File Release Notes and Changelog
Release Name: Beta 2
Notes:
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| Zinc Public Beta Release 2 |
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| 18 April 2003 |
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This is Zinc by:
Henok Bekele
Mike Colley
Ben Jemmett
Sam Jervis
Copyright (C) 2002-2003 the authors.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
email: zinc@bits.bris.ac.uk
discussion forum: http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/zinc/forum/
Contents
========
i ) What is Zinc?
ii ) About This Release
iii) Installing and Running Zinc
iv ) Getting Started with Zinc
v ) Feedback
vi ) Changes since Public Beta 1
i) What is Zinc?
================
Zinc is the Z-machine Including Network Capabilities.
Zinc allows you to play text adventure games (also known as interactive fiction)
either on your own, or cooperatively over a network. It comes with interpreters
for two of the most popular interactive fiction file formats -- Z-machine games,
and TADS games.
Zinc's networking capabilities are possibly unique. They enable several players
to work together to try to solve a game.
ii) About This Release
======================
We (the authors) are second year students at the University of Bristol. Zinc
came about as the result of our "Software Product Engineering" course in which
we are required to create a complete software product. Once the course is over
we hope to make Zinc freely available as GPL'd software (see license statement
above).
In order to generate interest in our project and to get some user feedback we
have made this beta release available. Note that despite being GPL'd software
at this stage we are not releasing any of our source code. This is because we
cannot be seen to have had outside help in fixing our bugs -- this project forms
part of our degrees, and so it has to be our own work. We shall be making the
full source code available in the summer after the project has been assessed.
Please be aware that this is not production quality software yet -- it is a
beta release, and is still fairly ropey in some areas. In particular please be
aware that saved game files that you may create may not be loadable in future
releases of Zinc.
iii) Installing and Running Zinc
================================
Zinc is a Java 1.4 program and so it requires an up to date version of the
Java Virtual Machine, available from Sun Microsystems's website at
http://java.sun.com/. Make sure you download the 1.4 version (or later) of the
Java Virtual Machine and install it correctly before trying to install Zinc.
Zinc is available for download as a file called "ZincInstaller.jar". The way you
run this installer depends on your system:
o Microsoft Windows: if Java 1.4 is correctly installed you should be
able to double click the ZincInstaller.jar file in Windows Explorer
to start the installation.
o UNIX: change to the directory where you put the installer and type
"java -jar ZincInstaller.jar" to start the installation. If the java
program is not in your PATH then you will have to give the full path
to the java program.
iv) Getting Started with Zinc
=============================
This is a quick introduction to some of Zinc's features; please see the
(admittedly incomplete) online manual for more information. You can access the
manual by selecting "Help | Help" from the menu bar.
When you run Zinc it will show the Game Launcher window. This displays a list
of games installed on your computer. Click on a game to see its initial output
in the right hand pane. Click on the "Start Game" button to play the game.
You can select "Multiplayer | Start server" to start a server. Now if you select
a game and click "Start Network Game" it will start the game in a multiplayer
session that other people can join.
To connect to a server select "Multiplayer | Connect to server". The Game
Launcher will change to also display games hosted on the server. Select one of
them and click "Join Network Game" to join the game.
There is a public Zinc server running on the machine zinc.microwavepizza.co.uk
(port 4999), which we hope Zinc users will find useful to try out features and
find other users running their own servers with their own choice of games.
However, since that machine is running unattended at the end of an ADSL link,
it may disappear or act strangely at times; if this happens, we hope to be able
to sort the problems out quickly, but that might not be possible.
There is also the Zinc discussion forums at http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/zinc/ ,
which users may find useful in hunting down other servers.
v) Feedback
===========
We would be extremely grateful if you could give us feedback on your
experiences with Zinc. The preferred means of feedback are through email to
zinc@bits.bris.ac.uk, or through our discussion forum located at the Zinc
website, http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/zinc/. In particular we would be grateful
if you could present your views on the following:
o What did you think of the multiplayer aspects of Zinc? How could we improve
upon this in the future?
o What did you think of the map? How could that be improved in the future?
o Did you encounter a bug? How can we reproduce it? It would be very helpful
if you let us know what system you were running Zinc on when you hit trouble.
There is a bug reporting form available on the Zinc project web site, at
http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/zinc/bugreport1.php -- using this would be very
useful in allowing us to deal with your report efficiently.
o Did you have problems playing a particular game? If so how can we reproduce
the problem? It would help if you could email us the storyfile (if it is
public domain) or point us to a website where we can download the file.
Remember that version 6 Z machine storyfiles are not supported at this time.
o Did you play a particular game all the way through to completion without any
problems? If so we would like to know, so that we can produce a "Zinc
compatibility list" of games known to work perfectly with Zinc.
o Was the documentation useful? Did you have a question that was not answered
in the documentation?
We value all your feedback, but please be aware that at this stage in the
project we are more concerned with bug fixing than with adding new features.
This is because we need our project to be as bug free as possible when we
submit it for marking. Suggestions for new features will be gratefully
received, but we may defer acting upon them until later in the year.
vi) Changes since Public Beta 1
===============================
o There is no longer a separate installation program for Windows.
o It is now possible to change the font and colour options for the game window.
o Numerous big fixes and tweaks.
Changes:
