There have been several changes/fixes made to the Empire3 code in the new Empire4 Server. This outlines the various changes and how they will affect you, the player. These were coded as the Wolfpack project, and bug-reports should be sent to <wolfpack@wolfpackempire.com>.
Changes to Empire 4.3.29 - Fri Jan 20 19:20:20 UTC 2012
* drop and fly from carrier could fail to load last civilian or
military.
* Telegram and announcement changes:
- wire no longer loops to show announcements that arrived while
waiting for the player to confirm deletion.
- At most five seconds worth of messages are now squashed together
into one. Before, only the time between adjacent telegrams was
limited, not the total time.
- When telegrams arrived while read was waiting for the player to
confirm deletion, and we then showed them, we nevertheless
claimed "you have new telegrams" before the next command prompt.
Only with toggle inform off. Known bug since Empire 2.
- Fix read not to clobber asynchronous notification of telegrams
arriving while waiting for the player to confirm deletion.
- Fix wire not to reset number of pending telegrams with toggle
inform on. Broken when Empire 2 introduced toggle inform.
- The number of pending announcements was off when announcements
were squashed together.
- More careful error handling and logging.
* Ensure all of an update's output goes into a single production
report:
- Avoid splitting it up when the update is slow. Empire 2 already
did that for the number of pending telegrams, but not for read.
- Don't turn parts of it into BULLETINs. Autonav and sail could do
that since Empire 2.
* files now creates POGO with user interface flags beep, coastwatch,
sonar and techlists set, for consistency with add.
* Change newcap back to not wiping the country (it wiped since
4.3.12). Additionally, leave levels and telegrams alone.
* Changes to deity command add:
- Require confirmation for unadvisable actions.
- Refuse to touch a country while it's being played.
- Don't crash on negative country number.
- Create deities with money, just like files creates POGO.
- Always reset the country completely, not just when adding a
player or a visitor.
- Rename argument "new" to "player". Keep recognizing "new" for
now, but deprecate it.
- Drop argument "active". If you really want to create a player
country without a capital, add the player country normally, then
activate it with edit instead of newcap.
- Drop the obscure sector check and wipe option. If you really
need to wipe out a country, there's much more to wipe than just
sectors.
- Drop the undocumented land unit destruction feature.
* Permit no-op country name change again. Accidentally outlawed in
4.3.20.
* Plug a few minor memory and file descriptor leaks.
* Fix use-after-free when plane gets shot down or aborted in
dogfight. Broken in 4.3.27.
* Code cleanup.
* Info page and manual page fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.3.28 - Sat Jul 16 11:30:53 UTC 2011
* Don't let POGO (#0) navigate dead ships, and march dead land units.
The ghosts even got sighted and interdicted, and could hit mines.
Has always been that way.
* llook can't see land units and planes loaded on land units anymore.
* Fix board to ignore land units loaded on land units when testing
whether a sector can board. Broken in 4.0.17.
* Fix transport to reject planes loaded on land units. The plane
remained on its carrier. When the land unit moved, the plane was
teleported right back to it. Broken since Chainsaw 3 added land
units.
* Fix lradar not to let land units loaded on land units use radar.
Broken since 4.0.0 added trains.
* Fix strength to ignore land units loaded on land units. Broken in
4.2.0.
* Fix navigate and march to find paths longer than a few sectors
again (7 for 64 bit hosts, 3 for 32 bit hosts). Broken in 4.3.27.
* march sub-command 'i' now shows number of military and land units
loaded.
* New server option -F to force start even when state looks bad.
Risks crashes and further corruption, but gives deities a chance to
fix up a bad game state with edit commands and such.
* empdump -x no longer refuses to export game state that looks bad.
Gives deities another tool to fix up a bad game state.
* Land units loaded on land units fight che again, as they used to
before 4.3.26.
* When a land unit dies fighting che, land units loaded on it get
unloaded, and planes loaded on it die. Before, the update left
them stuck on their dead carrier. Impact like the next item.
Abusable. Broken since Chainsaw 3 added land units.
* The update no longer destroys ships, planes and land units for lack
of maintenance. Before, it left any embarked planes, land units
and nukes on their dead carrier. In this state, units behaved as
if their carrier was still alive, with additional protection from
the fact that a dead carrier can't be damaged or boarded. If
another unit with the same number got built, it picked up the stuck
cargo. The cargo got teleported to its new carrier when the
carrier moved. Abusable, but it involves going broke, so it's
rarely practical. Slightly more practical before 4.3.6 removed
budget priorities. Broken for ships and land units when Empire 2
added their maintenance cost, and for planes when v4.3.3 replaced
nuclear stockpiles by nuke units.
* Fix bogus internal error triggered by navigate and march
sub-commands 'r', 'l' and 's'. Broken in 4.3.27.
* Fix client not to reject redirections and execute containing
non-ASCII characters with a bogus scary warning when using UTF-8.
* Fix execute not to mangle non-ASCII characters in the argument when
prompting for it while login option utf-8 is on.
* Fix handling of non-ASCII and control characters in batch files.
* Conversion from UTF-8 to ASCII ate the character following a
replaced non-ASCII character. Buffer overrun possible if the
terminating zero gets eaten. Could happen in players, read, flash,
wall, and execute.
* Fix handling of empty commands:
- Time used was not updated.
- Mortal player wasn't logged off for game hours, game down, and
time limit.
- Notifications were delayed: going broke, becoming solvent, new
telegrams (toggle inform off only), new announcements, capital
lost.
* Minor tweaks to nightly build.
* Server's and empdump's sanity checking of configuration and game
state is now more rigorous.
* Deity xdump no longer dumps unused countries' realms.
* Remove option LANDSPIES. Deities can customize the land table to
disable spy units.
* Remove option TRADESHIPS. Deities can customize the ship table to
enable trade ships.
* Configuration table changes (builtin and custom):
- Rows must be in ascending uid order.
- Omitting rows in tables item, sect-chr and infrastructure is no
longer permitted.
- Custom tables now replace the builtin table completely. Before,
omitted rows defaulted to the builtin version, except at the end
of a table. Commenting out unwanted stuff just works now.
- Permit custom table product having fewer than 14 entries.
- Reject custom tables where customization has no effect (updates,
table, meta, all symbol tables) or where it's unsafe (news-chr).
- Input is checked more rigorously.
* empdump -i fixes:
- Don't touch plane file when import fails.
- Refuse import of incorrectly sized table instead of silently
creating one the server will reject.
- Replace old state completely. Before, omitted rows in the dump
defaulted to the old state, except at the end of a table.
- Input is checked more rigorously.
* Fix xdump updates not to dump bogus extra updates.
* Fix use-after-free when a plane got shot down or aborted by flak.
Broken in 4.3.27.
* Friendlier diagnostics in the build command.
* Fix build to set nuke's tech exactly like for ships, planes and
land units. It's not currently used for anything.
* Research required for nukes was slightly off sometimes due to
incorrect rounding.
* Bridge building required 0.005 tech less than advertised, fix.
* "show nuke" now obeys toggle techlists.
* Fix "show land s" to show columns xpl and lnd again. Broken in
4.3.15.
* Code refactoring and cleanup.
* Documentation on custom tables, xdump updated.
* Info file fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.3.27 - Sun Apr 17 11:36:29 UTC 2011
* License upgrade to GPL version 3 or later.
* Fix buy not to wipe out concurrent updates. Can be abused to
duplicate commodities.
* Don't let fighters, SAMs and ABMs intercept while on trading block.
* Don't let missiles interdict ships or land units while on trading
block.
* Fix client to log long input lines untruncated.
* Fix client crash for long input lines.
* info subject pages now mark unusually long pages with a !.
* The edit command keys deprecated in 4.3.15, 4.3.17 and 4.3.20 are
now gone.
* Fix give, setsector and setres not to wipe out concurrent updates.
* Fix explore, move, test, transport not to ignore spaces in path
arguments. Broken in 4.3.7.
* Improvements to map drawing commands:
- Don't fail silently when asked to draw a map around an invalid
unit, explain the problem.
- Deprecate bmap flag "r". Use (a prefix of) "revert" instead.
- bmap flags following "t" are no longer ignored. However, info
pages previously documented an argument "true" in addition to
flag "t". To keep that working, keep ignoring flags following
"t" when they're bad. But deprecate that usage.
- Reverting the bmap no longer draws a map.
- Bad conditionals could make the commands misinterpret their first
argument.
- The commands now fail when they reject their second argument.
* The xdump syntax deprecated in 4.3.12 is now gone.
* Fix satellite to fail on bad conditionals instead of ignoring them.
* Journal improvements:
- Optional logging of output.
- Long lines are no longer truncated.
- Login phase input is now logged, too.
- Commands are now logged. Allows making sense of input without
context.
* Option BRIDGETOWERS is now disabled by default.
* Bridge towers now take 300 hcms to build, down from 400.
* Fix stop orders to expire even when the country is broke. Broken
in 4.3.8.
* Fix march and navigate not to advise on "legal directions" when
path finding fails.
* New path finder:
- Much faster, especially for distribution, i.e. where it matters
most. Speedups in excess of 30x have been observed for updates
taken from real games.
- Old land path finder leaked memory occasionally.
- Old land path finder overran buffers for very long paths. A
malicious player can arrange sufficiently long paths, but it
takes a lot of land. Distribution, the distribute command, land
unit reaction, and automatic supply now handle arbitrary long
paths. Commands explore, move, test, transport, march, navigate
and path now handle paths up to 1023 characters. Command
bestpath shows paths longer than 1023 characters with the tail
replaced by "...".
- Old sea and air path finder treated destinations as unreachable
when the best path was longer than 99 characters. Command sorder
now handles arbitrary long paths. Commands bomb, drop, fly,
paradrop, recon, sweep and sail now handle paths up to 1023
characters. Autonav considers up to 1023 characters at the
update. Planes can fly missions up to 1023 sectors from their
base.
* Automatic supply charged mobility for the path back to the source
instead forward to the sink.
* Make bestpath work for deities in foreign land.
* More robust savecore example script.
* Fix buffer overruns in the lookout, spy, map and nmap commands when
WORLD_X * WORLD_Y is not a multiple of 16.
* The path command's maps weren't always fitted to the path
correctly. Broken in 4.3.17.
* Land units no longer hit allied mines.
* Change sharebmap with yourself to do nothing instead of telling you
you're not friendly to yourself.
* You can now flash yourself. Enjoy!
* A race condition could make the flash command claim an ally was not
logged on when he was. Hard to trigger outside the lab.
* The flash command no longer prints "Flash sent" for deities. It's
annoying. It never did that for mortals.
* Plug memory leaks in mission code on a number of conditions:
- Submarines moving where own planes would interdict hostile
submarines
- Ground combat where countries hostile to one of the parties would
support if relations were right (allied to one party, at war with
the other)
- Ships or land units moving within hostile missile mission op
areas
- Any player action within marine missile mission op areas that
could trigger the missile owners' missions.
* Attack fixes:
- When you ordered a sector to attack with military, but lost the
sector before the attack was executed, and the new owner was
allied to you, the server got confused: it let the military
attack even though they were already dead, but not occupy.
- When you ordered a land unit to attack from an allied sector, and
the sector got lost before the attack was executed, the server
reported things as if you had owned the sector yourself. The
land unit still attacked when the new owner was also allied to
you. No more.
- When a land unit attacked out of an allied sector, its mobility
cost was computed as if the ally owned the land unit. Attacking
sectors old-owned by that ally was too cheap, and taking back
one's own was too expensive.
* Fix trade ships to pay off in own harbor. Broken in 4.3.17.
* Remove option SLOW_WAR. It hasn't been enabled in a public game
for years, and the code implementing it was buggy.
* Fix a bug in sail that limited the sail path to 27 instead of the
intended 28 characters.
* Fix race condition in transmission of flash and telegram
information messages that could double output and possibly crash
the server.
* Planes get to sweep and sonar only after flak and interception.
* Don't limit the radar command's range to fit its output into a
world map without clipping. The limiting goes back to Chainsaw 2.
* Make flak vs. pinpoint bombing consistent with ordinary flak:
- 4.3.6 reduced the plane abort chance on damage, but missed the
additional flak vs. pinpoint bombing. Fix that.
- Fix to charge mobility appropriate for damage.
* Prettier flak damage reporting.
* Fix bugs that could cause bmap updates from recon and satellite to
be lost.
* Fix lookout to properly report sector ownership to deities.
* Suppress bogus messages deities with non-zero country number got
when attempting to navigate foreign ships or march foreign land
units. Such deity use hasn't worked since Empire 2.
* Deities can no longer fly foreign planes. It didn't fully work
since Chainsaw 3, and can trigger internal errors since 4.3.11.
* Don't split lines over several bulletins. The read command
normally merges these bulletins, but if they are more than five
seconds apart (clock jumped somehow), we get a bulletin header in
the middle of a line. Broken since Empire 2.
* Don't beep when plane, land unit or nuke die on a collapsing
bridge. Not nice, because it could beep many times, and could put
beeps in bulletins. Beeping was added in 4.0.18.
* Minor improvements to nuclear damage reporting.
* When a deity dropped a foreign nuke, parts of the output went to
the owner of the nuke instead of the deity.
* When a player triggered a foreign missile launch (mission or
interception), and the missile exploded on launch, part of the
report went to the player instead of the missile owner. This
disclosed the missile owner's origin. Broken in Empire 2.
* When autonav reported to a ship owner that it can't load or unload
foreign civilians, it used the sector owner's coordinate system.
This disclosed the sector owner's origin. Abusable.
* When nuclear damage bounced off a sanctuary, the bulletin to the
sanctuary owner used the attacker's coordinate system. This
disclosed the attacker's origin.
* When a deity used sweep, lmine, sail or sabotage with a foreign
plane, land unit or ship, its location was reported in the foreign
coordinate system.
* When a deity asked for a foreign nation report, the capital
location was reported in the foreign coordinate system.
* Code refactoring and cleanup.
* Info file improvements.
Changes to Empire 4.3.26 - Mon May 24 16:37:40 UTC 2010
* Land units loaded on ships or land units can no longer fight che.
* When foreign land units were present, a che revolt could damage
them instead of the defending land units. This could let defenders
survive the revolt. They were captured or blown up if che took
over the sector.
* Fix che revolt to damage only land units that actually fight
* Fix loading x-light missiles on ships without capability plane.
These ships could only use their x-light slots for x-light planes,
not their plane slots. Broken in 4.3.17.
* Update bmap when nuclear detonation makes wasteland.
* Fix fly and drop to report discarded cargo items correctly.
* New client option -s to specify server host and port.
* Hitting landmines could crash the server. When not, the damage
reduction for capability engineer was applied unpredictably.
Broken in 4.3.24.
* Fix retreat and lretreat condition 'c'. Broken in 4.3.16.
* coastwatch and skywatch could see too far. Up to one sector for
practical radar ranges.
* skywatch now reports satellite uids. The uid is required for
launching a-sats since 4.3.23.
* Fix client not to send an empty line of input before aborting the
command on player interrupt (normally ^C).
* Fix sabotage not to kill the spy every time. Broken in 4.3.17.
* Code cleanup.
* Info page fixes, manual page improvements.
Changes to Empire 4.3.25 - Sun Mar 21 08:27:37 UTC 2010
* Hitting seamines could crash the server. When not, the damage
reduction for capability sweep was applied unpredictably. Broken
in 4.3.24.
* When an interdiction did damage other than collateral damage, the
planes that intercepted it from interdicted carriers used no
petrol. 4.3.24 fixed only the "no damage" case.
