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From: <xpi...@li...> - 2003-12-20 21:05:56
|
XPilot 4.5.5 is available for beta testing. You can download it from ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/beta/ or from http://www.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot/beta/. =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.5.5 compared to release 4.5.4. When more than one instance of a sound was generated in a frame, all those instances would be sent to the client, causing unnecessary network load and deafening playback. This has been fixed by eliminating duplicate sounds in single frames. Added client support for playing sound through the Esound daemon. Added a new server option -minItemMass. This option gives the mass per carried item for a player. It's default value is 1.0. This makes your ship really heavy when carrying lots of items. Therefore player must become careful which items they pick up and which ones to drop when they become too heavy. Jarno van der Kolk submitted a new server option -maxClientsPerIP which limits the number of clients for one IP address to 2. Now there is a pause tax of 0.01 point per frame. This is to discourage the long pausing of players who have accumulated a high score. When the server option cloakedShield was on then deflectors could not be turned on while being cloaked. Fixed. Thanks go to Paul Forman. Kristian Söderblom contributed several important bugfixes. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2002-07-16 21:48:49
|
XPilot version 4.5.4 has been released. This is a bugfix release for servers, with some extra improvements for Windows. See below for a detailed list of the changes. The source code for 4.5.4 can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.4.tar.gz And in Linux RPM source format as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.4-15.src.rpm Self-installing executables for Windows can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/XPilot4.5.4-NT13.exe And Linux binaries in RPM format from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.4-15.i386.rpm XPilot 4.5.4 packages for Debian are now temporarily available at: http://people.debian.org/~synrg/xpilot/ http://incoming.debian.org/ Once they are accepted, they will be removed from incoming and made available in the unstable/sid distribution from your favourite mirror. Happy upgrading! Bert =============================================================================== 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. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2002-06-21 11:15:33
|
XPilot 4.5.4beta is ready for beta testing. It contains a few improvements in the server and some new features in the Windows client. You can download it from ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/beta and *NEW* *IMPROVED* now also from http://www.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot/beta For the server changes see the ChangeLog summary at the bottom and for the Windows features see this mail: http://nslug.ns.ca/pipermail/xpilot-hacks/2002-June/000248.html Happy testing! Bert =============================================================================== 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 which aren't in playing mode. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2002-04-22 18:41:59
|
XPilot version 4.5.3 has been released. This is a bugfix release for servers. See below for the changes. The source code for 4.5.3 can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.3.tar.gz And in Linux RPM source format as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.3-13.src.rpm Self-installing executables for Windows can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/XPilot4.5.3-NT13.exe And Linux binaries in RPM format from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.3-13.i386.rpm Packages for Debian are available on: http://people.debian.org/~synrg/xpilot Happy upgrading, Bert =============================================================================== 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. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2002-04-16 12:17:09
|
XPilot version 4.5.2 has been released. This is a bugfix release for both client and servers. If you run a server older than 4.5.1 then you will want to upgrade because all servers below 4.5.1 have a security flaw. In addition this version has the new IP address for the meta server. If you just want to play then you will want to upgrade to this version because it knows better how to get a list of all the servers from both meta servers. The source code for 4.5.2 can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.2.tar.gz And in Linux RPM source format as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.2-12.src.rpm Self-installing executables for Windows can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/XPilot4.5.2-NT13.exe And Linux binaries in RPM format from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.2-12.i386.rpm Packages for Debian are available on: http://people.debian.org/~synrg/xpilot Happy upgrading, Bert =============================================================================== 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. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2002-04-09 13:14:40
|
