Linux Air Combat Release 5.91

[bbosen]

New version 5.91 was uploaded 29Mar2018. This version is fully networkable and interoperable with prior versions since 5.01. It supports the same set of 54 aircraft that have been available since version 5.63, but graphics are improved and several new features have been added.

The main changes since Version 5.67 include:

Improved HQ airfield appearance. There are more hangars and a prettier airfield main tower at each HQ airfield, with more "static" aircraft parked beside the runway.

Now the RADAR antenna is animated, spinning around and around like a proper late-war Radar reflector array. It can be damaged and destroyed independently of the HQ airfields. When the RADAR reflector antenna is destroyed, it stops rotating, falls to the ground, and disappears, leaving only the supporting tower structure visible. All RADAR-related functionality immediately ceases for the affected Team so that they cannot see or select RADAR blips or change RADAR range. With time, surviving airfield maintenance personnel can make sufficient repairs to restore general RADAR functionality, but those repairs are emergeny contrivances that never work as well as the original, and the spinning RADAR reflector is never visible again. The repaired RADAR functionality can be damaged, destroyed, and repaired over and over again as the battle progresses, until one side or the other completely destroys an airfield, achieving victory and ending the mission as in prior versions.

Bug fixes: Prior versions suffered a segmentation fault if the operator ever attempted to select a RADAR target in any of the three online, multiplayer missions if his RADAR was off. Also, when RADAR was destroyed, even though the main RADAR display was blank, it was still possible to select RADAR targets and learn their altitudes. Also, when a destroyed RADAR was repaired, it would be destroyed again, automatically, within 2 or 3 seconds. All of those bugs have been fixed.

Terrains have been beautified a bit more by eliminating the "trenches" that had been prominent near airfields in prior versions. As a result, many of the landscape and oceanscape areas look more natural (especially near the airfields).

A new "Morse Code Radio" communication facility is now available. The keyboard's primary alphanumeric and basic punctuation keys are toggled into and out of this new "Morse Code Radio" mode by pressing the "Caps Lock" key. When the Morse Code Radio mode is active in any of the online, multiplayer missions, alphanumeric keys are encoded into Morse code and transmitted across the network to all players participating in the same mission and realm. As they are sent and received, those characters are displayed on the cockpit panel, just beneath the "Mumble Panel", in a small, single-line, text instrument, scrolling horizontally across its surface as necessary to make room for newer characters so that the pilot can always see the most recent 20 letters, numbers, or punctuation keys that have been sent. A single-character indicator above that instrument displays the Network ID of the most recent sender, and the color of that single-character is either red or blue, matching the "RedTeam" or "BlueTeam" affiliation of the sender.

This "Morse Code Radio" works even for players that do not install the usual "Mumble" VOIP application for interplayer communication. However, the Morse Code Radio is far more primitive than Mumble's voice communication: Morse messages are transmitted quite slowly, one character at a time.