* Ship anti-missile defense failed to charge shells when the ship was
interdicted. The fix in 4.3.24 covered only launch.
* Fix a bug in navigate and march that let players lay mines free of
charge. Also fix them not to prompt for the number of mines.
* Missile exploding on launch could not damage its base if it was
armed with a nuke. Broken in 4.3.23.
* When a torpedo attack triggered a return torpedo, the news reported
it to be fired by the attacker instead of the defender.
* Interdiction attacked submarines with surface-only weapons. Broken
in 4.3.24.
* Fix a bug in lradar, path, radar, route, satellite, sect and survey
that could leak maps to other players. Broken in 4.2.0. Fixed in
4.2.8 for bmap, lbmap, lmap, map, nmap, pbmap, pmap, sbmap and smap
only.
* files could clobber the game when reading confirmation fails.
* fairland no longer rejects small worlds without trying.
Changes to Empire 4.3.24 - Tue Jan 26 21:29:14 UTC 2010
* The client sometimes hung under Windows when the server closed the
connection. Broken in 4.3.23.
* Fix navigate and march not to crash the server when a path argument
consists of a valid path plus whitespace. Broken in 4.3.7.
* When a client sent a blank line in the login phase, the server
crashed on some systems.
* Fix crash bug in bomb, drop, fly, paradrop, recon and sail. Broken
in 4.3.16.
* Fix bogus internal error on escort, recon, and satellite launch.
Mostly harmless, as error recovery worked fine. Broken in 4.3.23.
* Stop ship and land unit movement on interdiction even when it does
no damage.
* When an interdiction did no or only collateral damage, the planes
that intercepted it from interdicted carriers used no petrol, and
interdicted land units were immune to collateral damage.
* The limit for the number of sectors, ships, planes, land units,
nukes, and so forth is now large enough not to matter. It used to
be 32768 on common machines. The sector limit was introduced in
4.3.12. World x- and y-size are still limited to 65536 on common
machines.
* News use much less space, and thus I/O. Space was wasted in
4.3.12. Side effects of the change:
- Expiry of old news no longer updates news timestamps. Updating
timestamps was wrong, because it defeated incremental xdump news.
- The empdump utility can no longer update timestamps of imported
news. Unfortunate, as it breaks incremental xdump news.
* New news selector duration, the time span covered by this news item
in seconds.
* ABMs failed to charge supplies when their sector was the
intercepted missile's target. The stock game's ABMs use no
supplies.
* Ship anti-missile defense failed to charge shells when the ship was
the missile's target.
* Code refactoring and cleanup.
Changes to Empire 4.3.23 - Sun Dec 13 16:34:49 UTC 2009
* Fix missile interception not to intercept tactical and marine
missiles attacking missiles or satellites. No such missiles exist
in the stock game. Interception of tactical ABMs could crash the
server. Broken in Empire 2.
* Missiles missing their target do collateral damage again. Was
disabled because of bugs in 4.0.18 for manual launch and in 4.3.16
for automatic launch.
* News reported victim as actor for sub-launched anti-sat and ABM.
* Defense value of missiles vs. ABMs and satellites vs. anti-sats
failed to improve with tech.
* Fix a bug that let missiles interdict ships outside their op area.
This could happen when a group navigating together was partly
inside the op area.
* Only bomb strategic and launch at sector can use nukes. Before,
they could also be used by missions, bomb pinpoint, and launch at
ships, but there were several bugs and inconsistencies, and the
code was messy. The arm command now rejects marine missiles in
addition to satellites, ABMs and SAMs, and clears the mission. The
mission command now rejects planes armed with nukes.
* Missiles exploding on launch pad no longer set off their nukes.
* The launch command now more accurately reports why a missile can't
be equipped. It no longer draws supplies automatically.
* Manually launched anti-sat now always kills when it hits, for
consistency with automatically launched ones.
* Don't permit nukes on satellites, ABMs and SAMs. Nukes on
satellites could be armed and disarmed even in orbit. Nukes on
ABMs and SAMs were lost without effect when their missile
intercepted. The stock game is not affected, because its
satellites, ABMs and SAMs all have zero load.
* Remove obsolete plane capabilities stealth and half-stealth. Not
used by the stock game.
* Penalize fighter combat value for any load, not just bombs. The
stock game's fighters can't carry anything but bombs.
* Make bomb work for non-tactical cargo bomber. No such planes exist
in the stock game.
* Revised cargo plane rules: a cargo flight can be either an airlift
or an airdrop now. Airlifts carry more cargo than airdrops. A
cargo drop or paradrop with a non-VTOL plane is an airdrop.
Anything else is an airlift. This makes paradrop loads consistent
with drop loads. Paradrop with VTOL transports now carries twice
the punch, and drop with non-VTOL transports hauls less than fly.
In particular, the stock game's tr can't drop guns anymore.
* Enforce plane selection rules more tightly:
- bomb command can select only planes with capability bomber or
tactical. Before, other planes with non-zero load flew along,
but their bombs were silently lost.
- sweep command can select only planes with capability sweep.
Before, other planes performed ordinary reconnaissance instead.
- drop command can select only planes with capability cargo.
Before, other planes flew along but dropped nothing.
* Fix paradrop to fail without destroying the paratroopers when the
player owns the target sector.
* Launching an anti-sat now takes the target plane as argument.
Before, it took a sector argument, and targeted the lowest-numbered
satellite there. Rather inconvenient when your own satellite masks
one of the enemy's.
* Remove option PINPOINTMISSILE. Deities can customize the plane
table to disable marine missiles.
* Ridiculously impotent nukes could do unpredictable interdiction
damage. No such nukes exist in the stock game.
* The production command could mispredict resource-depleting level
production. No such products exist in the stock game. In fact,
they'd be highly unusual.
* The update could crash or corrupt the game when a (misconfigured)
product depleted resource "none".
* Revamp the Windows port based on ideas stolen from Gnulib. Share
the code between server and client.
* Don't log out player when update aborts a command under Windows.
Broken in 4.3.20, and not fully fixed in 4.3.21.
* Fix accepting connections from hosts with "long" IPv6 address. The
internal buffer had insufficient space.
* Delay shutdown up to 3s to let player output buffers drain.
* Fix a race between main thread and player threads, which could
theoretically make the server crash on start.
* Clean up synchronization between commands, update and shutdown, and
when player threads sleep on I/O.
* Clean up the cruft that has accumulated in and behind the empio
interface, and, to a lesser degree, the empthread interface.
* Fix time difference underflows in pthread and Windows code. They
could potentially cause hangs, although none have been observed.
* Make budget's "Sector building" line look better.
* Make sector maintenance cost configurable. New sect-chr selector
maint. Capitals now pay maintenance regardless of efficiency.
* Overhaul show sect b.
* Fix mine production resource limit for sector peffic != 100. This
affects mountains in the stock game, but only with an impractically
large number of ETUs per update.
* Code refactoring and cleanup.
* Info file fixes and improvements.
Changes to Empire 4.3.22 - Sat Apr 25 11:56:29 UTC 2009
* Fix a Windows client bug that could lead to hangs, at least with
some versions of the C run-time. Broken in 4.3.11.
* Allow building without curses terminfo. Highlighting in the client
doesn't work then.
* Really fix bomb not to wipe out plane updates made while it asked
for pinpoint targets. The fix in 4.3.21 didn't cover escorts.
* Fix tend land not to wipe out concurrent updates.
* Automatic supply fixes:
- Ships with just two shells could fire a torpedo to return fire or
interdict.
- Ships with just one shell could use their anti-missile defense.
- Land units were considered in supply even when they had not quite
enough supplies. Such land units could defend without penalty,
attack and react.
Broken in 4.3.20.
* Fix update to take dead units off carriers.
* Standalone client distribution built empire instead of empire.exe
for Windows. Broken in 4.3.0.
* Fix client to abort script execution on SIGINT.
* Fix Windows client not to hang on EOF on standard input when that
is a tty.
* Fix a client bug that could make it hang when EOF on standard input
follows an execute command closely.
* Seamines under bridge spans were disabled a long time ago, in
Empire 2. The drop command refuses to mine there. Change mine
command to do so as well.
* Seamines under bridge spans were mistaken for landmines by ground
combat, land units retreating from bombs, and non-land unit ground
movement.
* When a bridge tower collapsed, its landmines magically became
seamines.
* Don't log out player when he interrupts a command. Broken in
4.3.19.
* Code cleanup and portability improvements.
* Info file and documentation fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.3.21 - Mon Mar 9 21:34:52 UTC 2009
* Fix swapsector not to wipe out concurrent changes to the swapped
sectors.
* Fix a bug in crash dumping that could mess up the journal and, at
least in theory, mess up commands info, read, turn, and wire;
announcement expiry, and reading of econfig and schedule.
* Fix bomb not to wipe out plane updates made while it asked for
pinpoint targets.
* When bombing ships with a force containing both planes with and
without capability ASW, the bomb command could fail to report
presence of submarines, and could refuse to bomb ships when there
were only submarines.
* Leaving land units behind after a victorious attack could in some
cases wipe out changes made to them since the victory.
* The timestamp selectors added to commodity, load and trade in
4.3.12 could lead to spurious command failures. None have been
observed in the wild.
* Don't log out player when update aborts a command. Broken in
4.3.20.
* Code refactoring and cleanup.
Changes to Empire 4.3.20 - Fri Feb 20 18:14:20 UTC 2009
* Option LOANS is now disabled by default.
* Option RAILWAYS is now enabled by default.
* Many fixes to automatic supply:
- Planes flying interception or support missions, abms intercepting
ballistic missiles, and the launch command for missiles and
anti-sats could all supply more shells than necessary, lose
shells, or conjure them up.
- Ships shooting down marine missiles could supply more shells than
necessary, or lose shells.
- Supply ships could conjure up shells when firing guns using
multiple shells, or launching torpedoes, or dropping depth
charges, or shooting down marine missiles. No supply ships
capable of doing that exist in the stock game.
- Supply engineers could conjure up shells when laying mines. They
don't exist in the stock game.
- load, lload and supply could supply land units with enough food
from the sector containing them to starve the sector.
- Sectors were charged too much mobility for moving supplies
sometimes.
- Land units serving as supply source no longer draw supplies
recursively, because the bugs there are too hard to fix to be
worth it.
- Defending and reacting units only checked whether they could draw
supplies, but didn't actually draw them.
- load, lload, supply, assault and board no longer supply land
units from ships carrying them. This feature, added in 4.0.14,
was inconsistent with other ways to supply.
- Don't use automatic supply to avoid starvation at the update. It
adds complexity to the update. How much good it does to players
is highly doubtful; certainly nobody can rely on it. It isn't
covered by the starvation command. Ships or land units could
steal enough food from their sector to make it starve.
- lmine could only fetch shells for engineers that use ammo. The
stock game's engineers all do.
The changes listed for load and lload are actually lies, because
supply has been disabled there since 4.3.17.
* Don't let an engineer lay mines while it is on a ship or land unit,
or in a foreign sector.
* Sectors and ships no longer need shells to fire flak.
* Use IPv4 and v6 only when suitable interfaces are configured.
* Fix turn off not to fail when the message is empty. Broken in
4.2.20.
* Don't nag the deity about game hours restriction in force all the
time.
* Tell deity when the game is down, just like players. Also make the
information available in xdump, as game selector down.
* Corrupt mailboxes could crash the server.
* Fix reject accept. Broken in 4.3.4.
* If a player was at a prompt when the deity turned the game down, he
was allowed to enter one more command.
* Air defense is no longer separate from interception. Putting a
plane on air defense now merely changes where it intercepts.
Separate air defense added too much pointless complexity. Its
implementation violated design assumptions of the intercept code.
Because of that, the same plane could intercept both an air defense
mission and the planes that triggered it, and the damage it
received in the first interception was wiped out.
* Intercept the same all along the flight path. In each sector, any
country owning the sector, a surface ship or a land unit there gets
to intercept. Before, only the sector owner got to intercept,
except for the assembly point and the target sector. In the target
sector, any country owning surface ships or land units got to
intercept in addition to the sector owner. Thus, a sector owner
with surface ships or land units there got to intercept twice. The
sector owner did not get to intercept at the assembly point,
even when it was the target sector.
* Spotting rule changes:
- Ships and land units now spot overflying planes along all of the
flight path instead of just the target sector, and no longer
report allied planes.
- Planes now spot ships and land units only when flying recon or
sweep, and along all of their flight path instead of just the
target sector. It still takes a spy plane to identify ships and
land units.
- Planes now spot ships and land units in a sector even when all
planes abort there.
- Planes now spot all foreign ships and land units, not just
hostile ones.
* Fix SAM interception for intercepts other than the first.
* Fix air defense and flak over sectors allied to the planes. Air
defense was broken in Empire 2. Flak was broken in 4.2.8.
* Establishing contact by spotting planes from sectors didn't work.
* Fix reconnaissance patrols to use sonar when any capable plane is
present. Before, all planes had to be capable.
* Fix recon and sweep not to spy after all spy planes are gone.
* Fix a bug that made multiple clients running on the same Windows
machine interfere with each other. Broken in 4.3.11.
* Fix enforcing game hours for players already logged in. Broken in
4.3.19.
* Fix distribution not to abandon a distribution center by exporting
the last military.
* Many fixes to load, unload, lload and lunload:
- Now usable for deities.
- Plug loopholes that let you steal foreign commodities by making
load/lload unload and unload/lunload load through use of negative
amount arguments.
- Fix not to let you give away civilians.
- You can't use lload in foreign sectors or lunload with foreign
land units anymore. Loading stuff in foreign sectors was
prohibited already for ships.
- lload and lunload now work on foreign land units only when
they're explicitly named by uid. This matches behavior of load
and unload.
- Fix to test relations of foreign object's owner to player instead
of the other way round.
* Make sure land units with maximum mobility can attack mountains.
* Fix land unit attack mobility cost. Broken in 4.3.6.
* Conditions comparing string-valued selectors like wing to unquoted
values are now interpreted more smartly. Before, unquoted strings
were prone to be interpreted as selector names even when that made
no sense. You still have to disambiguate truly ambiguous cases
like w=w for planes, e.g. as wing=w or w='w'.
* Fix reporting of shot spies in news. Broken in 4.3.16.
* Remove econfig key mission_mob_cost. Questionable feature, and
hasn't been used in a long time.
* Reserve and escort missions now have an op-area, like all the other
missions.
* Land units now react only when on a reserve mission. The lrange
command is gone. The edit command still accepts and ignores the
land unit key 'P' for compatibility, but it is deprecated.
* Fix a bug that could mess up mission op-area when the range of
ship, plane or land unit on the mission decreases, e.g. through the
range command.
* Reserve missions no longer give a bonus to reaction range.
* Info file fixes.
* Code refactoring and cleanup.
Changes to Empire 4.3.19 - Sun Dec 7 23:15:34 UTC 2008
* LWP doesn't work with Darwin due to OS bugs, avoid it for now.
* Don't let ships double-retreat first on 'i' (injured) and then on
'h' (helpless) when shelled.
* Fix a bug that suppressed the "sunk!" message. Broken in 4.3.17.
* Log out player when maximum time per day is exceeded. Before, he
could remain logged in with visitor privileges only, but once
logged out could not log back in.
* If a player was at a prompt when either game hours restriction
started or maximum time per day was exceeded, he was allowed to
enter one more command.
* Deitying a capital failed to charge money and report news. Broken
in 4.3.17.
* Overhaul accounting of play time, fixing minor inaccuracies.
* Fix parsing of 24:00 in econfig key game_hours and
update_demandtimes.
* New option RAILWAYS.
* Che ages just like military reserves (1% per 24 ETUs).
* Permit ships to assault the sector they're in.
* Sectors eating less than one unit of food don't make one unit of
food for free anymore. They still can't starve.
* New concept sector terrain. Deities can use it to make sectors
other than wilderness redesignatable. See sect.config for more
info.
* Represent play time in seconds rather than minutes. This affects
xdump: nat selector minused (counting minutes) is replaced by
timeused (counting seconds).
* Improved nightly build, with additional tests.
Changes to Empire 4.3.18 - Sat Oct 18 18:39:17 UTC 2008
* Fix building of planes, land units and nukes with uids that have
never been used before. This could crash the server on some
systems in certain states. Broken in 4.3.17.
* Improved nightly build, with restructured and extended tests.
Changes to Empire 4.3.17 - Sat Sep 20 16:07:44 UTC 2008
* Fix standalone client build for Windows. Broken in 4.3.11.
* Disable automatic supply of land units on load for now, it's
broken, and can be abused to duplicate supplies.
* Make trade show exactly what's on sale, remove option SHOWPLANE.
* Stop ships, planes, land units and nukes on violent takeover, just
like sectors.
* Wipe orders when ships, planes, land units and nukes are taken over
violently or given away peacefully. Fleet, wing, army and mission
were already cleared in many, but not all cases. Other orders were
never cleared: mission op-areas (visible in xdump), ship autonav
orders, ship sail path (including ship to follow and mobility
quota), land unit retreat orders, plane range limit, and land unit
retreat percentage.
* Fix takeover of stuff by attack, assault, board, lboard, paradrop
and pboard:
- Corrupt land unit file could lead to infinite recursion.
- Take over nuke armed on plane along with the plane. Broken in
4.3.3.
- Taking over land units with negative mobility increased mobility
to zero. Ditto for planes embarked on ships or land units.
* Fix a bug that made set and xdump not recognize unused trade lots
as such.
* Fix giving away stuff by trading it:
- When an armed nuke is sold separately from its plane, take it off
the plane. You couldn't do that before 4.3.3.
- Give away nuke armed on sold plane along with the plane. Broken
in 4.3.3.
- Don't zero mobility of planes and land units on sold ships.
* Fix giving away stuff by unloading from its carrier: Give away any
nukes armed on planes (broken in 4.3.3) and land units loaded on
land units. The latter can't happen in the stock game.
* Fix giving away stuff by scrapping or scuttling its carrier:
- Fix up output.
- Disarm the nuke from a plane instead of destroying it.
- Give away any loaded land units and planes, too.
* Tradeship fixes:
- Fix scuttle to ask for confirmation when scuttling a tradeship in
an unsuitable sector even when the tradeship is pirated. Broken
in 4.2.13.
- Fix scuttle to require 2% harbor efficiency for a trade ship to
pay. Also require at least friendly relations.
- Make autonav refuse scuttle orders in unsuitable sectors.
* Clean up rules on where you can scrap stuff:
- Ships in own or friendly, efficient harbors (relations used not
to matter, contrary to info)
- Planes in own or allied, efficient airfields (friendly used to
work as well, contrary to info)
- Land units in any own or allied sector (relations used not to
matter, and you couldn't scrap them on ships)
Also tell player why something can't be scrapped instead of
ignoring it silently.
* Rewrite the broken code to move land units, planes and nukes along
with their carrier. The old code was a hack that didn't update
timestamps (so incremental dumps didn't pick up the movement), and
it didn't cover all uses. The update, in particular, was prone to
see cargo in old locations, which could screw up repairs.
* Expire lost items at the update instead of continuously.
* Replace econfig key lost_items_timeout by lost_keep_hours.
* Minor Windows threading fixes.
* Journal now uses human-readable names to identify threads.
* Ship and land unit load counters are no longer stored in game
state, because they duplicate information already there. Same for
the type of nuke loaded on a plane. Remove field nuketype from
xdump plane. Clients can simply find the plane's nuke instead.
The edit command still accepts and ignores the plane key 'n' for
compatibility, but it is deprecated.
* Ship and land unit load counts as displayed by ship, sdump, land,
ldump, ship selectors nplane, nxlight, nchoppers, nland, and land
selectors nxlight, nland are now reliable. They used to get out of
sync at times.
* Ship load counts now reflect what is loaded, not how it is stored.
For instance, if a light carrier, capable of carrying 4 x-lights
and 20 light planes carries nothing but 5 sams, we now have
nxlight=5, nplane=0 instead of nxlight=4, nplane=1.
* New cargo lists data structure to let code find loaded planes, land
units and nukes easily and efficiently.
* Revamped upkeep of lost file. It should be reliable now.
* Disable the ill-advised error recovery on sector access that swept
bugs under the carpet rather than recovering from them.
* Occupied sectors no longer revert to the old owner when all
military and land units go away. This feature was added in
Chainsaw 3. It wasn't integrated properly with the che code
(things went wrong when che killed all defenders, but couldn't
convert the sector due to its loyalty), and combat code (if an
attack killed off all local defenders and got defeated by reacting
units, the sector changed ownership anyway, silently).
* Include destination coordinates in interception and plane mission
messages.
* Client could misdiagnose redirections and executes as unauthorized,
or die outright. Broken in 4.3.11.
* Fix xdump realm to dump player instead of absolute coordinates.
Disclosed the true origin. Broken in 4.3.0.
* Fix spy to reliably avoid spying same sector more than once.
* The map drawing code could smash the heap when the world was
ridiculously small.
* When a satellite's launch trajectory was off, its coordinates could
get screwed up, which made it invisible in skywatch.
* Fix several bugs that made the path command screw up when the path
spans large areas.
* Fix the default size of the map shown by move, test and transport
sub-command M.
* Fix bugs that could make arguments in area or dist syntax miss
ships, planes, land units and nukes at the border of the selected
area, if that area spans the whole world. In sufficiently small
worlds, it could also make radar miss satellites and ships, sonar
miss ships, satellite miss ships and land units, nuclear
detonations miss ships, planes, land units and nukes, automatic
supply miss ship and land unit supply sources, ships and land units
fail to return fire, ships fail to fire support.
* Maps sometimes showed x-coordinates as three lines instead of two
unnecessarily.
* Improved nightly build, tests in particular.
* Code refactoring and cleanup.
Changes to Empire 4.3.16 - Sat Aug 9 15:56:52 UTC 2008
* Production command incorrectly limited the number of graduates,
happy strollers, technological breakthroughs and medical
discoveries produced by a sector to 999. Broken in 4.2.15.
* Fix a bug in improve that could let you spend more money than you
have.
* Fix work command not to spend more mobility than requested, and to
round mobility use randomly instead of down.
* Commands demobilize, convert and work no longer let you spend more
money than you have. Commands demobilize and convert no longer ask
for confirmation before spending more than half your money. Saving
that feature would have been more work than it's worth.
* Remove undocumented key 'd' at bomb ship, plane and land unit
target prompts.
* Fix land unit flak when pin-bombed to match flak when overflown:
proportional to efficiency, and randomly rounded. Was missed in
4.3.6.
* Don't permit bombing of embarked planes and land units.
* Fix capital maintenance to charge at 60% efficiency.
* launch command now requires only 40% plane efficiency, for
consistency with other ways to launch missiles.
* Disable collateral damage when automatically launched missiles miss
their target. Collateral damage was done even when the launch
failed or the missile got intercepted. It's been disabled for
manually launched missiles since 4.0.18, for the same reason.
* Fix a bug that corrupted the lostitems file. Broken in 4.3.12.
* Show command changes:
- Move product information from "show sect c" into new "show
product", and reformat it to be easier to understand.
- New column navigability in "show sect s".
- "show sect s" now shows the packing bonus type instead of
selected packing bonuses. "show item" shows the actual bonuses
for each type.
