File Release Notes and Changelog
Release Name: 1.04
Notes:
/------------------------------------------------------------------------------\
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| Zinc Version 1.04 |
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| 18 August, 2004 |
| |
\------------------------------------------------------------------------------/
This is Zinc by:
Henok Bekele
Mike Colley
Ben Jemmett
Sam Jervis
Copyright (C) 2002-2004 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-if-contact@lists.sourceforge.net
website and forums: http://zinc-if.sourceforge.net/
Contents
========
i ) What is Zinc?
ii ) Installing and Running Zinc
iii) Getting Started with Zinc
iv ) Last minute release notes
v ) Changes made in this release
vi ) Source code availability
i) What is Zinc?
================
Zinc is the Z Interpreter with 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) 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.
iii) Getting Started with Zinc
==============================
This is a quick introduction to some of Zinc's features; please see the
online manual at http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/zinc/help/ for more information.
You can also access the manual by selecting "Help | Help" from Zinc's 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.
iv) Last minute release notes
=============================
Due to limitations in the Java interface to the Linux sound architecture,
running multiple copies of Zinc on the same computer is known to cause
user interface freezes. If such a freeze occurs it can be recovered from by
quitting the unfrozen copy of Zinc.
Because of this problem sound is disabled by default when Zinc is installed
on a non Windows platform. It can be enabled from the Options dialog box,
which is accessible from the File menu of the Game Launcher window.
v) Changes made in this release
===============================
This release (1.04) fixes several crashes, bugs and other oddities with the 1.03
release. The main problem to be addressed is a possible hang or crash when
starting Zinc for the first time, causing it to start every gamefile present
under the Zinc installation directory.
The saving of games, including the map, over the network has been improved, as
has feedback when an unsupported game save/load operation is performed. We
cannot add the ability to load a savefile when playing a network game until a
1.1 release due to an extensibility problem with the network code used in 1.0x.
Other smaller fixes are a possible crash in the display window when a lot of
text is present, and bugs related to holding files open by accident. In some
circumstances, the 'console password' field in the server dialog would not
appear -- this has been corrected. A text decoding flaw affecting gamefiles
for the version 1 and 2 Z-machines has been fixed, as has the lack of save /
restore functionality in those versions.
If two clients used different default character encodings, passwords in earlier
releases would often be interpreted incorrectly. PLEASE NOTE: this causes an
incompatibility between 1.04 and earlier releases when using passwords on
network servers.
This release also marks the move of the Zinc project to SourceForge.net. This
allows us to continue development now we've graduated and cannot maintain our
BITS account at the University of Bristol.
vi) Source code availability
============================
If you downloaded the binary-only release of Zinc, you can obtain the source
code from http://zinc-if.sourceforge.net/download.php and selecting the
source link from the Latest Release section.
Zinc is built using version 1.4 of the JDK, which should be available from
http://java.sun.com/. We use Apache's ant build system to control the build
process; this is available from http://ant.apache.org/. The documentation is
built using Docbook (http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/).
If you have any problems building Zinc from source, drop us a line at
zinc-if-contact@lists.sourceforge.net and we'll try to help out. If you want to alter Zinc,
feel free (it is under GPL, after all!); if you have questions about the
system we'll be happy to help.
Changes:
