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  Great game!

  posted by anonymous 86 days ago

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  Anonymous commented on the autosheild artifact

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  taraskostiak commented on the Ejecting tank can cause server crash (5.0.0a9) artifact

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  taraskostiak commented on the autosheild artifact

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  sf-robot commented on the Scriptable Bot Code artifact

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• xpilot-4 xpilot-4.5.0 file released: xpilot-4.5.0.tar.gz

  =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.5.0 compared to release 4.4.2. Kimiko Koopman submitted a patch which changes the way scores are kept and makes it possible for players to form alliances: - scores are kept as floats (DFLOATs) in the server. The client receives (if >= 4.5.0) an int with the score * 100, or a rounded value otherwise. The client recalculates the float and displays the score with 2 decimals. - team scores are kept separately instead of just being calculated for display. Cannons count to this score as well. I have not yet made further changes, such as the distribution of points for team gains/losses. - new option: teamShareScore. If on, each player has a score equal to teamscore/number of members (that's why). Points are divided evenly over all team members this way. - (this is the most important stuff) alliances are possible. These are a sort of on-the-fly teams. The options teamShareScore (that's why) and teamImmunity work for alliances too, except only the changes in score are divided for the latter. The client displays them in an extra column (instead of the team column) with '+' if alliances are not public (see below) or with a number if they are. - there is a new talk command: /ally. It has a number of possible subcommands: /ally invite <name> invites another player into an alliance /ally cancel cancels such an invitation /ally refuse [<name>] declines one or all invitation(s) /ally accept [<name>] accepts one or all invitation(s) /ally leave leaves the current alliance - two new options: allowAlliances and announceAlliances. The latter determines whether alliances are announced to other players than the members themselves. Invitations are never made public, but only sent as messages to the invited players. Robots refuse invitations if there is also a human player in their alliance. - packet version has been increased to 0x4500 because of the new format of score packets and the new teamscore packets. Older clients don't receive team scores (the only difference yet are the cannon scores) or information about alliances (in the score packets). Austin Donnelly submitted a patch which adds an option to automatically kick players who have been paused too long: So, I've introduced a new option: maxPauseTime. If a player pauses longer than maxPauseTime seconds, they are automatically kicked with a message telling them they paused for too long. By default, maxPauseTime is 1 hour. So bona-fide pausers should have nothing to worry about. Especially if you're paused but viewing a game, each time you switch to view a different player that counts as activity, and the 1 hour timer is reset. So this should only catch players who have left their terminal for over an hour leaving themselves playing. The auto-pause feature should kick in after 1 minute, then an hour later they will be kicked. Kimiko Koopman submitted a patch which changes the way fuel drain from shot hits is calculated: Revived the old idea (originally from Bob Glickstein) to vary fuel drain from shot hits according to their kinetic energy. This was disabled in v4.0.0 because it made cluster debris either too powerful (N) or too weak (V). This patch compensates for that effect by changing the mass of each cluster shot so that its kinetic energy remains the same. Since this is actually more realistic than not varying shot damage, the option that turns this feature off (shotHitFuelDrainUsesKineticEnergy), will be removed in a future version about March 2002. Jarno van der Kolk submitted a fix for the server under NT: When using the "Choose Map"-button in the WinServer the "current path" is altered. This means that XpilotServer can't find the configfiles, like defaults.txt and robots.txt anymore. Paul Alexander Drees submitted a patch which adds asteroid concentrators: This patch puts asteroid-concentrators into the game. The function of an asteroid concentrator is to control where asteroids appear. They have parameters similar to those for item concentrators: -asteroidConcVisible, -asteroidConcRadius, and -asteroidConcProb. There is a function in guimap.c called Gui_paint_setup_asteroid_concentrator() to paint asteroid concentrators; currently, it does nothing, as I do not really know how