XPilot version 4.5.1 has been released. This is a bugfix release for servers. If you run or want to run a server then you will want to upgrade to this version. More explanation will follow later. The source code for 4.5.1 can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.1.tar.gz And in Linux RPM source format as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.1-11.src.rpm Self-installing executables for Windows can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/XPilot4.5.1-NT13.exe And Linux binaries in RPM format from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.1-11.i386.rpm Packages for Debian are likely to be available soon. Happy upgrading, Bert =============================================================================== 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. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2002-03-08 14:03:50
|
On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 10:07:37PM +0100, Bert Gijsbers wrote: > XPilot version 4.5.0 has been released. ... > Packages for Debian are likely to be available soon. Debian "sid" packages of xpilot 4.5.0 are now available at the maintainer's apt-gettable archive at: deb http://people.debian.org/~synrg/xpilot / deb-src http://people.debian.org/~synrg/xpilot / I expect these to clear the incoming queue and be accepted into sid some time after 18:00 UTC today, Fri, Mar 08, 2002. Thus, by tomorrow, they will be in sid, and you won't need to use the above URL. Simply update from your regular mirror. If you run Debian "woody", you'll need to either fetch these from the maintainer's archive, download them directly from unstable, or wait a couple of weeks before they are accepted into woody. If you run a Debian "potato", and need xpilot 4.5.0, see me. I'll see about backporting them for you. Your Debian xpilot maintainer, Ben -- nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca sy...@sa... Debian http://www.debian.org sy...@de... [ pgp key fingerprint = 7F DA 09 4B BA 2C 0D E0 1B B1 31 ED C6 A9 39 4F ] [ gpg key fingerprint = 395C F3A4 35D3 D247 1387 2D9E 5A94 F3CA 0B27 13C8 ] |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2002-03-07 21:07:59
|
XPilot version 4.5.0 has been released. It brings five months worth of development on new features and bugfixes. See below for a detailed list of what is new in this release. The source code for 4.5.0 can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.0.tar.gz And in Linux RPM source format as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.0-10.src.rpm Self-installing executables for Windows can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/XPilot4.5.0-NT13.exe And Linux binaries in RPM format from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.5.0-10.i386.rpm Packages for Debian are likely to be available soon. Happy playing, Bert =============================================================================== 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. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-11-07 22:39:32
|
Hi, Debian packages for XPilot version 4.4.3 are now available for Debian "unstable" (sid). I was just emailed notification that my packages have been processed by the sid package queue daemon and accepted. So, the next time your Debian mirror is refreshed, you will be able to get the packages directly from your mirror. I just wanted to clarify Bert's earlier announcement: On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 05:36:19PM +0100, xpi...@li... wrote: > XPilot version 4.4.3 has been released. It fixes > two bugs either of which could crash the server. ... > Debian packages will most likely later be available at: > > http://sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca/~synrg/xpilot This is the URL for my pre-releases of the Debian "unstable" (sid) XPilot packages[1]. It is an apt-gettable source, meaning you can add to your /etc/apt/sources.list these lines: deb http://sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca/~synrg/xpilot / deb-src http://sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca/~synrg/xpilot / All of my debs go here for my own personal evaluation and for evaluation by other developers who assist me with testing. I make no guarantees about the quality of debs placed here, but if you are an intrepid Debian user who absolutely must have the latest bleeding edge XPilot for Debian binary packages, this is where to look. I periodically make alpha and beta releases available here as well (which I am in the habit of never uploading into sid, since release cycles of XPilot are happily quite brief) so if you have the aforementioned deb line, you will automagically get the alpha or beta version on your next upgrade. Caveat downloader. Please email me directly at sy...@sa... instead of going through the Debian bug system if you have problems with packages you have downloaded from this site. If you only want final (i.e. not alpha or beta) and well-tested releases of XPilot for Debian binary packages, then please leave out the above deb lines and just wait the extra few days it takes for me to finish evaluation of my debs, and they will go into sid as soon as I'm satisfied they are ready (as they are today for 4.4.3). Thanks, Ben Armstrong (aka Fishy <fi...@xp...