[Conquest] Conquest moved to github, and other status

[Jon Trulson]

Hi,

I have moved Conquest from SourceForge to GitHub.  The SourceForge page 
is no more.  The GitHub page can be found here:

https://github.com/jtrulson/conquest

All further development will continue there.

I've also shut down the two version 8.5 servers - they are too old, and 
I'm not sure you can even compile that version on a modern system 
anyway.  They only see a few legit visits a year anyway.

It's been a long time since the last release, so I am currently 
preparing a new development/beta release of Conquest, which I hope to 
make available in a week or two, depending on what I can get done.

New servers will go up at conquest.radscan.com when the devel release is 
ready.  The final stable release will be Version 9.0.

There have been many significant changes -- hopefully for the better.

You can read the commit logs if you want the details, but some of the 
highlights of the next release:


- Conquest is built with a C++ compiler now.  Your compiler must
   support the C++11 standard - this includes g++ 4.9 or better, and
   clang++ 3.4 or better.  Conquest is still C, but with some C++
   constructs and containers in use.  I would like to move toward more
   C++ use over time.

- The user and system conquestrc configuration files are now named
   conquest.conf.  If you have an existing ~/.conquest/conquestrc, you
   should rename it to ~/.conquest/conquest.conf to preserve your
   settings.

- The curses client has been removed.  It could no longer compete with
   the GL client, and some things, like an object's (ship, planet, etc)
   size was just impossible to implement properly.

   "conquestgl" (the OpenGL version) has been renamed to "conquest".

- The protocol has changed.  A lot of shortcomings in the v6 protocol
   have been fixed.  Support for the v6 protocol is still provided, but
   only for playing back old .cqr (Conquest recording) files made by
   previous versions of Conquest.

- The internal clocks have been re-implemented, yielding millisecond
   accuracy.  Previously, you were limited to 1 second accuracy.

   This has the side effect that bombing planets is much faster now.
   Original Conquest specified that you had a chance to kill up to 3
   armies every second of bombing.  With the previous 1 second
   resolution, you could only bomb up to 1 army per second.

   As a result, bombing will seem about 2-3 times faster than previous
   versions.  This was the way it was intended in original Conquest,
   and actually helps to move a game along faster.

- The Common Block (CB) which represents the Universe, has been
   reworked.  It is now named 'conquest.cb'.

   In the conqinitrc file, there is a "global {}" section that
   specified how many ship slots you could have, how many planets, etc.

   Previously, this data was ignored as Conquest hardcoded all of that
   stuff, and the CB was hardcoded to a fixed size.

   Now this data is used to construct a custom CB, and those parameters
   are supplied to the client so that it can construct a custom CB
   matching that of the servers'.

   You can have up to 256 planets, 256 ships, 64K users, 256 message
   slots and 256 history entries.

   Building a universe is a lot more flexible now since the old
   hardcoded methods are gone.

- Planets, suns, and ships have a 'size' value now (expressed in
   CU's).

   Previously these objects were all 300 CU's in size (due to curses
   client limitations).

   Now they can vary.  The scanning range, orbital path, and damage
   range of a planet or sun also now depends on it's size.  Be careful
   of Suns now, they have a much larger reach than they used to :)

   For ships, cruisers are a little larger than destroyers.  Destroyers
   are a little larger than Scouts.  Previously it was fairly random,
   depending on the texture used, and in some cases (Romulan) a team
   scout was much larger than the team cruiser.

- The homeplanet, and core flags of a planet are fully implemented
   now.  They were present in previous versions, but ignored.

   "core" planets are used to mark a planet that must be taken in order
   to conquer the universe.

   "homeplanet" planets, are team owned planets that are defendable by
   team robots.

   Previously, which planets were core, and which were homeplanets were
   hardcoded into the game.  Although you could change some of the
   characteristics of the planets, you were still required to conquer a
   hardcoded 25 planets in order to take the universe.  In addition,
   each team had 3 hardcoded home planets defendable by robots.

   Now, you can mix/mash these up as you desire.  The only requirement
   is that each team has at least one homeplanet.  You can even specify
   that only one planet is needed to take the universe if you like.
   These changes make it possible to more fully customize a universe of
   your choice.

- Some new server flags have been added:

   - NoTeamWar - when set, ships are prohibited from declaring war with
     their own team.

   - NoDrift - when set, the Drift bug is disabled.

   - Closed - When set, the game is closed/private, and only players
     with an account on the server, and the PLAYWHENCLOSED user flag
     set, will be able to login and play.

- UDP has been reimplemented, properly this time.  UDP packets are
   tagged with a sequence number now so that out-of-order, duplicate,
   and missing packets can be detected and handled properly.

   In addition, UDP is now negotiated with the server, via the
   protocol, eliminating the hacky way we were doing it before.

- The old tactical grids have been removed and replaced with a new
   circular grid.  The old tac grids only worked in LR scan, and were
   not scalable, so they were kind of useless, even though they might
   have looked nice.

   The new circular grid is much simpler and simply draws 10 concentric
   circles around your ship, spaced at 1000 CU intervals.  It's
   available in both LR and SR scans, and is always scaled properly
   according to your SR/LR scan selection and your applied mag factors.

   It can be enabled via the Options menu, or toggled on and off in the
   game with ^G.

- The ability to make client recordings has been removed.  You can use
   a screen recorder (like kazam on linux) to record games if you like.

   Server recordings are still supported.

- Using the -G switch to conquestd, now allows a single server
   installation to serve multiple independent games.  See
   docs/server-guide.md for details.

- The Universe is now "limited" to +/- 200 million CU's in each
   direction.  This is still pretty huge.

- The -m option to conquest (query metaserver) is gone, and is now the
   default when conquest is run without a server argument (-s ...).

- The 3 main configuration files used for the planets, textures, and
   sounds (conqinitrc, texturesrc, and soundrc, respectively) are
   always overwritten on a make install or package update.  If you
   would like to make changes to these files that survive an update,
   copy them with a '.local' extension.  When loading these files,
   Conquest will always load a '.local' variant of the file first, if
   present.

   This is only of interest to people who want to run a server.

- we use the stb_image.h image loader now and all Conquest textures
   have been converted to PNG from TGA.

- Many hundreds of warnings, dozens of bugs and an overhaul of much
   "under the hood" code has been done.


Enjoy!


-- 
Jon Trulson

"But when I'm in command, every mission's a suicide mission."

                               - Zapp Brannigan