Taxipilot / News: Recent posts

More than two years after the last release of Taxipilot, version 0.9.2 is finally out. A few new levels have been added, and there is now a list of highscores, and some more small new features. However, this is not too much development for two whole years, and things are unlikely to improve, due to limited time. If you like Taxipilot, want to continue to see new levels, and a port to KDE4, I need your help! I hardly find the time to even do the basic maintainance. Please write to taxipilot-develop@lists.sourceforge.net, if you would like to help out.

After another long silence, version 0.9.1 has been released few minutes ago. Stefan has added three new very cool levels and has polished his existing ones to look even better. Also, you can now finally save and load games, making it much easier to get to see the higher levels. Of course there are a lot more changes than that, which you can read about in the ChangeLog on the "Download"-section. But of course, instead of just reading about the changes, why don't you download the new release and see for yourself. I hope you enjoy this new release!

Andreas Wilm has prepared binary (i386) debian packages of taxipilot 0.9.01. Since admittedly taxipilot requires quite a lot of libraries to build, this may be interesting to many. You can download the packages at http://onde.linux-daemon.de/ . Many thanks to Andreas for preparing those packages.

As I'm writing this, a new release is being uploaded to sourceforge. Although the changes are fairly small, some of them are also fairly significant. For one thing, a crash in the "An Introduction to Taxipilot"-missions has been fixed. Also, I've finally found a way to increase performance significantly. If Taxipilot wasn't running smoothly on your machine before, give it another try now.
Unsystematic testing indicates, you'll see the full improvement only with qt 3.2. However, even with older versions of the library, you should at least see some improvement.

Finally! Version 0.9.0 has jsut been released. The most noteable change is the addition of a number of really high quality levels contributed by Joe Bolin and Stefan F. Raab. Be sure to check out those new missions. I hope you enjoy this new release.

As many of you have noted, the development of taxipilot was pretty much on ice during this year. This was mostly due to me not having the time to work on the project. Meanwhile, several people have sent me new levels/graphics etc. or offered to do so. It's a shame I have not yet published those - hang on a few more weeks.
A few mintues ago, I did the first commit to taxipilot-CVS since roughly a year. From now on, I hope to be able to afford some time to development again. Don't expect rapid progress: I'll only have some few hours a week and first of all, I need to get acquainted with the code again. But do expect to see something within the next month or two.
So check back soon - and a Happy New Year!

The new release of Taxipilot does not change much on the surface - there's a lot of changes under the hood, though. First of all, I've fixed a number of compilation issues. Second, Taxipilot is a lot more sensible about errors in the configuration-files, and will not longer exit, even on serious errors. Third, there is now a common animation-framework, that is not only more consistent, but also more flexible, than the old patchwork. Also the sound-framework has been changed for more consistency. Have fun, and please do notify me of any problems.

Taxipilot is no longer silent! Although sound support is not complete yet, passengers and the taxi can and do produce sounds (only one of the passengers has sound, yet). On the downside this means, that in addition to a decent graphics-designer, a sound artist is now sought... So if you would like to give a hand - please contact me. The second noteworthy addition is one new level. Please note, that Taxipilot likely will no longer compile with KDE 2.x. I have not tested this, but I'm no longer actively keeping the code backwards-compatible. One of the next versions will drop backwards-compatibility completely.

As announced in the previous posting, the current release has a lot of new features (some of which are not used, yet) and for as far as the basic gaming-functionality is concerned, is pretty close to complete. One new level has been added, and a few bugs have been fixed. No binary releases are provided this time (that's simply too time-consuming) and the release has not been tested under KDE 2.x (but is expected to work under that version of KDE, too). Feedback is always welcome!

According to taxipilot.cpp, Taxipilots day of birth was exactly one year ago on the 17th of May 2001. Since those early days it has gone quite some way and has grown in many ways much more flexible than I thought it would, when I started the project as my personal "I learn programming for KDE"-lesson. With the upcoming 0.7.2-release, the actual gaming-functionality of Taxipilot will be more or less completed. The 0.8.x series will add sound, highscores lists and other features that will hopefully make the game more enjoyable. The 0.9.x series will then be all about fixing bugs and enhancing performance. So while Taxipilot is pretty grown up already and slowly but surely heading for the 1.0-release, what I wish the game as a birthday-present would be more and better levels. So if you can draw somewhat and are at least a whee bit creative - please check out the documentation and see, how you can help.