>) [1] sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca is my personal workstation at home which is triple booted Linux, Win98, and Hurd. Services on it are therefore subject to disappear at any time. You may wish to consider this before adding my pre-release package site to your /etc/apt/sources.list. If there is sufficient demand for my pre-release packages, and sanctuary's occasional unavailability is a problem for people, I will consider (at the expense of a slight inconvenience to myself) moving this archive to a 24/7 server. I have several at my disposal. That being said, it is also my backup server, and thus needs to be up overnight. So if you do your apt-get updates any time between 00:30 and 06:30 localtime (GMT-4) it is virtually guaranteed, barring catastrophes, to be up. -- nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca sy...@sa... Debian http://www.debian.org sy...@de... [ pgp key fingerprint = 7F DA 09 4B BA 2C 0D E0 1B B1 31 ED C6 A9 39 4F ] [ gpg key fingerprint = 395C F3A4 35D3 D247 1387 2D9E 5A94 F3CA 0B27 13C8 ] |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-11-06 16:36:40
|
XPilot version 4.4.3 has been released. It fixes two bugs either of which could crash the server. The source code can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.3.tar.gz And in RPM format as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.3-8.src.rpm And Windows binaries as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/XPilot4.4.3-NT13.exe And Linux binaries as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.3-8.i386.rpm Debian packages will most likely later be available at: http://sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca/~synrg/xpilot Bert =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.4.3 compared to release 4.4.2. A bug was fixed regarding asteroids wrapping beyond map_width. Jude J Anthony submitted a bugfix for robots: The problem appears to be a confusion between the global Obj[] array (object *Obj[MAX_TOTAL_SHOTS], declared in server.c, and included through global.h) and a local array of object pointers. Within Robot_default_play_check_objects(), at line 1874, we declare a local array of object pointers (object **obj_list). At line 1907, we get all items within our visibility with Cell_get_objects(), placing them in the obj_list. At 1911, we loop j through all the items in obj_list, setting shot to an object pointer within the list at 1913. At line 1965, we run a check for items of type OBJ_ITEM. (Thus explaining why the error only occurs with robots AND items.) On line 1973, try to find the Importance of Obj[j], but j is actually an index into obj_list. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-11-02 13:46:46
|
Hi, Sadly, enigma.nslug.ns.ca is dead again due to the third hdd failure suffered this year. This failure was complete -- the data on the drive is totally unrecoverable. By this time we (the admins at NSLUG) are all good and fed up with cheap PC hardware and would like to replace it with real server hardware. However, that stuff isn't easy to come by, so we're scrambling to find donors, and thus it may not happen for some time. In the interim, some slightly more modern hardware will replace the old dead hdd and the now suspect motherboard (which we fear sustained damage being yoked to a power supply that exhibited some flakiness just before we replaced it several months back, and subsequently ate the three hdds). Even more sadly, there were no backups of the archives. Our LUG's web site was in CVS and so can be recovered, but the archives were to be backed up over amanda on our co-loc's backup system. Unfortunately, after we inserted the 2nd nic in enigma to make this happen, none of the admins had the time to work with our co-loc to get the backups up and running before this final, catastrophic hdd failure struck. So, if you're wondering where xpilot-hacks and its archives went, that's the whole shaggy dog story. By the way, if anyone has a complete folder of xpilot-hacks email, I could try reconstructing the archives. I do have a fair amount of it myself, but I'm not certain it is complete. Also, I don't have a subscriber list, so if anyone just happens to have a copy of the list of any age and/or state of (in)completeness or has a copy of a reasonably complete list of developers to send a one-time mailing to, then once I have the new list started, I would like to email as many interested people as possible so they can resubscribe themselves. Regards, Ben for ad...@ns... -- nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca sy...@sa... Debian http://www.debian.org sy...@de... [ pgp key fingerprint = 7F DA 09 4B BA 2C 0D E0 1B B1 31 ED C6 A9 39 4F ] [ gpg key fingerprint = 395C F3A4 35D3 D247 1387 2D9E 5A94 F3CA 0B27 13C8 ] |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-10-08 20:28:06
|
