release_notes.3.1.txt

It's here.  It's been a long time coming (9 years and a day in fact[1]),
but it has finally arrived.

CircleMUD 3.1 is now made officially available for your consumption.

This is the final[2] release that all of the beta patchlevels over the
last several years have been building towards.

Some brief history on the CircleMUD 3.x releases:

After the highly successful release of CircleMUD 2.20, steps were quickly
made towards overhauling the codebase from ground up, extending what could
be done, and removing bugs and loopholes all over the place.  This
culminated in an "internal" release of CircleMUD 3.0, which over the
course of a few months led to a release of Patch Level 4 on September 24,
1994, a little less than a year after the 2.20 release.  A mere 8+ years
later, many additions, 20 patchlevels, many new bugs, and something called
"documentation", the beta testing period is over, and we have made a full
and proper release!

The changes are too numerous to list[3], but some highlights of
differences from CircleMUD 2.20[4] include an entirely new world, new shop
structure, several new core members for the development team, and coherent[5]
documentation on the world and core components of the source code.

Work will begin shortly on the CircleMUD 4.x series, with a release
expected in late 2010[6].

Don't run with scissors, but make your way to:
   ftp://ftp.circlemud.org/pub/CircleMUD/3.x/

Special thanks to all of those on the CircleMUD Mailing List and everyone
who submitted bug reports over the last decade, we couldn't have done it
without you.[7]

Best Regards,

The CircleMUD Development Team, 2002
<cdev@circlemud.org>
  Jeremy Elson <jelson@circlemud.org>        Since Jul 16, 1993
  Chris Epler <cepler@circlemud.org>         Since Late  , 1994
  Alex Fletcher <furry@circlemud.org>        Since Feb 23, 1995
  George Greer <greerga@circlemud.org>       Since Oct 14, 1997
  Daniel A. Koepke <dkoepke@circlemud.org>   Since Jul 11, 1999


[1] CircleMUD 2.20 was released on November 17, 1993.  CircleMUD 3.1 was
    released November 18, 2002.
[2] We, the CircleMUD Group, reserve the right to all and any future "final"
    CircleMUD releases.
[3] But they're listed in the Changelog file anyhow, just in case you're
    really curious.
[4] Everyone compares to their last full version, why can't we?
[5] Well, we'd like to think so at least.
[6] We're hoping to time it with the discovery of a monolith around Jupiter.
[7] And had you not submitted so many damned bug reports, we would have had
    this finished almost a decade ago!