- "show sect b" now shows the usual values in addition to unusual
ones.
* Fix interdiction to obey op-area for missiles.
* Fix a bug that caused a stale sources.mk to be distributed in the
4.3.14 an 4.3.15 tarballs. The latter does not build out of the
box because of that.
* Don't strip tab characters from quoted command arguments. Broken
in 4.2.21.
* shutdown commands now always take effect immediately. Before, they
could be delayed by up to a minute.
* shutdown could start multiple shutdown threads when you initiated a
shutdown shortly after cancelling one. This screwed up the timing
of the shutdown.
* Deity syntax of zdone changed, and is now documented in info.
* The threshold command could be tricked into accepting negative
thresholds.
* Fix designate to always write updated bmap to disk.
* Fix bomb to fail on empty <pin|strat> argument instead of flying
without bombs.
* Fix a bug in distribute that screwed up the current sector's
distribution center when the command got aborted.
* Commands arm, bomb, deliver, drop, fire, fly, paradrop, recon,
lmine, order, power, range, sail, shutdown, sweep and tend did not
honor command abortion at some prompts.
* Fix a bug in handling of EOF from client that could bite in the
following ways:
- EOF at target prompts for bombing commodities, ships, planes and
land units sent the server into an infinite loop that ate all
memory.
- EOF at sail's path prompt crashed the server.
- EOF at some prompts in deliver, designate, fly, morale, zdone,
attack and assault didn't abort the command.
Broken in 4.3.11.
* Selector terr is now the same as terr0 for mortal players, and
dterr for deities. This matches how the territory command works.
Unfortunately, this required us to rename xdump sect field terr to
terr0. Sorry about that.
* Fix bomb not to let you bomb dead ships and land units.
* Make the retreat command a bit more helpful on retreat conditions,
and make it fail on bad conditions.
* Fix the mapper scripts. Broken in 4.2.0.
* Fix flying commands not to let planes do double duty as escorts.
Broken in 4.3.12.
* When a minesweeper hit a mine after sweeping, the mine wasn't used
up. If it sank the minesweeper, the code accessed freed memory,
which could clobber the ship file or worse. Broken in 4.0.17.
* Don't let non-light units board ships that can't carry them.
* Capitals can now employ up to 1000 civilians instead of 999.
* Spy command changes:
- Spy now requires sector military. Before, presence of land units
was sufficient, but spies shot were only deduced from sector
military. If you lost more spies than you had sector military,
the rest came back from the dead.
- Spy no longer ignores non-sea sectors without civilians, military
and land units.
- Remove columns lnd, pln from spy report. The values didn't match
the reported land units and planes, and could leak the presence
of spy units.
- Establish contact when spy succeeds even though the spy was
caught.
* Fix news reporting and damage when land units interdict ships in
sectors other than sea.
* Fix land unit return fire damage to ships to take accuracy into
account, like the fire command and interdiction does.
* Remove the inconsistent shelling damage reduction for range. Fire
command got damage reduced by 10-20% with a chance depending on
range ("Wind deflects shells"). Ships interdicting got it reduced
by half. Other ways to shell did not get damage reduced for range.
* Fix ground combat to report defending land units. Broken in 4.3.4.
* Info file and documentation fixes and improvements.
Changes to Empire 4.3.15 - Sun May 18 08:59:30 UTC 2008
* The edit command keys deprecated in 4.3.10 are now gone.
* fairland now obeys game file locks.
* Do not leak world creation time in files utility, because that
facilitates attacks against fairland's PRNG. Broken in 4.3.12.
* Fix starvation not to starve one more than it should. The last man
on a boat or land unit now can't starve anymore.
* Fix a crash bug in satellite. Broken in 4.2.7 and not fixed
correctly in 4.2.12.
* Fix a coordinate normalization bug that could theoretically lead to
buffer overruns and other unpleasantness. None have been
reproduced, though. Broken in 4.3.12.
* Remove option FUEL. The abstract idea of tying ships and land
units to a logistical tether is sound, the concrete implementation
as option FUEL is flawed. It adds too much busy-work to the game
to be enjoyable. It hasn't been enabled in a public game for
years. The code implementing it is ugly, repetitive, and a burden
to maintain. The edit command still accepts and ignores the fuel
keys for compatibility, but they are deprecated.
* Fix pin-bomb not to report subs when there are none.
* You now have to take a capital to capture the victim's money, loans
or market lots. Merely obliterating the capital doesn't cut it.
It still makes the victim lose money, though.
* Fix a bug that could theoretically allow sacking of non-existant
capitals of visitors, deities and such.
* You now gain BTUs and MOB_ACCESS mobility before the first update
again. You didn't since 4.3.10 introduced the ETU clock.
* Fix edit to detect when the edited object changes while it's being
edited.
* Fix xdump nat for relations: it got HIDDEN backwards. Broken in
4.3.12.
* Fix origin command not to prompt twice for its argument. Broken in
4.3.0.
* Info file improvements.
Changes to Empire 4.3.14 - Mon May 5 04:57:03 UTC 2008
* Another round of fixes to the fire command:
- Don't disclose where the target retreated to.
- Charge the target shells for returning fire.
- Always use guns when the target is out of range, even if it's a
submarine. Before, the difference in shell use disclosed whether
the target is a submarine. Loophole opened in 4.3.12.
- Make depth charges again work with just one shell. Failing the
command in that case lets players find out whether the target is
a submarine. Loophole opened in 4.3.12.
- Detect when the firing sector, ship or land unit changes across
the target prompt. Can be abused to duplicate commodities, and
more.
* Fix parsing of anchor-relative time in update schedule. Broken in
4.3.13.
* Fix logging of player input in the journal to include command
interruption and EOF.
* Fix oversights in 4.3.12's change to keep track of flying planes:
planes could be erroneously reported damaged by their own ground
strikes. Happened with missions and the launch command.
* Fix load not load hardened missiles.
* Fix harden not to harden missiles loaded on land units.
* New server option -E to choose what to do on recoverable internal
error. You can now make the server dump core and keep going (not
implemented for Windows). New econfig key post_crash_dump_hook to
run a program after crash-dumping. See scripts/savecore for an
example.
* Journal entries are now flushed to disk right away even when the
server is not running in debug mode.
* Don't let land units load trains.
* Allow deity to display power report for all types of countries,
with power c.
* Fix designate's check for disallowed sector types. Broken in
4.3.12.
* Documentation fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.3.13 - Tue Apr 15 19:03:11 UTC 2008
* Work around strptime() lossage on some systems. Fixes the parsing
of the schedule file there.
* New selector maxnoc for xdump version.
* Fix initialization of realms in newcap. Broken in 4.3.12.
* Fix add for status arguments active, god, delete. Broken in
4.3.12.
* Info file, manual page and documentation fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.3.12 - Wed Apr 2 05:35:06 UTC 2008
* Fix rounding error in update that could result in more babies than
food permits, and negative food.
* Fix a bug that could lead to unfair thread scheduling under
Windows.
* Fix ship and land unit missile interdiction and ballistic missile
interception to require a proper base. Before, missiles could
launch from anywhere for that.
* Launch bug fixes:
- Don't allow launching from unowned sectors.
- Don't destroy missiles stuck on foreign ships.
- Use up the supplies required for launching an asat only when it
actually launches.
- Don't ignore satellites' fuel use.
* Deity command newcap now requires its second argument (sanctuary
coordinates). Before, it tried to pick a suitable location when
none was given. The code implementing this feature had problems,
and it's not worth fixing, because it is obscure, and rarely (if
ever) used: no conscientious deity would use it for a real game,
and for blitzes fairland does a better job.
* Keep track of flying planes properly. This fixes a number of bugs:
- While the bomb command awaited pin-bombing target input from the
player, other players could interact with the pin-bombers and
escorts as if they were sitting in their bases: spy them, damage,
capture, load, unload, or upgrade them, even get intercepted by
them. But any changes to those planes were wiped out when they
landed. Abusable.
