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[conquest] Conquest 8.1.2a (devel) is now ready
at http://radscan.com/conquest.html
This is a significant update incorporating Cat's new Icon HUD
work and several other enhancements and fixes.
This is probably a good version for server operators to
upgrade to, as it works around a firewall issue that could
cause dropped UDP connections, corrects some issues with
server recording, and provides new server OPER commands.
Here is the portion of the release notes (including the
snapshot release notes). It's a bit long :)
8.1.2a (devel release) 3/05/2006
- at long last
- This is a pretty major revision compared to the last stable
8.1.2 release. This version incorporates new artwork textures and
a new 'Icon' HUD layout, curtesy of Cataboligne (aka Roy)
including:
- new ship textures
- team specific photon torpedos/animations and phaser textures
- team specific LR tactical grids
- doomsday fires an anti-proton beam at unfortunate
planets.
It also corrects some potential server problems and adds new
OPER commands. I would not hesitate to recommend upgrading
to this server version at least :)
Do to the rather large changes from Cat, it was clear that
certain internal mechanisms (like texture management) in
conquestgl needed major overhaul. So, in addition to the new
art, the texture and animation backend has been completely
rewritten from scratch, based on the new cqi (conqinit)
lex/yacc parser.
Texture and Animation descriptions are defined in the global
'texturesrc' file, or a user's own ~/.conquest/*.trc files.
In addition, a much more complete customization of conquest's
planets is possible via the global 'conqinitrc' file.
The goal was to provide maximum flexibility to users/hackers
w/o having to change the code each time :)
conqinit is discussed in more detail in the CONQINIT.TXT file
(currently crude, but will be improved for a stable release. :)
- changes since last snapshot release:
- cqi animation specific parser done. GLAnimDefs and
the animQue runner/iterator done. We have animations :)
- re-added the team specific torp animators that Cat
originally supplied in his patch, but were left out of the
snapshot releases until the new animator 'engine' was done.
- other animators currently present (and working :) are the
'explosion', and blinker animations.
See texturesrc for all texture and anim definitions if you
want to see them for yourself.
The only one(s) currently missing from the original patch,
that will be added in the future, are the solar animators (for
the suns). But I need some better textures from Cat first
:)
- conquestd: reworked server OPER commands. As you may (or
may not) know, users marked as CONQ_OPER in conqoper, can
send certain commands to the server when logged into the
game, by sending a specially crafted message to GOD. This
version no longer uses 'EXEC' as the command prefix, rather
'/' is now used.
- kill a ship or user:
/k[ill] <what>
- create robot(s)
/r[obot] <username> [<number> <warlike if non-null>]
- start a server recording
/recon
- stop a server recording
/recoff
- conquestd: fix problem where the recording packet cache was
not cleared when starting a new recording, except for the
first one.
- reduced the size of all of the 1kx1k textures, saving alot
of texture memory/file space :) The src package size went
down to 5.2MB compared to 8.3MB in the snapshot releases.
- The following are notes from the 3 previous snapshot
releases leading up to this release. Worth reading (if you
are bored) as there were alot of important changes not
mentioned above.
8.1.2ng3 (snapshot release) 2/05/2006
- Got rid of the old HUD. The new Icon HUD is now the only
hud in conquestgl and is a huge improvement over the old
one. Thanks Cat! The DoIconHud and related options are
now gone.
- added new shield graphics. It's basically an edited
version of Cat's original 'layer' texture, but with the
insides 'partially' hollowed out and color coded according
to strength. It think it gives a nice 'bubble effect'... I
much prefer it - hope you do too!
The shield layer options are gone, and only do_shields
remains - indicating whether you want to see a shield
graphic or not.
do_shields is now on by default.
- re-arranged the 'alert' indicator text, armies text and
towing text around the ship icon. The alert text was too
hard to read in certain cases.
- changed the doomsday AP beam rendering to be less cpu
intensive. The beam simply uses an on/off duty-cycle of
600ms now.
- correct problem where clients might exit incorrectly when
an unexpected packet arrives during the welcome phase.
- While playing on CyberBilly's server, I noticed that when
no ships are moving (and hence no UDP traffic is occuring),
his firewall would terminate the UDP connection after 60
seconds, and the client would exit.