to do client programming. When this function is filled in by someone, it should appear as three rotating squares. Kimiko Koopman submitted a patch which allows use of balls in race mode: Added two options: ballrace and ballraceConnected. With ballrace on, balls are timed instead of players. With ballraceConnected also on, a player has to be connected to a ball to pass a checkpoint. With ballrace on, but ballraceConnected off, any ball owned by a player can pass a checkpoint for that player. When a player finishes the race, the balls owned by that player are disowned, but not destroyed. That way, other players can still use those balls in the race. Jarno van der Kolk submitted a patch which adds replay recording for Windows: This patch allows the Windowsclient to make xpr-recordings too. Paul Alexander Drees pointed out that blockFriction should not be applied to phased ships. Paul Alexander Drees submitted code to always announce when a server option is changed during play. A new client option -showScoreDecimals has been added, which has a useful range [0,2]. It gives the number of decimals to use when displaying scores. The default value for this option is 1. It is now possible to use the map file keyword "expand" on the command line too. The "-expand" option takes as argument a comma separated list of words. These words must have been defined with the "define:" keyword in either the map file or the xpilots defaults file. They are all expanded. This opens up powerful possibilities to predefine groups of settings which can be activated on the command line with only limited typing. Paul Alexander Drees submitted code to detect when shots are near mines. A new server option -mineShotDetonateDistance determines if these shots will detonate a mine or not. Paul Alexander Drees submitted patch to improve the handling of maxRoundTime: I noticed a bug in the server today. It caused maxRoundTime to be all but disregarded unless gameDuration and roundDelay were set. I have fixed this bug, and also made it so that when maxRoundTime is set and gameDuration isn't, the time left clock displays how much time is left in the round. Paul Alexander Drees submitted a patch: I made a couple fixes to the alliance system, pertaining to tanks. - Tanks that belong to you are shown on your radar as green. - When one of your shots intersects one of your tanks, teamImmunity is checked, instead of selfImmunity. This way, it works the same whether alliances are on or not. - You cannot use KEY_LOCK_CLOSE and KEY_LOCK_NEXT to lock onto your tanks. - Your tanks show on your screen as blue. Paul Alexander Drees submitted a patch which implements a lag meter: Here is a patch for a client-based lag meter. The code is a kludge, but it works adequately well, that I know. Kimiko Koopman submitted a patch which changes the scoring of asteroids and cannons: asteroidScoring has been replaced by asteroidPoints and asteroidMaxScore. Players receive asteroidPoints points for every asteroid they break, until their score is >= asteroidMaxScore. If no points are scored, either because asteroidPoints is 0 or the player's score is too high, no points are displayed on the HUD. cannonPoints and cannonMaxScore work the same for cannons. The defaults are 1.0 and 100.0 for the *Points and *MaxScore respectively, such that the scoring behaves mostly the same as before. BTW, I changed the displayed position of kill scores for the winner to the position of the loser. This way, the displayed score reflects the actual location of the kill. Two new server options were added to allow players to log messages to the server administrator. The adminMessageFileName option gives the name of the file where player messages for the server administrator will be saved. For the messages to be saved the file must already exist. Players can send these messages by writing to god. The adminMessageFileSizeLimit option gives the maximum size in bytes of the admin message file. Kimiko Koopman submitted a patch to make cannons defend themselves: Cannons can now defend themselves using emergency shields and phasing devices. This behavior is controlled by a new option cannonsDefend. The default is true, but cannonsUseItems must also be true for this to have an effect. There is a chance that a cannon will not use an available em. shield or phasing dev., mostly to reduce the load on maps with many cannons with defensive items. Thorsten Kroeger was getting sick of missing messages, so he hacked in some lines so that one can decide to have messages (with or without status messages) sent to standard output. You can change it in the config menu. Jarno van der Kolk submitted code to draw asteroid concentrators. Fixed two bugs which allowed one to obtain normal shields on maps where shields were not allowed, but emergency shield items were available. ===============================================================================