- The bomb command could bomb its own escorts, directly (pin-bomb
planes) or through collateral damage, strategic sector damage,
collapsing bridges or nuke damage. The damage to the escorts was
wiped out when they landed.
- If you asked for a plane to fly both in the primary mission and
escort, you got charged fuel for two sorties instead of one.
* Plug memory leaks in plane interception.
* Fix trade not to let the buyer teleport satellites (not in orbit)
and asats to an arbitrary sector. Abusable, because abms
intercepted from anywhere, and satellites could be launched from
unowned sectors.
* The PRNG seed is now logged in the journal.
* Fix nightly build for Windows.
* Fix crash bug that bit when custom tables contained columns names
that existed, but weren't supposed to be in the custom table.
* New timestamp selector for commodity, country, game, loan, nation,
news, realm, trade, treaty to support incremental xdump.
* Deity commands newcap and add wipe the nation more thoroughly. add
no longer touches relations and flags for status active and god.
* New utility program empdump to export and import game state as
plain text. Check its manual for details, including limitations.
* Plane, ship and land unit stats are no longer stored as game state,
but recomputed from tech and base stats as needed.
* xdump ver is no longer a special case. Syntax "xdump ver" is now
deprecated. Use "xdump version *".
* Fire and torpedo cleanup and bug hunt:
- Plug memory leak in fire command.
- Fix ammunition use when returning fire: resupply could lose
shells when returning fire to multiple targets, and land units
were charged per target instead of just once.
- Interdicting land units now resupply shells automatically, for
consistency with other ways to fire.
- torpedo and fire no longer resupply shells automatically. The
latter used to resupply land units only.
- Land units no longer have to be in supply to fire actively, for
consistency with other ways to fire.
- Submarines with zero mobility can no longer interdict, for
consistency with other ways to torpedo.
- Fix bugs that let submarines without capability torp use
torpedoes to return fire and interdict.
- Fix torpedo command not to require a line of sight for return
fire and depth charges, and to use torpedo range instead of
firing range for return torpedoes.
- Active fire and interdiction didn't work for ships with zero
firing range, even though return fire and support did. No such
ships exist in the stock game.
- Let land units with zero firing range and non-zero firing damage
fire, for consistency with ships. No such units exist in the
stock game.
- Ships required different numbers of military to operate their
guns for the various kinds of fire. Unify to require 2*N-1
military to fire N guns.
- Ship ammunition use differed for the various kinds of fire.
Unify to use one shell per two guns.
- Forts could fire support even when there were not enough mil.
- Fix automatic shell resupply in several places to supply exactly
the shells actually fired, no more, no less.
* Change depth charges back to how they are documented and worked
before 4.0.6, mostly: require no guns, one military, do damage like
shell fire from three guns (before 4.0.6: two guns), use two
shells. In 4.0.6's model, they worked exactly like shell fire
(require guns and gun crew, non-zero firing range, damage and
ammunition use scales with available guns), except for missions,
which was a bug. Note that depth charge damage for all ships is
now like fire from three guns for two shells. No change for dd; af
did two gun damage for one shell before, and nas did four gun
damage for two shells.
* The edit command keys deprecated in 4.3.3 are now gone.
* Fix build not to screw up automatic dependencies on certain compile
errors.
* Fix a bug that could prevent repeated news from properly
aggregating into one news item.
* Properly initialize all bits in game state files, even those that
aren't used.
* Fix explore's test for stopping on a splashed bridge. The bug made
explore print to a bogus message.
* Fix spelling of symbol airburst in table plane-flags. This could
affect clients.
* Change designate not to check total cost before executing the
redesignation. The code implementing that was buggy and too ugly
to live. Designate doesn't cost anything in the stock game.
* Always charge land units at least as much mobility for assaulting
from non-landing ships as from landing ships. Before, marines lost
all mobility when assaulting from a non-landing ship, which could
be less than what the same assault costs from a landing ship (half
an update's worth).
* Fix LWP's stack initialization for -s. It caused crashes on some
systems.
* Fix confused and buggy bridge splashing code:
- Flying planes could be reported drowned.
- Pin-bombing a bridge head failed to collapse bridge spans for
lack of support, unless the pin-bombing caused collateral damage.
- Corrupt sector file could lead to infinite recursion.
* Relative names now work for econfig keys data and info.
* Fix utility programs to abort on internal errors. They used to
print a message and attempt to recover.
* Fix off-by-one in fairland that ate the last expansion island.
* Switch from CVS to git.
* Code refactoring and cleanup.
* Portability fixes.
* Info file, manual page and documentation fixes and updates.
Changes to Empire 4.3.11 - Tue Jan 1 18:57:38 UTC 2008
* New sector selector elev. It's set by fairland, but has no effect
on the game. It can be useful for deities to customize a world
created by fairland.
* The client now copes with ids greater than 15. The Empire
protocol currently uses 14 ids.
* Rewrite the client's code for reading server output during login.
The old code could write one byte beyond the end of the buffer
(theoretically a remote hole), got confused by long lines, and
lines that didn't arrive in one piece.
* Long country name, password or user name crashed the client.
* Fix xdump not to deny access to game state tables when maximum
minutes per day are exceeded.
* The server considers a country bankrupt when its treasury is
negative. Except when it doesn't. Fix that:
- report misreported countries with $0 as broke.
- If a command spent a few cents more than you had, commands requiring
money became unavailable even when rounding brought you back to
$0. But logging out and back in then bankrupted you.
- If your treasury rose to exactly $0, commands requiring money
remained unavailable.
- If you had $0, sectors didn't build and sectors and ships didn't
produce at the update.
* Fix a bug in trade that made your money evaporate when a trade fell
through because you couldn't fully pay. This bug was there since
the introduction of the market in 4.0.0. It got aggravated by the
removal of forced loans in 4.3.0.
* Fix printing of the new group in army, fleet and wing. Broken in
4.3.5.
* Fix flash not to screw up the message when the first argument
contains white-space.
* Don't let planes intercept when they are stuck in foreign bases, on
inefficient ships or land units, or on land units loaded on ships
or land units.
* Fix a bug that made interception require petrol to be present even
for planes that don't use fuel (SAMs). Broken in 4.3.3. Air
defense missions weren't affected.
* fairland and setsector now limit fertility to 100 instead of 120,
like the other resources.
* Generalize the autonav hack for fishing boats so it covers oil
derricks as well.
* Fix bug in path command that made it swallow every other step.
Broken in 4.2.22.
* The execute command no longer supports redirections and execute in
batch files. Flaws in the Empire protocol make it next to
impossible for clients to implement that correctly. See
doc/clients-howto for an explanation.
* Rewrite much of the client's code for sending commands and
receiving server output:
- No longer blocks on sending commands, which could deadlock the
session.
- Fix race condition that could cause server output to be discarded
on EOF on standard input.
- Don't discard server output when reading standard input fails.
- Fix error handling for execute and other, more obscure cases.
- More rigorous error checking for redirections and execute.
Clearer error messages, too.
- Fix execute redirected to file or pipe. Believed to be broken in
4.2.0.
- The client now creates files for redirections with the same
permissions whether the redirection is in a pipe or not. Before,
redirections without a pipe created files with no permissions for
group and others. This change may make your redirected output
visible to other users on your system. Use the usual controls,
like umask, to restrict permissions to your liking.
- Reject unexpected redirections (violating the protocol). Before,
they silently replaced the current one, and in the case of pipes
leaked file descriptors and memory.
- Redirections in batch files are not implemented. They didn't
quite work before, and could leak memory and file descriptors. A
flaw in the Empire protocol makes them next to impossible to
implement correctly.
- The execute command in batch files is not implemented. A flaw in
the Empire protocol makes this practically useless anyway.
- Old code leaked memory in various places.