XPilot version 4.4.2 has been released. It has several new interesting features which will be listed below. The source code can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.2.tar.gz And in RPM format as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.2-7.src.rpm And Windows binaries as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/XPilot4.4.2-NT13.exe And Linux binaries as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.2-7.i386.rpm Debian packages can be found at: http://sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca/~synrg/xpilot Bert =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D This is a summary of changes of release 4.4.2 compared to release 4.4.1. Paul Alexander Drees submitted a bugfix for the Windows version of XPilot. It used to be that, if you typed a message, the score window would go bla= nk until a new set of scores came in. Joe Groff submitted a patch to allow more keys to be bound to one mouse button. Jarno van der Kolk submitted a patch: Almost all of the serveroptions can now be "changed at runtime". Only file-options, like scorefiletable, defautsfile, etc. still can't= be changed at runtime. And the options, timing and teamplay. Bob Glickstein submitted "flak hack." It changes the shots fired by cann= ons=20 to be AAA ("anti-aircraft artillery") rounds. These work like normal sho= ts=20 but explode into small flak bursts after a short while. Austin Donnelly submitted a patch: Also discussed on rec.games.computer.xpilot was an proposal to make t= he ball connector non-rigid. This patch adds a new option "connectorIsString", (default no) which when set allows the connector to go "slack", so you can't push against the ball. This makes certain ballruns harder, and others easier. It does take = a little getting used to. Guido Koopman reworked Bob's flak patch a little. Flak explosions are sma= ller and flak can be turned off with an option cannonFlak. Austin Donelly submitted a patch to allow clients to make some attempt at backwards compatibility with old servers which can't handle a turnResistance of 0.0. Austin Donelly submitted a patch, which adds two new options: ballCollisions (default no) Do balls collide with other objects? ballSparkCollisions (default yes) Can balls be blown around by exha= ust? ballSparkCollisions is only active if ballCollisions is also on. What happens during a ball-object collision depends on the object. Shots (including missiles of various kinds) are absorbed in an inelastic collision. Other balls bounce off, unless they were going too fast (as determined by maxObjectWallBounceSpeed) in which case both balls pop. Wreckage and debris is also absorbed. Laser pulses, mines and powerup items pass unhindered through the ball. I originally had items bouncing off the ball, but this turned out to look silly: items have low mass and even slightly clipping them with a ball would send them off at high speed without affecting the ball much. I tried to get lasers absorbed, but couldn't work it out - I suspect the collision detection is slightly different, but I haven't spent much time on it. Mines I couldn't decide whether they should trigger or bounce of the ball (so I ignored them). This is my latest version, and fixes the problem I mentioned earlier about balls in treasures being blown about. One of the cute things I've found is that you can blow a ball by placing and detonating a mine close to it :) Paul Alexander Drees submitted a patch for the server: It makes asteroids release items when they are broken. The probability that an asteroid releases items is given by the option asteroidItemProb, while the number of items that are released is between 1 and asteroidMaxItems. I also streamlined some code in frame.c using a function I created for the asteroid item determination. Juha Lindstr=F6m submitted a patch for the client: The attached patch draws the object information of the radar to the map on an area three times the size of the radar. The information is drawn in the sliding radar way so that you sit in the center of the radar and the circles show where the opponents are relative to you. Now if one of the circles suddenly moves quickly towards you, just drop a few bullets to the direction of the circle, move behind some cover and BANG the world is again a bit better place to play xpilot :) Jarno van der Kolk submitted a version of xp-replay for Windows: Finally, it works. (i.e. it doesn't crash all the time) :-) This ZIP contains the source and an executable in the Release-dir. The files should be unzipped into src/replay/NT, since the project us= es "src/client/recordfmt.h". Beware that XPreplay loads the entire XPilot recording into memory, s= o it doesn't really like the 80 Mb recordings from the summercamp. It C= AN handle the ballrunrecordings from the various ballrunsites just fine though. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-09-24 19:58:51
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XPilot 4.4.2beta is available for beta testing. It contains an impressive number of new features which will be listed below. You can download the source code, Linux executables or Windows executables from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/beta/xpilot-4.4.2beta.tar.gz ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/beta/xpilot-4.4.2beta-6.i386.rpm ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/beta/XPilot4.4.2beta-NT13.exe As long as 4.4.2 is in beta there is feature freeze. What we would like to know about this release is if it is stable and if the features work as they should. Is it something we can give to the innocent masses? Do the new features speak for themselves, or do we need to update the documentation? (rhetoric question ;-)) Happy beta testing! Bert What follows is the ChangeLog for 4.4.2: Paul Alexander Drees submitted a bugfix for the Windows version of XPilot. It used to be that, if you typed a message, the score