Evennia 0.7 released

As of today Evennia 0.7 is officially out! Evennia is a Python framework and -server for creating text-based multiplayer games (MU*).

A big thank you to all collaborators that have helped with code and testing along the way!

Here is the hefty forum post that details how you migrate to Evennia 0.7.

Evennia 0.7 comes with a range of changes and updates (these are just the ones merged from the latest devel branch, a lot more has happened since 0.6 that were already in master): 
 

• Evennia separates Player objects from Character objects in that the former is an OOC entity that can puppet one or more of the latter. The name Player was a source of some confusion since this is used differently in other code bases. Player has now been renamed to Account to make its function clearer.
• Evennia's in-built website now uses our own theme and bootstrap under the hood to make it easier to modify as well as rescale it better on mobile devices (webclient is not updated at this point).
• Shared logins between webclient and website, with the ability to log out of each independently of the other if so desired.
• Prefix-ignoring - All default commands are now renamed without their @-prefixes. Both @examine, +examine or examine will now all point to the same command. You can customize which prefixes Evennia simply ignores when searching for a command. The mechanic is clever though - if you create a command with a specific key "+foo", then that will still work and won't clash with another command named just "foo".
• Easy pause mechanisms using yield statements directly in Command code (just do yield 10 in your command code to have it pause ten seconds without blocking anyone else). You can also do retval = yield "Do you want to accept?" and have the command pause (non-blocking) for the player's input before continuing.

New contribs (optional plugins) (selection, new since 0.6 but many have been available on master branch for a while):

• The optional In-Game-Python contrib by Vincent le Geoff allows for coding and scripting in-game using full-fledged Python to make events and triggers. It's not a safe softcode-style language (you have the full power of Python which is not good for untrusted users) but is intended for trusted builders to make complex scripting from the command line.
• Wilderness/maps - Creation of dynamic or static maps based on ascii-maps for dynamically creating rooms and to show when moving around. (titeuf87, Cloud Keeper)
• Full turn-based combat system, meant to expand for a desired system (battlejenkins)
• Alternative Unix-style command base for Evennia, for those that prefer to enter commands like you do on the unix command line (with --flags etc) (Vincent le Geoff)
• Multidescer, which together with Evennia's nick replacement system can be heavily customized in-game (me).
• Mail - a @brandymail-style in-game mail-system (grungies1138)
• Clothing system, for layered outfits adding to the wearer's desc when worn (battlejenkins).

A more technical list from the main announcement post: 

• EvMenu formatting functions now part of class - EvMenu no longer accepts formatting functions as inputs, these are now part of the EvMenu class. To override the formatting of EvMenu nodes you should now override EvMenu and replace the format method you want. This brings EvMenu more in line with other services in Evennia, all of which are built around overriding. 
• Scripts are now valid message senders - Also Scripts can now act as "sender" of a Msg, for example to a Channel or a player.
• Due to the new prefix-ignoring above, @desc (builder-level description-setting) was renamed to setdesc to make it clearly separate from desc (used by a player setting their own description). This was actually the only clash we had to resolve this way in the default commands. 
• Permission Hierarchy names change - To make Evennia's permission hierarchy better reflect how Evennia actually works, the old Players, Player Helpers, Builders, Wizards, Immortals hierarchy has changed to Player, Helper, Builder, Admin, Developer. Singular/Plural form is now ignored so Builder and Builders will both work (this was a common source of simple errors) Old permissions will be renamed as part of the migration process. The distribution of responsibilities has not changed: Wizards (which in some other systems was the highest level, which confused some) always had the power to affect player accounts (like an admin) whereas Immortals had server-level access such as @py - that is, they were developers. The new names hopefully makes this distinction clearer.  
• All manager methods now return querysets - Some of these used to return lists which was a throwback to an older version of Typeclasses. With manager methods returning querysets one can chain queries onto their results like you can with any django query.
• PrettyTable was removed from the codebase. You can still fetch it for your game if you prefer (it's on pypi). But EvTable has more functionality as well as color-support. 
• Add **kwargs support to all object at_* hooks - All object at_ hooks, such as at_look, at_give etc now has an additional **kwarg argument. This allows developers to send arbitrary data to those hooks so they can expand on them without changing the API.  
• Remove {-color tags - The use of {r, {n etc was deprecated for years and have now been completely removed from Evennia's core in favor of only one form, namely |r, |n etc. However, the color parser is now pluggable and the {-style as well as the %c style color tags etc can be re-added to your game since they are now in a contrib.  
• Updated hooks for say/whisper commands - There are now at_before/after_say sub-hooks to allow say to be more easily customized. There is still ongoing discussion on the best way to handle this (see e.g. this PR).  
• More compact distribution of ports - Before, Evennia distributed its ports widely, such as using 4000, 4001, 8000, 8001, 5001, 8022, some of which appeared close but actually was unrelated in functionality. They were also scattered throughout the settings file. The port definitions have now all moved more closer together, at the top of the settings file. Evennia will now use ports 4000-4006 by default (fewer depending on which protocols you want to start). This should make it easier to assign port ranges when wanting to run multiple Evennia instances on the same machine.  
• Change how auto-login works - It used to be that once you logged into the website, every time you went to the webclient you would auto-login, even if you manually quite the webclient before. Only way to really log out (to change account, say) would be to first log out of the website. Now this will work more intuitively - you will still auto-login but if you log out of the webclient you "decouple" from the login state of the website and need to re-login to the webclient next time, even if you are still logged into the website.  
• Better idle disconnects - This is a long-running pet peeve for many. Idle timeouts will now honor a particular lock. Setting this lock allows selected entities (for example staff and bots) to avoid getting timed out like everyone else.
• A slew of bug fixes and other tweaks. See here for the list.