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From: xyzzy@u.washington.edu (Trent Piepho)
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Subject: New linux client available
Date: 23 Nov 1999 02:26:30 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
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Message-ID: <81cu0m$5es$1@nntp3.u.washington.edu>
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I'm pleased to announce the next version of the Paradise 2000 client.  This
version has a some new features and a lot of bug fixes.  It should fix the
WindowMaker incompatability of previous clients.

Get it from xyzzy.dsl.speakeasy.net:/pub/paradise-2000-beta2.tar.gz

This client is statically linked and should work with any linux distribution.

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 your
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.

.netrek options for new the features.  These are also settable while playing
from the options menu.

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