It's basically the reverse of the problem that required
implementing a client UDP keepalive mechanism in v8.1.1.
So the server has been modified to always emit at least one
ship update for your ship every 5 seconds if UDP is active,
and no other UDP data has been sent in that time. This
should work around the issue by keeping the connection
'live'.
- add more debugging to readPacket() so problems might be
known.
- texturesrc - remove layer shield textures, added new shield
textures. Updated to load the correct one for each ship.
There are only 3 new textures that all the ships use
depending on their shape :)
- add a little explanation for the mysteryies in
updateIconHudGeo().
8.1.2ng2 (snapshot release) 1/30/2006
- The main focus of this release was to get the icon hud
working. It now scales properly.
The geometry setup was completely redone, since the code
from Cat didn't quite work properly - probably because he
didn't know what updateGeo() was really doing :) I will add
some comments later. I promise.
Some things changed as well:
- alert status/bars
The alert is now identified by 'alert bars' located on
either side of the iconic ship diagram. The ship causing
the alert is displayed just below the icon.
The bars are coded the same as in the original hud, though
there is no text on them.
- steady yellow = proximity alert
- blink yellow = enemy ship in yellow alert range
- steady red = ship in red alert range
- blink red = ship in phaser range
- Cat's torp 'pip' stuff is gone as well (though the texture
is still there). The main problem there was that each
ship was different in where in the decal texture the pip
array is located. This made it far too tedious/painful to
implement correctly. I'd also like to try to make it
reasonable for someone to add a new shiptype someday
without severe pain.
I like the idea though, so it may return in a more
'generic' way that looks and acts the same on all ships,
and is therfore easier to code and maintain.
- The 'animated' tractor icon decal was removed for the same
reason.
- The decal indicating you are carrying armies does not
display the army count. Same reasons as above. I'll
remove the empty '[]'s soon.
- there is no room for some of the standard indicators in
the new hud, so some are located in other areas, for
example:
numeric warp and heading, these are displayed to the
bottom left of their respective icons.
armies/ai - this is indicated by '%d armies' displayed in
the upper left of the icon area, or by the action token
when watching a robot.
towing/towed by - this is indicated in the lower left of
the icon area.
destruct - this is now rendered in large, semi-transparent
blinking letters centered in the viewer. Don't know why I
didn't do that in the first place, 'cause it looks kinda
cool :)
- changed default WxH to 1024x768 as 800x600 is difficult
with the iconhud.
- uiPutColor() can understand alpha now.
- fixed several minor conqinit parser issues.
- ALT-G will toggle the tac display on/off in LR scan.
8.1.2ng1 (snapshot release) 1/05/2006
- This version incorporates Cataboligne's massive artwork
patch. Among them:
- new ship textures
- team specific photon torpedos and phaser textures
- team specific LR tactical grids
- doomsday fires an anti-proton beam at unfortunate
planets.
- original 8.1.2 Conquest included 37 textures. This version
includes 173 textures. The src tarball got a little
bigger :)
This also includes the new 'icon hud' functionality, which
promises to be the future default hud, once the kinks are
worked out.
- User config data (~/.conquestrc) is now stored in a new
~/.conquest/ directory. The files that can currently be
present in this directory are:
conquestrc # used to be ~/.conquestrc
conquest.log # what it says
img/ # directory containing user textures
(.tga) files.
*.trc # user supplied texture definition files.
If you already had a ~/.conquestrc with your settings in it,
simply copy it into ~/.conquest/conquestrc before starting
the game.
- conquestgl will now emit it's log entries to stderr as well
so that gl users might see something useful if something
breaks :)
- planet and texture configuration and intialization have been
completely rewritten through the new CQI infrastructure.
- texture loader now supports compressed tga files.
- fix server recordings so they include TORPEVENT
packets. These were only being recorded for clinet
recordings. This is important when rendering the new
'directional' torp graphics Cat added when playing back a
recording.
- this version includes all of the bug fixes in 8.1.2.
--
Jon Trulson mailto:jon@xxxxxxxxxxx
ID: 1A9A2B09, FP: C23F328A721264E7 B6188192EC733962
PGP keys at http://radscan.com/~jon/PGPKeys.txt
#include <std/disclaimer.h>
"I am Nomad." -Nomad