New for rc1: Double buffering support! This will cause the tactical to be refreshed from an off screen image, and should eliminate flicker for those who notice it. Turned on by the "doubleBuffer" option in the rc file, and can be toggled while playing by pushing control-D. Double buffering gives the client some extra work, which means more lag. The command x11perf -copypixwin500 will run a test that will tell you how much extra lag you will get. I've seen ranges from 15ms to 0.1 ms; the speed is mostly based on your video card and XFree's support of it. Fixed a major bug present in all netrek clients since UDP was added. The client will refresh all the windows and redraw the tactical every time is gets a packet. This means every time you get a message from a player or a warning (like "bombing 5 armies left") the client does an extra refresh, because all these things are sent with TCP and come in an extra packet. Turn on double buffering and the 20+ redraws per second you get when bombing or dropping start to make a difference. Annoying bug where you couldn't see the player list fixed. Cleaned up a few of the bitmap albums. Improvements to the help window. Window manager close window buttons should effect most client windows. The "nameMode" option now lets you turn planet names off on the galactic map and not just the tactical. Changeable while playing from the options menu. Planet names aren't very useful in hockey. Observers can lock onto cloaked players, after they have already cloaked, and watch them. When observing, the player/planet lock triangle is no longer drawn. It doesn't really tell you anything and just gets in the way. Your player ID is also no longer drawn next to your ship when you are an observer, so that you can see the ID of the ship you're watching. Otherwise the two numbers get drawn on top of each other and you can't read either one! You will also no longer have your player letter drawn on the galactic map when observing. If you are watching someone, their ship will be in white on the galactic as if it were yours. Fixed the tractor/pressor lines for observers. It will now reflect whoever the person you are observing is tractoring and not always be drawn toward player 0. The player list will now longer show the stats for observers. Their name, ship number, etc. will still be shown, but things like kills and rank will be skipped since they are meaningless and just add clutter. Clicking the right mouse button on a server in the metaserver list will cause you to join that server as an observer. Your player name and number are added to the window title after you log on. Makes it easier to keep track of multiple clients. Default file searching and reading totally changed around. The new method is incompatable with the old one, but that was so complicated and undocumented I doubt anyone will notice. Now the client will look for a compiled in system defaults file, "/usr/local/games/paradise-2000/system.netrekrc". Then it will look for a ".paradiserc", ".netrekrc", or ".xtrekrc" in the current directory and then the user's home directory, in that order, and read the just first one it finds. This file gets read in addition to the system defaults file, overriding any settings redefined. Then, if the user specified a server on the command line with -h, it will look for a ".paradiserc-servername", "~/.netrekrc-servername", etc. file for that server and read it in too. New in beta8: You can now configure the the columns in the player list in both single column mode and two column mode. See the sameple netrekrc file for details of the playerList option. The login screen doesn't use 100% CPU anymore. Added a sound effect for entering warp or transwarp. The client will not go into hockey mode if the server was in hockey mode some time before you entered the game, but isn't in hockey mode when you enter. Auto war declaration will not happen in hockey mode. If t-mode was acquired between points, when you're at peace, the client would declare war and you'd get frozen for 10 seconds. Fixed a ton of places that assumed the tactical and galactic were 500x500 and that the font size was 6x10. Different sized fonts should work much better now. Fixed a few bugs in the dashboard with fonts that don't have character 0 as blank. Better observer support. Observers will get marked in the player list as status 'ob'. When you are observering a player, the dashboard stats for torps out, kills, and max armies carryable will refect the player you are observering instead of just staying 0. Removed a blank line from the top of the player list. You might want to adjust your netrekrc. New in beta7: Fixed speech bug where the "god" voice would get stuck on. The normal voice should come back now. The planet list window will switch from sorted to unsorted mode when you click on it. The macro window will switch between showing RCDs or macros when you click on it. You can select planets from the planet window, for actions that effect planets. This means you can info them, lock on to then, and refer to them in RCDs and macros. Just put the mouse over the planet name and push the corresponding key. You can do this with the player list too, but that's not a new feature. Sending RCDs and macros from the player or planet list works better than before. The client will not crash if you try to send a macro to a cloaked player. The planet and player names are more accurate too, for example if you push control-o on player 1's name in the player list, you'll send something like "Help Ogg 1 at Org". Org would be the closest planet to player 1. You can now refer to cloaked players via the player list for macros and info, but not for locking onto. Scroll-lock and num-lock will stop screwing up mouse button mappings. New in beta6: Speech enabled sound server now included! The normal sound server is called "paradise.sndserver" and should run on almost any Linux system. The speech version is called "paradise.sndserver.viavoice" and is linked to IBM's ViaVoice TTS package. This gives it some requirements for shared libraries you'll need to have. You will need IBM's ViaVoice TTS runtime package, from http://www.ibm.com/software/speech/dev/ttssdk_linux.html. To use the viavoice soundserver, you'll need to set the soundPath