New in beta3: (not yet released) Default metaserver address changed to metaserver.us.netrek.org, because metaserver.netrek.org is broken. You can use whatever metaserver you want by putting a "metaserver: blah.blah" line in your .netrekrc. Fixed a small bug with short packets 2. Sometimes the playerlist wouldn't refresh after a player died, so they would still be listed as '--' instead of 'CA' or 'SC'. New server/client feature, 19FLAGS. Replaces the SELF_8_FLAGS feature with a much better one. In almost every packet, 19 of the most important flags are sent, like shield, cloak, alert status. In fact every single player flag except war reprogramming and self-destruct is sent. This way a single lost packet won't cause your flags to be wrong, as they are resent every update. Due to a server side improvement, bandwidth usage is actually slightly less than it was before. New in beta2: Behave a little nicer as an X program. Metaserver window will no longer fail to appear when using WindowMaker. The window manager delete window protocol will work for most top level windows. When the puck travels at warp 15 or 31, it will no longer cloak. This is a kludge fix to a problem created by the CLOAK_MAXWARP kludge. The hockey server has MIT has a server side kludge to fix this; when at warp 15 the puck reports its speed as 14. What a mess. Short packets 2. Finally add support for these to the Paradise client. This reduces bandwidth and improves playability with packetloss. Support for the SELF_8FLAGS and SELF_8FLAGS2 features. Combined with SP2, should eliminate the problem where your don't see you shields/cloak/other state change because of packetloss. Support for the SBHOURS feature. When in a starbase, your hours played stat reflects time in a base. Option to omit the team letter from the player IDs on the galactic. So instead of things like 'F2' and 'R5' there would just be a yellow '2' and a red '5'. Letter clutter on the galactic. Shrink phasers, like in BRMH. Phasers lines shrink toward their target, in one second they get to about half length. Aids with timing your phaser cycle, and lets you see who is phasering who easier. Some new sound effects. Currently, there are 17 different sound effects. omitTeamLetter: boolean (off) Omit the team letter from ships on the galactic shrinkPhasers: boolean (on) Shrink phasers as they cycle From beta1: Stereo sound effects. Super sophisticated psycho-acoustic 2D sound placement. Well, not that sophisticated, but it does place sounds by where they happen on the screen. You need to have permissions on /dev/dsp, and the sound server paradise.sndserver must be in a place the client can find it. You can define in your .netrekrc file where the sound server is and what device to open. unixSoundPath: /name/of/sound.server (default paradise.sndserver) unixSoundDev: /dev/dsp (default /dev/dsp) * You also need to add the line, "playSounds: on", to your .netrekrc file in * * order to turn sound effects on. The "play sound effects" entry in the * * defaults menu doesn't work. * ****************************************************************************** Support for wheel mice. If your mouse if configured properly in X, you should be able to scroll the message windows with it. On the tactical, the wheel will fire torps by default. You can bind keys to the buttons with 'buttonMap', just like other mouse buttons. The up direction is button p and down is q. So to make up det and down plasma, you would have a buttonmap of 'pdqf'. Remember that buttonmap also goes through the keymap, so if you have space bar mapped to det, you would make your buttonmap 'p qf'. You still can't lock onto cloaked players from the playerlist, but attempting to do so will no longer crash the client. Re-enter the game after you die and are at the MOTD by pressing the space bar, rather than clicking on the race window. Stop entering on the wrong team in 4x4 hockey games. No puck player letter on tactical. Correct metaserver address! 32 position ship bitmaps. There are twenty files named R?.C?, these are 32 positions ship bitmap albums. You will need to add an entry into your .netrekrc file for them, eg. shipBitmapPath: /path/to/these/files (default is ".") Some new features, rcfile option, type, default, description: detCircle: int (1700) Draw red circle around ship headingTic: boolean (on) Tic mark to indicate heading puckArrow: boolean (on) Tic mark to indicate puck heading (hockey) tractorID: boolean (on) Show ID of tractored player next to ship