window would go bla= nk until a new set of scores came in. Joe Groff submitted a patch to allow more keys to be bound to one mouse button. Jarno van der Kolk submitted a patch: Almost all of the serveroptions can now be "changed at runtime". Only file-options, like scorefiletable, defautsfile, etc. still can't= be changed at runtime. And the options, timing and teamplay. Bob Glickstein submitted "flak hack." It changes the shots fired by cann= ons=20 to be AAA ("anti-aircraft artillery") rounds. These work like normal sho= ts=20 but explode into small flak bursts after a short while. Austin Donnelly submitted a patch: Also discussed on rec.games.computer.xpilot was an proposal to make t= he ball connector non-rigid. This patch adds a new option "connectorIsString", (default no) which when set allows the connector to go "slack", so you can't push against the ball. This makes certain ballruns harder, and others easier. It does take = a little getting used to. Guido Koopman reworked Bob's flak patch a little. Flak explosions are sma= ller and flak can be turned off with an option cannonFlak. Austin Donelly submitted a patch to allow clients to make some attempt at backwards compatibility with old servers which can't handle a turnResistance of 0.0. Austin Donelly submitted a patch, which adds two new options: ballCollisions (default no) Do balls collide with other objects? ballSparkCollisions (default yes) Can balls be blown around by exha= ust? ballSparkCollisions is only active if ballCollisions is also on. What happens during a ball-object collision depends on the object. Shots (including missiles of various kinds) are absorbed in an inelastic collision. Other balls bounce off, unless they were going too fast (as determined by maxObjectWallBounceSpeed) in which case both balls pop. Wreckage and debris is also absorbed. Laser pulses, mines and powerup items pass unhindered through the ball. I originally had items bouncing off the ball, but this turned out to look silly: items have low mass and even slightly clipping them with a ball would send them off at high speed without affecting the ball much. I tried to get lasers absorbed, but couldn't work it out - I suspect the collision detection is slightly different, but I haven't spent much time on it. Mines I couldn't decide whether they should trigger or bounce of the ball (so I ignored them). This is my latest version, and fixes the problem I mentioned earlier about balls in treasures being blown about. One of the cute things I've found is that you can blow a ball by placing and detonating a mine close to it :) Paul Alexander Drees submitted a patch for the server: It makes asteroids release items when they are broken. The probability that an asteroid releases items is given by the option asteroidItemProb, while the number of items that are released is between 1 and asteroidMaxItems. I also streamlined some code in frame.c using a function I created for the asteroid item determination. Juha Lindstr=F6m submitted a patch for the client: The attached patch draws the object information of the radar to the map on an area three times the size of the radar. The information is drawn in the sliding radar way so that you sit in the center of the radar and the circles show where the opponents are relative to you. Now if one of the circles suddenly moves quickly towards you, just drop a few bullets to the direction of the circle, move behind some cover and BANG the world is again a bit better place to play xpilot :) Jarno van der Kolk submitted a version of xp-replay for Windows: Finally, it works. (i.e. it doesn't crash all the time) :-) This ZIP contains the source and an executable in the Release-dir. The files should be unzipped into src/replay/NT, since the project us= es "src/client/recordfmt.h". Beware that XPreplay loads the entire XPilot recording into memory, s= o it doesn't really like the 80 Mb recordings from the summercamp. It C= AN handle the ballrunrecordings from the various ballrunsites just fine though. |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-07-02 16:11:23
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XPilot version 4.4.1 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release, with a few new features for firewall support and password file support. The source code can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.1.tar.gz And in RPM format as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.1-4.src.rpm And Windows binaries as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/XPilot4.4.1-NT13.exe And Linux binaries as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.1-4.i386.rpm Bert =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.4.1 compared to release 4.4.0. When tuning text options at run time like the password the server would crash. This has now been fixed. Clients now support the firewall patch. For this the client has two new options: -clientPortStart and -clientPortEnd. When the client is started with e.g.: -clientPortStart 40000 -clientPortEnd 41000 then the server will use this range for UDP ports to communicate with clients. This is useful for sites which are behind a firewall. A new server option -passwordFileName gives the path to a file which only contains a definition for the server password. The advantage of this is that you can set the file permissions so that others cannot read its contents. Zemyla submitted a patch to fix a small bug in his old blockFriction patch. The problem was that the option -blockFrictionVisible would not work. This patch fixes it. Ben Armstrong fixed a bug where ball ownership for all connected balls would be reset whenever a player would leave. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-06-12 19:28:08
