actually on.
- The help forum refunds its posting fee if no answer arrives.
- Doors: icon and text sizes are back to Windows 95 proportions, and the MS-DOS Prompt opens where it always did.
Known issues
- Typing reboot inside an ssh session reboots your own workstation instead of the remote host.
- After a relaunch, Zircon's conversation windows come back only when you open Zircon.
- IRC conversations pause while the screen is locked, which can look like they are stuck. Unlock and they continue.
- A few side jobs finish with a line in #netwire-news. Their ending note waits until you have looked at that channel.
- telnet to a web or mail port shows the greeting but does not let you type requests to the server.
Next planned mechanics
- Dial-up. You will connect through a dial-up account with your ISP. A ban can then cover your ISP's whole address range, not just one address. If the FBI traces you, you get a couple of minutes to get into your ISP and clean up its logs before they reach you.