ID:2333180
 
Code:
<a href=byond://?src=\ref[usr];action=pm><IMG SRC=\ref[usr.avatar] width="24" height="24"></a>


Problem description:

My game has a PM system tied to the chat avatars. If you click on someone's avatar, it'll open the PM window and let you send them a private message.

It was brought to my attention recently that within the past month or so, the tooltips for the avatars have changed. As far as I'm aware, I haven't made any changes to the game that should have influenced this.

previously the tooltip at the bottom of the screen when you moused over someone's avatar would read something along the lines of...

"byond://?src=[icefire2050];action=pm"

now it looks like it shows a memory address instead as...

"byond://?src=[0x300001f];action=pm"

Does anyone have any idea what would have caused this? It's not a huge problem and the PM system works fine but players used it to identify a player's key quickly if they changed their in-game name.
Last I knew, \ref will always show the memory address like that. If you want their key to show, then just do usr.key or whatever. You don't need to do \ref or whatever.
The "ref text macro" is documented in the DM Reference (F1 in Dream Maker). In most cases, it is replaced with that ID number. However, if the object has a tag (see "tag var (datum)"), then the tag will be used instead.

So, it's pretty clear that a line of code was removed that set players' tags to their ckey, causing \ref to show their ckey instead of their internal reference ID.

From a game design standpoint... you should probably provide some easier alternative way of checking keys, if you're okay with that happening at all.