UPDATE #7

CHAT

CORE: xENGINE · 27 OCT 2026

PRIVATE MESSAGES

Two commands the old server had and this one did not

/pm <nick> <message> writes to one person, wherever on the server they are standing. /r <message> answers whoever wrote to you last. Part of a name is enough and case does not matter.

The lines read exactly as they did on the old server, word for word and colour for colour — people have been reading them for years and there is nothing in them worth making anybody relearn.

What is not the old server's is how a name is found. It took the first player whose nick contained what you typed, so on a server with two names alike you got whichever MTA listed first and had no way to tell. This asks the same resolver the mentions ask — exact, then the only name that starts with it, then the only one that contains it — and sends nothing at all when two people match. A private message put in the wrong hands is worse than one that did not go.

A refusal is said out loud rather than swallowed: they have private messages off, you have yours off, or one of you is ignoring the other, each told apart from the rest. A line in a room that never arrives is nothing anybody notices; a private message that silently goes nowhere is somebody waiting for an answer that was never coming.

One arriving gets you the same sound and taskbar flash as being mentioned.

IGNORING SOMEBODY

One rule with no exceptions to remember

/ignore <nick> and nothing that person says reaches you anywhere: the room, their team, the global channel, a private message, and the chime a mention from them would have made. /ignores lists them, /unignore <nick> undoes it, and so does /ignore again on the same person.

It is kept against your serial, beside the rest of what you set for yourself, so it survives a reconnect. The old server kept its list against the connection and emptied it on the way in — an ignore you have to redo after every disconnect is one nobody uses.

A referee's announcements are not caught by it, and that is deliberate: those go out as the match being run rather than as anything a player said, so somebody who ignores the referee still hears the round. /unignore also looks through your list by the name you typed before it looks for a player, so you can still take back an ignore on somebody who has left the server.

THE SERVER TELLS YOU WHAT IT HAS

One line every five minutes

Almost everything anybody asks for already existed and had no way of being found, which is nobody's fault: a key that nothing ever names is a key that does not exist.

So one line goes out every five minutes, in order rather than at random, and the list comes back round after about an hour — so somebody who stays an evening sees all of it once instead of the same three lines four times. Thirteen of them: the F7 panel and the map shop, the frame rate keys, the training keys and warps, /cps, spectating, the map lists, the team commands, the chat commands, the scoreboard and the top times.

Every key and command in them was checked against the code that binds it rather than written from memory. A tip naming a key nobody bound sends somebody off pressing it and leaves them thinking the server is broken, which is worse than never mentioning it at all.

They do not go out in the clanwar rooms. A match is being played and read by two clans in there, and a tip about hiding scenery arriving in the middle of it is noise on the one screen where noise costs something. The lobby does get them: somebody standing there is deciding where to go, which is exactly when knowing what the server has is worth most.

F7 turns them off for good, along with private messages — both are new rows in the settings tab.

TRAINING KNOWS WHO IS WATCHING YOU

An eye beside the clock

Beside the training clock, in the same pill and the same white, an eye with the number of people watching your lap on it. It stays at zero rather than going away, so it is in the same place every time you want to glance at it. The number goes orange the moment somebody is on you.

/nowatch if you would rather drive unwatched. Everybody currently on you is let go the moment you type it, B skips you on everybody else's machine from then on, and your own eye sits shut so you can see that it is on. Type it again to allow it. It is remembered by serial.

The camera belongs to whoever is looking through it, so this is enforced where it can be: you stop being offered to anybody pressing B, your watchers are told to let go, and your splits and /cps times stop being sent. It is not a promise that a modified client cannot point a camera at your car — it is a promise that it will never be handed a single number about your lap.

A CLAN'S SCORE STOPS SHRINKING

A clan earns points, and the people who earned them are allowed to leave

A clan's score was worked out rather than kept: the sum of whichever players were standing in the room on that side, recomputed after every award. Tidy, and wrong. Somebody with fifty points who left the room — or who a referee moved to the stand — took fifty points off a clan that had already won them.

Worse, it did not happen at the time. The total is stored, so it sat there looking right until the next payout or the next person to walk through the door recomputed it, and then half a match disappeared with nothing on screen to say why.

The score belongs to the clan now and is kept by the clan. Two things move it and nothing else: a round paying out, and a referee correcting it on the panel.

DROPPING OUT MID ROUND

Your checkpoints wait for you

A round's collected checkpoints were filed under the connection, so somebody who dropped out three gates in came back a different player as far as the server was concerned: an empty row, a badge reading nought, and a round that paid as though they had taken nothing.

They are filed under the serial as well now. Drop out and come back inside the same round and you pick up exactly what you had, badge and all.

And if the round finishes paying while you are still reconnecting, your clan is paid anyway — the gates were taken and the clan has them, and a dropped connection is not a reason to take that off them. Your own figure goes into the slot your serial already keeps, the same one your score comes back from on the way in, and lands on you the moment you walk through the door.

Leaving the room on purpose still scores nothing on the way out: a round that has not ended has not been played, and half a map's checkpoints are not half a map. The difference is that the row is no longer thrown away — it waits until the round pays out.

ONE BAND, AND A WHISTLE

What the scoreboard says about who is who

The last update put the xen role in a Xenous band beside Admin(s), on the argument that one said who runs the server and the other said who it belongs to. In practice they were the same people wearing two labels, and the one thing a reader actually wants from a band — which of these is one of ours — was split across both.

There is one band now: Xenous, in the server's own orange. Moderator, super moderator, admin and the clan's own role all land in it. The red crown beside a nick already says who is on an admin account, and answers that per person rather than per band.

The whistle gets a band of its own: Referee, in the mint their card on the scoreboard is already drawn in. It wins over the clan's band while it is held and drops back into Xenous the moment it is taken off. It is not a rank, it is a job — everything else there says what somebody is on this server and keeps saying it all evening, and this says what they are doing in the match being played right now, which is the thing both clans need to be able to find on a board without reading names.

This replaces what the last update said about the two bands.

SMALLER THINGS

• Walking into a round that is already running now puts the loading curtain up, with the map's name and the transfer bars on it, instead of showing you a car flying through open sky while the world arrives over the next few seconds. It lifts when your own copy of the map is ready — which is why it could not have one before: a round that started without you never sends the signal the ordinary curtain waits for, so it would have sat there until the next map.

• Moving a player between sides from MTA's own admin panel did nothing at all. That panel writes the native team, and the native teams here are stand-ins that nothing reads — so the move changed a mirror, left the room, the scoreboard and the score where they were, and the next sync quietly put the mirror back. It now goes through the same door a referee's click does, with the same rules about who may be on what and the same line in the room's chat. Crews people made for themselves are deliberately left alone: those have an owner and invitations, and dropping somebody into one from an admin panel would walk around all of it.

• /numbermaxplayers <n> is an ordinary command now rather than a test one, and it is in the tips. It sets how many of each clan the clanwar panel lists. Asked outside a clanwar room it says so and takes the number anyway, instead of printing a ceiling of one for a panel that is not on screen.

• The /createnewteam usage example was printing a literal #f76d01, which chat reads as a colour code and eats — so the one line whose whole job was to show the colour format was showing it with the colour missing. It gives 247,109,1 now.

Xenous Development team & Staff.