Unfortunately compiling and installing Taxipilot or more generally getting it to run on different distributions does not always work out as expected. I've added a new forum for dissucing those problems on the Sourceforge project-site.

Version 0.7.1 works with both KDE 2 and 3. Seperate binaries are provided, and the source can still be compiled for KDE 2 (requiring some handwork, detailed in the file INSTALL). Apart from that, a number of bugs have been fixed, and some minor enhancements like a new pause-framework were coded. Additionally, it is now possible to translate not only the application itself, but a new framework makes it relatively easy to create translations for the configuration-files, too. See the documentation ( http://taxipilot.sourceforge.net/docs.php ) for details.

With version 0.7.0 TaxiPilot is making another big step in maturing to be a real game. A framework of "events" and "states" has been put to work, that will get extended in the next few releases, but already allows fro great flexibility in creating doors and switches, or more generally in conditional behavior.
As always with important new features, a demonstrational level has been added making use of these, and of course, the documentation covers the new features, too.
Furthermore, a few annoying bugs have been fixed, particularly the crash when the app gets closed is hopefully resolved for good.

Several people asked me to supply some binaries for Taxipilot. The current release 0.6.2 is the first to come with a i586-compiled binary distribution. Other than that there are hardly any changes in the new release - some bugs have been fixed and lots of code has been reworked (hopefully to the better), but no new features have been added.

...but I haven't found much time to work on it recently, and I won't do too much to it during the next few weeks either. Oh, and in case you're reading this, Oatz, I've received your mail, but apparently, you're not receiving mine. Should you have a second mail-account, please tell me, so I can try that.

Probably not very interesting to those, who already use version 0.6.0. Fixes some problems with landing, that occured at certain frame-rates. Only relevant addition is textual moving objects (used for a good-bye-message in the last level).

... which most noticeably brings a new configuration-dialog, where you can specifiy startup-mission and mission-path (useful, when developing own missions) but most importantly, tune refresh and recalculation-rates, allowing Taxipilot to run on older hardware.
For a full list of changes see the ChangeLog.

This new version does not bring too many changes on the surface. Internally however, the passenger class has seen a major rewrite, making the code much more readable and at the same time introducing control over the passenger's animation-timing. The second noticeable change is that the configuration files are by default no longer parsed completely when generating the credits, but rather only when needed in the game or when the --thorough_check comandline-option is set. This descreases startup-time and time to load a mission noticeably (and thereby allows for missions with a lot more levels - so go ahead an design some...).

Version 0.5.1 should be ready for download any minute now. The most prominent change is that you can now define teleporters, platforms and centers of gravity to be moving objects. See level5 (first level of mission3) for a rather wild demonstration of this.
With this new feature, flexibility has increase quite a lot - and increasing flexibility always means that thorough testing is getting harder. Please don't hesitate to send in every bug you can find, or any comment you might have!

Finally: Levels no longer have to remain static. Version 0.5.0 brings support for basic moving objects. Extensions for moving platforms and teleporters are planned for the coming releases of the 0.5.x-series.
Further, the first user-contributed level has been included in 0.5.0. Thank you, Stefan Bruens!

Release focus is on direction-dependend animations for the taxi, i.e. taxis that look differently going left and going right. Again mission2 uses such a taxi, while mission1 sticks with the old one. Fixed a number of landing-flaps related bugs.

This new version brings a number of minor fixes, the ability to configure the key-bindings and support for landling-flaps that may be raised or lowered. A taxi using such flaps can be tested in mission2 (mission1 remains the way it was).

Version 0.4.2, originally meant as a mere bugfix-release is out. It introduces support for oversized levels and has a few new features that especially level-developers will appreciate (I hope).
See ChangeLog and Release-Notes (and Documentation) for details.

Version 0.4.1 is out and should be downloadable is a few minutes.
The most prominent change is the gameflow-messages looking much better now. I guess I'll upload a screenshot later tonight.

The 0.4.0 release contains(/ed) an incomplete archive. I hope the matter should be fixed now.
Sorry, if you have downloaded a bad version!
(Correct filesize of the .gz is > 1 MB!)