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XPilot version 4.4.0 has been released. It contains a large number of new features and improved functionality. The list of changes can be found below. The source code can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.0.tar.gz And in RPM format as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.0-3.src.rpm And Linux binaries as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/xpilot-4.4.0-3.i386.rpm Soon a Windows binary distribution will be made too. Bert =============================================================================== This is a summary of changes of release 4.4.0 compared to release 4.3.2. New option (bool) logRobots: whether to log robot's comings or not. Windows only: server config dialog box has a button to allow you to choose a map and two url links: local Server Options; and Jarno's Server Options Page. Removed support for CMW and VMS as these have been broke for a long time and are not expected to be updated anymore. Removed support for antique 0.x versions of Linux which did not have support for sending broadcasts to the network and had small socket buffer limitations. Add strlcpy and strlcat. Replaced most of the calls to strcpy, strncpy, strcat and strlcat with calls to strlcpy and strlcat. New code should preferably only use strlcpy and strlcat. Removed sourceid strings as they only produced compilation warnings and haven't ever turned out to be useful. Paul Alexander Drees, a.k.a. Zemyla, submitted a big patch with a large number of small new features: - A small pair of client options (-user and -host) to be abls to set the user@host in the .xpilotrc file or on the command line. - A set of options to control ball parameters: o -ballMass sets the mass of the ball. o -ballConnectorStringConstant to set the restoring force of the connector. 0 -ballConnectorDamping to set the damping of the connector's motion. o -maxBallConnectorRation to set how much the connector can deform before it breaks. o -ballConnectorLength to set the default length of the connector. - -cannonDeadTime to set how long (in seconds) a cannon stays dead once it is killed. - -targetDeadTime to set how long (in seconds) a target stays dead once it is destroyed. - Random items. These items show no hint of what they are; instead, they appear to alternate between different items. The items shown depend on what probabilities there are for items; for example, a map where the only items are wideangles and armor would have its random items alternate between wideangles and armors. Dropped items are never random. - -randomItemProb to set how oftem items appear random (0.0-1.0). - -/+captureTheFlag mode. When -captureTheFlag is on, the treasure that an enemy ball is being deposited in has to be safe in order to score. - Friction blocks. The map character for friction blocks is "z". When a ship is in a friction block, the frictional force on it is equal to -blockFriction instead of -friction. There is also the -/+frictionVisible option to change whether the friction blocks appear as decor or not at all. - -coriolis determines through what angle (in degrees) a ship's velocity vector rotates in a frame. - -robotRealName, -robotHostName, -tankRealName, and -tankHostName. These options set the realnames and hostnames for robots and tanks. - -tankScoreDecrement. This option describes what the difference is between the player's score and the score of his released tanks. - -/+turnThrust. This option behaves exactly like the former compile-time option of the same name -- turning uses fuel and produces sparks. - -/+selfImmunity. This option determines whether a player and his tanks are immune to his own shots, mines, sparks, etc. - -defaultShipShape and -tankShipShape. This sets the shipshape for people who don't define a shipshape (or everyone when -allowShipShapes is off), and the shipshape for released tanks. - An enhancement to the Tune_option function that lets it set valSec and valPerSec values (so the /set command can change these values). - A refinement to the /set command to show the value after tuning in the server message. - A /get command to get the current value of an option. It does not work for password and mapData (on purpose -- I do not want any Joe Blow to be able to get the password, and the mapData far too long.) - A refinement to the /help command. When the command is given with no arguments, it iterates through the list of commands and displays each one in turn instead of showing a fixed list. - Empty treasures. These act like regular treasures, but they do not own a ball, and are not counted in the number of treasures a team owns. Thus, they are useful for places that are inaccessible to players, but that balls can be dropped into (like Worm Mountain). - A refinement to the Detonate_item() function. If the victim is a tank, the items belong to the player who owns the tank. - A refinement to shoving. Shoves now count as kills, robots can