The Ur-Quan Masters v0.5.0 release(Sunday, Feb 2 2006)
NEW FEATURES
- The Starmap is searchable! Type / then the beginning of the
constellation name, and you can tab through all possible
completions.
- New 'hq' scaler, based on Maxim Stepin's "HQ2X" scaler. See
www.hiend3d.com/hq2x.html for more details.
- Scalers can use MMX/SSE/3DNow! instructions for significant speed
improvements. The "Processor pack" is necessary for compilation of
same on VC6.
- Imported DOS versions of many graphics; these have richer palettes
and so generally look better
- There's a proper credit roll at the end of the game now.
- Superior Planet handling: topographical maps scaled far more
precisely; optional 3DO-style throbbing slave shield; planets are
finally rotating spheres instead of spotlit cylinders or rectangles.
The old PC-style "Entering Planetary Orbit..." screen is back.
- Setup Menu far more complete and easy to use, and selections made in
the Setup Menu will actually persist when you restart the program
- Added support for the Tremor Ogg Vorbis decoder (avoids floating point
math)
- Home, End and BackSpace keys work as you'd expect in text input.
- Most of the game works with Unicode properly now, and so, with proper
font characters installed, will work with non-Latin alphabets. (On
Windows, Unicode input requires a very recent version of SDL.)
- Text may be input with the joystick again, as on the 3DO. The
available characters are stored in content/lbm/joyalpha.txt.
- The intro now plays only when a new game is started.
- Color depth is now determined entirely automatically.
BUGFIXES
- Only SELECT and CANCEL trigger the fade-to-black at the end of a
Super Melee, solving the issue of invisible "Really Quit?" menus for
Super Melee. The "quit during fades" problem in general is still
extant.
- Many dialog, and comm animation, and general graphical fixes
- Keypress status is not reset when entering battle mode, so (for
instance) Melnorme ships can continue to charge a shot across
battles.
- The Melnorme would occasionally strip off Plot Points as part of a
fuel deal. No longer.
- Bugs in the original code prevented certain ships from properly
spawning in "uncontrolled" space. The "wilds" are now a bit wilder,
as apparently originally intended.
- Venus's atmospheric density was incorrectly corrected in the 3DO
version. It's been correctly corrected now.
- Scheduled plot events work properly, even when the game suddenly
skips ahead in time.
- Fixed version checking in unix build scripts. SDL 1.2.10 is now
recognised as newer than 1.2.9.
- Spliced communications can be safely skipped past now.
- Fixed fast escape weirdness (bug #619)
- Threading system no longer assumes that there is no thread 0; this
permits compilation on AmigaOS.
- Relative paths and fallback paths work properly now.
- Scalers now use surface pitch instead of image width - this is
reported to solve many strange display problems in non-OpenGL mode
on Macs
- Ending sequences may now be safely paused.
INTERNAL CHANGES
- Added the rest of devel/ and users/ documentation into MSVC .dsp
files.
- Control scheme upgraded. Old versions of keys.cfg will no longer
work.
- PNG transparency info (tRNS chunk) is now set properly, based on
info in the .ani files.
- Paletted images should render much faster now, and collisions
between mods are less likely.
- New font engine: fonts are loaded and treated as alpha-channel-only
images, with font effects handled as backing images.
- Melee works properly with alpha-channel graphics new, even when
mipmapped.
- Lander report drawing handled more sensibly now
- Binary resource indexes have been replaced with textual ones.
- All spritework is done internally in 32BPP.
- Removed MikMod i/o hacks.
- The temp files for representing star and group data are now kept in
memory instead.
- Separate config_win.h file for build.sh builds on Windows
- Lowered some animation rates to reasonable levels, lowering CPU
usage.
- Changed comm subtitle caching scheme. Should kill the "blue comm
screen" problem forever.
- Refactored setup menu code to use generic widgets.
- Cleaner build output. Set '$MAKE_VERBOSE' to 1 for old output.
- Improved dependency tracking for unix build system. "./build.sh uqm
depend" is now only needed for checking for new source files.
