From jon at radscan.com  Sun Mar  5 22:04:44 2006
From: jon at radscan.com (Jon Trulson)
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2006 22:04:44 -0700 (MST)
Subject: [conquest] Conquest 8.1.2a (devel) is now ready
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0603052153590.13598@m5.radscan.com>



         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 at radscan.com
ID: 1A9A2B09, FP: C23F328A721264E7 B6188192EC733962
PGP keys at http://radscan.com/~jon/PGPKeys.txt
#include <std/disclaimer.h>
"I am Nomad." -Nomad