declare war on people who shoved them, and robots can undeclare war on people they shove. Guido Koopman submitted a patch: - treasures are allowed in non-team mode. balls can not be saved because they don't belong to a team. number of frames loose is not reported when a ball is destroyed. - robots can declare war when killed by a ball. - small changes in the client to paint treasures without team correctly. Fixed the saving of recordings to use the proper window dimensions. Added Ben Jackson's fix for not drawing the border of the active view with window scale factors which are equal to one or less. The order in which radar information about players is sent is now randomized. This is to prevent cheat hacks which take advantage of the fixed order some information is sent in. Paul Forman submitted code which adds options to prevent players from placing stationary mines and prevent players from throwing mines of the speed at which they fly is below a limit. This patch was modified and simplified to only add one new option to the server -minMineSpeed which controls the minimum speed at which mines move. The default is zero, which allows for stationary mines. Non-zero values will give the mine an initial speed based on the player velocity and direction. Fixed bug which caused lowering of number of robots not to work. Guido Koopman submitted a really nice patch which implements asteroids: - a new object type: asteroid - version magic number has been increased to 4400 (was 4300) - there are currently only two shapes for asteroids, but more can easily be added. - sounds for asteroids: asteroid_hit and asteroid_break - a new packet type: PKT_ASTEROID (number 80) - two new files in src/server/: asteroid.[ch] - constants like mass, size etc. are #defined in asteroid.h - points are awarded for hitting asteroids with balls - four new server options: option name: description: default: asteroidsWallBounce Do asteroids bounce off walls? true asteroidCollisionMayKill Are asteroids deadly? true asteroidsOnRadar Are asteroids visible on radar? false asteroidScoring Points for shooting asteroids? true asteroidProb Asteroid create probability 5e-7 maxAsteroidDensity Max. [0.0-1.0] asteroid density 0 Behavior of asteroids: Asteroids are created with a random size from 1 to the maximum size (4). Bigger asteroids can take more hits before breaking than smaller ones. Asteroids size 1 can take no hits (are destroyed when hit). When an asteroid breaks, two asteroids of size N - 1 are created, plus some debris and wreckage. If asteroidScoring is on, one point is awarded per asteroid broken (or destroyed for size 1), up to a maximum of 101 points. This is the same as for cannons. Clients with versions less than 4400 are not sent the asteroid objects, although they can still see them on the radar if asteroidsOnRadar is on. Sometimes when a client was slow to join in an almost full game a robot could be started which would cause the client login process to fail. This has now been fixed. Guido submitted a new patch to let asteroids collide with many objects: Improved asteroid - object collisions. Asteroids now collide with wreckage, debris and sparks from players or cannons; no longer collide twice with other asteroids; trigger mines and torpedoes instead of hitting them. Also, different objects do different amounts of damage to asteroid. Players and asteroids bounce elastically. New algorithms have been implemented in the XPilot server which speed up the handling of objects. This will especially be noticable on servers with more players, or servers with lots of robots and objects. These servers will see reduced CPU usage, which benefits network I/O processing. A client visible feature related to these improvements is that packets received will hardly ever be larger than one kilobyte. What happens when a player is near a very large number of objects is that at most the 500 objects closest to the player are transmitted over the network. The option parser internals have been overhauled. Now for each option we can specify from which sources it can be set (command line, defaults file, or the map file). And we can control which options can be seen by clients. When an option list was requested options with type valSec or valPerSec were not corrected for FPS. This made them look very different from their values in the map file. This has now been fixed. Now a few options are not listed when a client requests to see the list of server options. These include: robotFile, mapFileName, defaultsFileName, scoreTableFileName, and password. Added a -motdFileName server option. This option specifies which file to use for the MOTD which is displayed when clients join. Its default value is determined at compile time, or gotten from the environment variable XPILOTSERVERMOTD. When cannons were configured to use items this could crash a server when a full nuclear cluster mine would explode. Now option define statements which are set in the defaults file can be expanded in the map file and by doing so set options which could not have been set in the map file explicitly. This sounds very complicated, but it will be easy to understand with an example: When in the defaults file I specify these two define statements: define: PrivateSettings \multiline: EndPrivateSettings idleRun: no noQuit: no contactPort: 15000 serverHost: localhost reportToMetaServer: no EndPrivateSettings define: PublicSettings \multiline: EndPublicSettings idleRun: yes noQuit: yes contactPort: 15345 reportToMetaServer: yes EndPublicSettings Then I can expand these defines in any map file with: expand: PrivateSettings or: expand: PublicSettings This does allow me to choose between these option values in each map file. While the options themselves are of a kind which normally cannot be set in mapfiles, but only in the defaults file or on the command line. Ben Armstrong updated the xpilots manual page. =============================================================================== |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-05-29 20:14:22
