Race Into Space

LATEST NEWS Development slowed substantially after the 1.0 release. Our remaining active programmer, who was mostly responsible for the changes in 1.0, is on hiatus--life sort of caught up to him, and he burned out a little on RIS's difficult code. To fill the gap, I started doing a little work again, but I'm not a programmer and what I can do is very limited: largely superficial changes, like what I did before for version .4.8--centering of words in dialog boxes and adding visual cues to aid gameplay--like how crews highlight crew members' relevant skills, and how those who've announced retirement now show in black or purple. Unfortunately, most of the improvements I could make were already done...but there were a few I never got to: so I came back for a bit and got some more done. Since then, we've had an influx of a handful of new programmers whose enthusiasm has drawn a couple members of our old guard back into the game. The team has decided to take a step back and rewrite the code to make it easier to work with, which promises to greatly benefit future efforts to improve (or even extend) the game. They've pulled the old CVS code over to a GIT repository until they've completed the rewrite. That's still in progress, but is on hold at the moment--seems folks have been overtaken with other things in their lives...temporarily, I hope. In the meantime, I'd like to put out a release (v.1.1) of the CVS code as it stands, with the improvements I've made since 1.0. This should help tide us all over until the next release...just in case there isn't another for some time. (It's been long enough since 1.0 came out anyway!) ------------------------------------ THINGS TO EXPECT IN VERSION 1.1 ------------------------------------ The following are changes I've made since v.1.0: * The screen where you assign crews to a mission now highlights the relevant skills of each crew member, just like in the capsule/shuttle screen. * Improvements to Advanced Training: - 'Nauts in Advanced Training now get 1 point of skill after 2 turns, and another point at the end of training (before, it simply gave 2 points at the end of training, so you got nothing if you withdrew someone early). (feature #3512556) - The game prevents you sending someone to Advanced for a skill they already have a 4 in. (feature #3497595) - Anyone sent to Advanced for a skill they have a 3 in will now go straight to Advanced III. (feature #3497595) - Refunds are available when you withdraw people early: 3MB if pulled from Advanced I 2MB if pulled from Advanced II 1MB if pulled from Advanced III - If you withdraw someone from Advanced I or II (where they won't have gained any skill points yet), you can send them to Advanced Training again later. The game used to prevent this. * Basic and Advanced Training now show 'naut morale. (feature #3512552) * Technology Transfer will now give partial credit if you haven't quite reached 75%--before, as an example, if your Mercury was at 70%, or had been knocked down to 44%, Gemini would get no benefit from tech transfer. Now it would at least get partial credit. (feature #3497605) * The R&D and Purchasing screens now indicate when research is temporarily stronger or weaker due to newscast. (feature #3497580) * The R&D and Purchasing screens now indicate when a component holds a Failure Avoidance card. (feature #3517592) ------------------------------------ - Leon raceintospace@yahoo.com