in your netrekrc to point to the paradise.sndserver.viavoice executable. The "Speech Control" section of the example netrekrc documents the many options that can control speech output. You can also play with most of the options from the Speech page of the options menu. Annoying longstanding bug fixed. Sometimes the client would crash for no apparent reason, and if you reconnected quickly it would crash again, and again... But if you waited a minute to re-connect, no crash. Turned out to be a problem with logging in players messing with the auto war declare feature. Another longstanding problem fixed. The client would stop responding to keys correctly if num-lock or scroll-lock was on. The client should now work fine with them on. Hockey score display. The client finds the score of a hockey game by counting Rom and Fed planets, and displays the score in the corners of the map window. This way you can see the score at a glance, without having to count the planets yourself or waiting until a goal is scored. The warpStreaks feature now works on Bronco servers when you transwarp. This makes the background stars streak as you enter and leave warp, for a cool Star Trek "engage" look. The dashboard will also say "TransWrp" instead of "Impulse". Bronco planet list window now looks right. Before it was split over two windows that were on top of each other. Now the Bronco list is one window like in COW, while the Paradise planet list is split into two non-overlapping windows. For netrekrc window layout, "planet" is the Bronco-style list, while "planet1" and "planet2" are the Paradise-style list. Made the "mapSort" feature work with the Bronco planet list, instead of just the Paradise list. When mapSort is on, the planet list is sorted by team. When mapSort is off, the Bronco list will have lines separating the four teams' original planets, so you can tell when one race is about to be genoed on screwed up servers like chaos.eic.net. hockeyScore: boolean (on) Find and display hockey game score on galactic New in beta5: Transwarp key for Bronco servers. Pushing '-', the key to engage warp on Paradise, will work for Bronco transwarp too. It will automatically lock onto your team's starbase, if you have one, and then send the practice robot request that starts transwarp. This way you don't have to find your base and lock onto it first, which can be a pain when there are lots of ships next to the base. Refit/transwarp marks on the dashboard status gauges. Small marks on the dashboard indicator gauges show the shields/hull/fuel you need to be able to refit or transwarp. They turn color from white to red when your stats are outside the refit or transwarp range. Paradise refit command lockout bug fixed. Before, if you pushed refit, you had to pick a ship type before you could use the keyboard or mouse normally. So if you hit 'r' for refit instead of 'R' to repair, and then wanted to raise your shields or fire torps, the client would just beep at you when you pressed the keys, which was rather annoying. Updated the why dead messages to be more in tune with current servers. Speech synthesis stuff is in the client now. However, you need the speech enabled sound server, which I haven't released yet. So the speech menu is just there to tease you. I'll write some docs and release the speech server when either IBM says it's ok, or I get tired or waiting. New in beta4: Made lowerCaseT default to on. When on, 't' sends messages to your team and 'T' sends messages to player T. When off, you have to hit shift-T to send messages to your team, and that sucks. Fixed the showIND feature, which draws an X through independent planets on the tactical and galactic. It previously didn't work. Fixed the Bronco ranks so they match the standard for current servers. The metaserver list now shows all working servers, not just those with players on them. Maybe once upon a time there were too many servers to list this way, but not anymore. New option, "singleRCD", which makes RCDs implicitly singlemacros, which mimics the RCD behavior in COW. What this means is that an RCD can be sent with a single key, instead of pushing the macro key first. E.g. ogg would be control-o instead of 'X' followed by control-o. Default is on. Several of the default RCD control keys conflict with, and will override, the default keys for other things. For example, control-9 is the key for the pickup RCD, and is also the key for warp 19. If you want a warp 19 key, you'll need to remap it or turn singleRCD off. Bug fix, you couldn't make a single key macro that was a control key. Now you can. Client now tells server is has the SHIP_CAP feature. The Paradise client has always had this (it was a Paradise invention!), but the Vanilla server, unlike the Paradise server, needs to be told. The smaller heading tic that indicates desired direction will be drawn when you are locked onto a planet or player. It will be green and indicate the direction to the locked on object. Before it was not drawn when you were locked on. In addition, it is not draw when you are orbiting or docked. Made the UDP portswap code an option, settable in the netrekrc file with udpTryPortswap. You can also change between portswap on normal mode via the UDP options menu ('+'), and then try re-establish while playing. Portswap mode on causes the client to send the the first UDP packet to the server, instead of the server sending the first UDP packet to the client, as in normal mode. Portswap will work with most NAT setups, while normal mode won't. Some older servers don't support portswap. Increased max players from 20 to 32 in Bronco mode. This was necessary because max players in the Vanilla server was increased in version 2.9pl4. Sound can now be turned on and off while playing via the options menu. singleRCD: boolean (on) RCDs are implicit singlemacros udpTryPortswap: boolean (off) Use the portswap method for UDP connection New in beta3: 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 player list 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. Server support added in Vanilla 2.9pl4. 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 at 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. * [in beta 4 it does 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