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Due to all the very helpful feedback we were able to improve the alpha3 version. Now I think it is better to stop using alpha3 and upgrade to alpha4 if you can. You can ftp it from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/test/alpha/xpilot-4.4.0alpha4.tar.gz Or better use the "cvs upgrade" command in the xpilot directory if you use CVS. Here is a list of changes since alpha3: ! The option parser internals have been overhauled. Now for each option we ! can specify from which sources it can be set (command line, defaults file, ! or the map file). And we can control which options can be seen by clients. ! ! When an option list was requested options with type valSec or valPerSec ! were not corrected for FPS. This made them look very different from ! their values in the map file. This has now been fixed. ! ! Now a few options are not listed when a client requests to see ! the list of server options. These include: robotFile, mapFileName, ! defaultsFileName, scoreTableFileName, and password. ! ! Added a -motdFileName server option. This option specifies which ! file to use for the MOTD which is displayed when clients join. ! Its default value is determined at compile time, or gotten from ! the environment variable XPILOTSERVERMOTD. And Guido and me worked on the asteroids to improve their breaking. Hmm, I forgot to mention the bugfix for cannons using items which could crash the server. Paul should be happy that the -motd option has reappeared... ;-) Bert |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-05-22 21:07:16
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On special request by Guido Koopman I've made a new alpha release available for ftp: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/test/alpha/xpilot-4.4.0alpha3.tar.gz Of course if you use the CVS facilities at sourceforge it is more convenient to do "cvs update" instead. See http://xpilotgame.sourceforge.net/. Here's a small list of the most important visible changes: ! Sometimes when a client was slow to join in an almost full game a robot ! could be started which would cause the client login process to fail. ! This has now been fixed. ! ! Guido submitted a new patch to let asteroids collide with many objects: ! Improved asteroid - object collisions. Asteroids now collide ! with wreckage, debris and sparks from players or cannons; no ! longer collide twice with other asteroids; trigger mines and ! torpedoes instead of hitting them. Also, different objects ! do different amounts of damage to asteroid. Players and ! asteroids bounce elastically. ! ! New algorithms have been implemented in the XPilot server which speed up ! the handling of objects. This will especially be noticable on servers ! with more players, or servers with lots of robots and objects. These ! servers will see reduced CPU usage, which benefits network I/O processing. ! A client visible feature related to these improvements is that packets ! received will hardly ever be larger than one kilobyte. What happens ! when a player is near a very large number of objects is that at most ! the 500 objects closest to the player are transmitted over the network. Quite some of the server internals have changed. Much of this won't be noticable by clients except hopefully for the speedups. To see the effects of the algorithms I have uploaded an XPilot recording as: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/test/alpha/2nukes.xpr.gz This recording makes some of the new server internals visible by showing how nuke explosions are handled. What you will see is that when the nukes explode the objects which are farther away from the player are not shown anymore. Also a robot dies of cluster shots which you can't see. In previous versions when nukes exploded my client would experience delay in the updating of frames. This has been improved by 4.4.0alpha3. The reason why we don't move to beta status is that I feel that the asteroids need to be improved. They should have proper wall collision handling with the circumference of their shape. And the breaking of asteroids after a shot is also not always correct. Bert |
From: <xpi...@li...> - 2001-05-12 19:11:21
|
I've made a 4.4.0 alpha release for those who like to play with the latest source. It contains patches by Zemyla and Guido, and some maintenance work by us. Nothing really breathtaking. We'll keep this for one or more weeks, and either add more new code, or move it to beta. Depending on your feedback. You can get it from: ftp://ftp.xpilot.org/pub/test/alpha/xpilot-4.4.0alpha.tar.gz (Yes you can't pwd or list test, but try again in alpha.) Have fun, Bert |