Plans

Hello everyone,

I've just made plans to go overseas this holiday and new years. For those few of you who are close to me, you know what this trip represents. For all the other followers of this project, I won't go through even part of the whole story, but this trip will bring me back together with the person I love more than anything after three long years of waiting. I might never have seen her again but I got lucky recently in a couple ways. This trip is a financial risk for me but one I have to take.

I will try to put out the next version before Christmas, but if you ever even considered donating to this project in the past, now would be the perfect time, and I would appreciate any support. Thanks.

Greetings to the globe

Just wanted to say hello to all the countries of the world with visitors to this site. I just checked my analytics and I see people visiting from Japan to Norway to South Africa, 63 different countries in fact. Apparently I have the most fans from Germany, but also a visitor from Iran and even someone from the Isle of Man. Salutations and peaceful wishes to you all.

In honor of this I've added a Translate button to the web page. I'm sure it will be entertaining sometimes in its misinterpretation, but I think it's overdue.

Forums

Okay, supposedly, all my databases have been repaired. I won't be convinced of this until a few days have gone by with people posting and registering. Please check it out and let me know (somehow) if you see any errors.

Oh, and don't worry about this slowing down any dev progress. I've continued working and should have something new for everyone in a couple weeks. And hey, in the mean time, there's that "donate" button over there on the right...

Forum Maintenance

Hey everyone,

My web server was upgraded recently, and while they claimed my databases would not be affected, they definitely have been. I'll have to work on this today and see what's going on. Hopefully I haven't lost too much data and can get things running again soon.

EDIT: Everything "should" be fine now (and incidentally should be much more responsive after the upgrade). Feel free to resume normal forum activity.

EDIT AGAIN: This is really starting to piss me off. Found out people couldn't register due to database problems, tried to fix it, and now everything's hosed again. Getting real sick of my web hoster right now.

1.61 Win32 release

Linux version will be up after I get some library issues resolved.

This is a standard update with some bugfixes and some new features. In my latest testing, network sync has been perfect (knock on wood). Please leave a note in the forums if you see any out-of-sync situation in the future. No improvements to networking speed yet.

• Added Sandstorms. They occur rarely (more often in the Deep Desert) but they reset all visibility for all players. This is likely to remain a permanent new feature
• Selecting units and scrolling the mousewheel now allows immediate issue of orders. Scrolling the mouse up chooses Move orders, and scrolling down chooses Attack orders (defaulting to Protect and Guard orders respectively as normal)
• Foot Soldiers now receive a +2 range bonus while in Crags, but Crags no longer stop low bullets
• Devastators now fire twice as slowly, but with 250% damage. This makes them even better against large targets and even worse against infantry. Plus dammit, they're devastators. They should wreck what they're designed to wreck
• Split pickup lists for Carryalls into two separate ones for Harvesters and all other units (improves Carryall prioritizing of targets)
• Starting Units now provides a Flak Trike
• Allied units will share vision
• Re-added spice field voice call for first discovered spice
• Refineries will now drop the first harvester upon completion automatically
• Fixed a sync issue with IX and other building bonuses
• In-game Exit button works again (like the Back button now)
• Switched to OpenGL rendering
• Fixed music bug with "back" button
• Disabled Z-menu for HTF
• Fixed bug with detonating units not causing much damage
• Fixed bug with HTFs not counting flyers properly
• Fixed bug with selecting buildings to Demolish
• Merc purchases now ensure unit cap adherence
• Alliance units now have tiny amount of player coloring
• Fixed several other small bugs

Linux 1.59 release

My first Linux release, so bear with me for some issues. I am not sure if sound works, and only the non-music version is available because I don't yet have a Linux interface for the music streaming library I use. You will of course need OpenAL installed, and OpenGL is the renderer. I've included a list of dependencies you'll need to run it; hopefully it's complete. Otherwise it seems to test out fine on the development environment I finally got set up.

If you try it, please drop by the forums and let me know how it worked. If it works well, cheers. If not, at least you got excited. :)

1.59 release

First of all please note this is NOT a network update release. This is largely another bugfix but there are a couple new things you should enjoy.

• Biggest feature: Scrollmouse building menus. Select a building and try using the mousewheel! This actually took a lot to implement but is well worth it
• Saboteur behavior has been changed. They can be given Attack orders and will detonate automatically as soon as they are within range. They have also been slowed down but are still very fast
• Protect orders now scan out to a much larger range for attacking enemies
• Several AI enhancements including more aggressive building, new tactics, more intelligent spice usage and less CPU cycles
• Finally resolved the issues with some video cards showing garbled images and text. Turns out the graphics rendering library I use automatically scales images by powers of 2, so some smaller pics were scaling differently depending on graphic card capabilities
• Switched over to using a true font for text. I may or may not keep this depending on how it affects performance in the future
• Infantry coming out of buildings after destruction now act on Guard orders
• Losing your Palace will now mean loss of the current alliance
• Added "back" buttons to some menus
• Hopefully corrected the rare random issues with carryalls freezing in mid-air and harvesters sometimes being dropped at 1,1
• Several other minor bugfixes/tweaks