  posted 1335 days ago

• xpilot-4 xpilot-4.5.1 file released: xpilot-4.5.1.tar.gz

  =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.5.1 compared to release 4.5.0. Zemyla submitted code to remove all items at the end-of-round reset. Kimiko Koopman submitted a patch which adds two new options, selfKillScoreMult and unownedKillScoreMult (the latter is based on an idea from Paul Drees): - scores for killing yourself or being killed by an unowned object (like an asteroid) are now rated the same way other kills are, which means that players with higher scores get penalized more than players with lower scores. - selfKillScoreMult, default 0.5, rates the score for killing oneself - unownedKillScoreMult, default 0.5, rates the score for being killed by asteroids and unowned shots, balls, etc. - with these defaults, the base penalty for such kills is 5 points, just like before, only now the player's score and different kill methods (the other *KillScoreMult options) are also taken into account. Kimiko Koopman added another option, selfDestructScoreMult, because some folks didn't like how selfKillScoreMult applied to self-destructing as well. - same default as selfKillScoreMult, 0.5. At end-of-round paused players would keep their items. This enabled players to cheat by pausing right before the end-of-round reset and unpausing soon after. To prevent this at paused players are now reset too at end-of-round. Since v4.5.0, players were unable to collide with their team's unowned (thrown or lost) balls. This made it impossible to destroy them in case en enemy player threatened to grab them. Unowned balls are now excluded from team immunity checking. ===============================================================================

  posted 1335 days ago

• xpilot-4 xpilot-4.5.2 file released: xpilot-4.5.2.tar.gz

  =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.5.2 compared to release 4.5.1. The IP address of the primary meta server was changed because it was moved to a new machine. Both the client and the server make use of this IP address if they can't do a name lookup. Due to the recently introduced version filtering by the metaservers it now can happen that the number of servers listed in the client welcome screen is rather small. This is now improved by trying to read at least 30 servers from both metaservers. The -messagesToStdout client option now also prints internally generated messages. The +cloakedShield server option now also works in shield enabled maps. ===============================================================================

  posted 1335 days ago

• xpilot-4 xpilot-4.5.3 file released: xpilot-4.5.3.tar.gz

  =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.5.3 compared to release 4.5.2. Fixed a bug which caused paused players to become unpaused at end of round reset. Fixed two bugs that caused team scores to remain the same when a (or all) player(s) left. Scores of leaving players are now subtracted from the team score and the team score is reset when a team's first player enters. Objects from paused players are now inactive. Other players can no longer collide with them. Shots and mines from paused players will now be displayed in neutral colors. ===============================================================================

  posted 1335 days ago

• xpilot-4 xpilot-4.5.4 file released: xpilot-4.5.4.tar.gz

  =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.5.4 compared to release 4.5.3. Team cannons could kill teammates with laser pulses. Fixed. On the map Death Star one can destroy a large number of targets with one FNC. This results in packet buffer overflows and slow updates. To overcome this a smarter map update algorithm is implemented in the server and also map updates are now limited to max 2 KB per network packet. The default score font was reduced from 15 to 13. When the server sends map updates to the client these are now always acknowledged immediately by the client. This should help prevent stalls or lock-ups on maps where are a large number of targets or cannons can be destroyed. It should also reduce the number of very big server frame update packets. Robots no longer try to go after players who aren't in playing mode. Windows XPwho persistent fixes (shipbar, statusbar, toolbar). XPwho can also set the user@host values. XPwho now has scrolling credits box derived from the CREDITS file. Windows server now has a button to launch a client connected to this server (127.0.0.1). Windows installation, at the end of a successful installation, offers to launch XPwho (for Internet games) and/or XPilotServer (for local games). Hopefully, this will help with newbie installations who start XPilot.exe and can't figure out why nothing happens. ===============================================================================

  posted 1335 days ago

• xpilot-4 xpilot-4.5.4 file released: xpilot-4.5.4-15.i386.rpm

  =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.5.4 compared to release 4.5.3. Team cannons could kill teammates with laser pulses. Fixed. On the map Death Star one can destroy a large number of targets with one FNC. This results in packet buffer overflows and slow updates. To overcome this a smarter map update algorithm is implemented in the server and also map updates are now limited to max 2 KB per network packet. The default score font was reduced from 15 to 13. When the server sends map updates to the client these are now always acknowledged immediately by the client. This should help prevent stalls or lock-ups on maps where are a large number of targets or cannons can be destroyed. It should also reduce the number of very big server frame update packets. Robots no longer try to go after players who aren't in playing mode. Windows XPwho persistent fixes (shipbar, statusbar, toolbar). XPwho can also set the user@host values. XPwho now has scrolling credits box derived from the CREDITS file. Windows server now has a button to launch a client connected to this server (127.0.0.1). Windows installation, at the end of a successful installation, offers to launch XPwho (for Internet games) and/or XPilotServer (for local games). Hopefully, this will help with newbie installations who start XPilot.exe and can't figure out why nothing happens. ===============================================================================

  posted 1335 days ago