- Unfortunate incompatibility with older servers: if you type the
EOF character (normally ^D) at an argument prompt, the session
hangs. Use the interrupt character (normally ^C) to get out.
* The client now supports options -h and -v.
* The client no longer zaps its command line in a lame attempt at
protecting users who foolishly specify passwords on the command
line. Zapping annoys system administrators and creates a false
sense of security.
* Journal entries are now flushed to disk right away when the server
is running in debug mode.
* Fix bugs in load that could make loading operations fail noisily
instead of silently on some systems.
* Server now reliably shuts down session when it receives an
end-of-file condition from the client. Before, it merely failed
the current command when it got it at an argument prompt.
* Fix bug in execute that could crash the server on some systems when
it prompts for the argument.
* Fix bug that let you check whether a non-allied carrier is
efficient enough for takeoff when one of your planes got stuck
there somehow.
* Fix bug that let you attempt to escort a one-way mission to a
carrier with non-light, non-interceptor escorts. Such planes don't
fit on carriers, and the command then failed with a bogus error
message. Before 4.2.17, the planes flew, and the escorts were
teleported home.
* Change the rules for fitting planes on ships slightly, so that the
order of loading no longer matters. Choppers and x-lights can now
use plane slots even when not light. X-light choppers, which don't
exist in the stock game, can no longer use x-light slots.
* The server now keeps its log file open, just like the journal.
* New server option -R to set the PRNG seed. This is for
reproducible tests. Change the Windows-only service uninstall
options from -r/-R to -u/-U.
* Supply a real PRNG for Windows instead of the leaky water-pistol
Windows provides.
* Threads sleeping until a specified time could return early under
Windows. This could cause missed updates. Broken in 4.3.10.
* Fix missing newline in show updates.
* Power report didn't factor tech into power correctly. Broken in
4.3.3.
* Code refactoring and cleanup.
* Info file and documentation fixes and updates.
Changes to Empire 4.3.10 - Thu Sep 6 17:59:53 UTC 2007
* Bridge spans now cost $1000 instead of $2000, and bridge towers
$3000 instead of $7500.
* The Windows port now supports IPv6, but it still needs to be
enabled manually at compile-time.
* The custom table reader detects more errors.
* Do not leak world creation time in files and fairland, because
that facilitates attacks against the PRNG. This misfeature crept
into 4.3.0.
* Remove the ancient, crufty non-UCONTEXT system-dependent LWP code.
Using it required manual hackery since 4.3.0.
* Plug file descriptor leak in add command.
* Don't kill player connections violently when their thread appears
to be hung. Threads being aborted by update or shutdown could be
misidentified as hung, and the violence could lead to resource
leaks, locked out updates, and corrupted game state.
* Fix LWP to reliably wake up threads sleeping for a time. Before,
players with a sufficiently fast connection could starve out system
threads, including the update.
* Fix a class of bugs that made commands behave differently while the
update is attempting to take control:
- No MOB_ACCESS mobility was gained.
- Telegrams were miscounted.
- Bulletins got misfiled as production reports.
- The navigate command ignored sail paths.
- The declare command was more quiet, and declarations of war
failed silently when SLOW_WAR was enabled.
- Many messages got misdirected to bulletins.
Some of these bugs go back all the way to Empire 2, ca 1995.
* New deity command reload, effect similar to SIGHUP.
* Not voting for a demand update no longer lets you veto further
demand updates. This feature was flawed (it encourages players to
vote late so that they can tactically vote no and thus build up
veto rights), virtually unused, and buggy. The edit command still
accepts and ignores the country key 'U' for compatibility, but it
is deprecated.
* Fix zdone not to claim to have triggered an update when they're
disabled.
* New update scheduler and ETU clock:
- New schedule file. See doc/schedule for how to use it. Replaces
econfig keys update_policy, adj_update, update_times, hourslop,
blitz_time. A change of schedule does not require a server
restart.
- The force command can no longer force updates in the future.
Edit the schedule file for that.
- New command show updates to show the update schedule. Obsoletes
the update command.
- New xdump game and xdump updates.
- New utility program empsched to help test update schedules.
- Replace option DEMANDUPDATE and econfig key update_demandpolicy
by econfig key update_demand.
- econfig key update_demandtimes no longer applies to scheduled
demand updates.
- You now receive new BTUs at the update in addition to login.
- You now always gain the same BTUs and MOB_ACCESS mobility per
turn, even when the update schedule changes, updates get missed,
or unscheduled demand updates run.
- Remove the mobupdate command, because porting it to the new ETU
clock is not worth it.
* Redesign of synchronization between commands, update and shutdown,
and how updates are triggered:
- Simplify update to a single thread waiting for the trigger.
Before, three update threads had to perform a carefully
choreographed dance to make updates happen. The dance relied on
thread priorities for correctness, which are only implemented by
LWP. With pthreads and under Windows, demand updates were prone
to two update threads starting up concurrently. Even with LWP,
forced and demand updates could lead to double updates.
- Use a lock for synchronization: commands take it shared, update
and shutdown take it exclusive. This makes update and shutdown
block until all aborted commands terminated and gave up their
lock. Before, they proceeded blindly after waiting two or one
seconds respectively, which was cheesy and unsafe.
- New commands no longer fail while the update is pending, they are
delayed until after the update.
- New commands can no longer start during shutdown. Before, they
could, but risked getting killed violently, possibly corrupting
game state.
- Fix command execution so that commands blocked in writing
redirections are abortable. The bug allowed players to delay
update and shutdown indefinitely.
- Fix shutdown not to let player threads block on output. This
let players delay shutdown indefinitely.
- Fix reading of player input not to block again after update or
shutdown aborted it. The bug allowed players to delay update and
shutdown indefinitely.
* Thread priorities are only implemented by LWP and no longer used.
With LWP, they let players with a sufficiently fast connection
starve out the threads that clean the lost file and kill idle
connections. Drop them.
* Show nuke rounded required research incorrectly.
* Log unprintable characters as octal escapes rather than question
marks in the journal file.
* The files program no longer changes permissions of existing files.
* The files program now creates all files with permissions ug=rw and
all directories ug=rwx, modified by umask.
* Fix a bug that could make arm, disarm and nuke detonation work with
a used-up nuke instead of the armed one. This could be abused to
detonate nukes multiple times. Broken in 4.3.3.
* Fix nuke detonation output for zero blast radius.
* Plug memory leaks in thread code.
* Fix a bug that made LWP I/O wakeup unreliable.
* New march sub-command v for view.
* Journal was initialized before threads were, which was wrong.
* Fix server not to create a journal on SIGHUP when it is disabled.
* shutdown 0 now requests immediate shutdown instead of cancellation
of a pending shutdown. shutdown -1 now cancels.
* flash and wall no longer split long message lines.
* Fix a bug in collect that screwed up a fully collected loan instead
of deleting it. The screwed up loan could not be sharked or
collected, but it could be repaid.
* Remove the wait command, it's been broken and restricted to deity
since Empire 2, ca. 1995.
* Budget failed to take sector production into account for predicting
unit repairs. Before 4.3.6, this bug bit only when you fooled
around with budget priorities.
* When unit repairs are limited by materials, the efficiency gain is
now rounded down.
* Ship repairs outside harbors and plane repairs by carriers used to
consume commodities when and as far as available. Now, they
consume the same fraction of the real cost of each commodity,
i.e. commodity use is limited by the most scarce commodity.
Neither old nor new behavior make much sense, but the new code is
simpler.
* Code refactoring and cleanup, in particular to make the Windows
port less ugly.
* Portability fixes.
* Info file and manual page updates. All manual pages are now
installed in section 6.
Changes to Empire 4.3.9 - Sat Jan 6 12:42:19 UTC 2007
* Fix declare to prevent the deity from changing relations for a
player to self. Allow the deity to set the relations of a player
towards the deity.
* Fix arm not to put the same nuke on multiple planes (broken in
4.3.3).
* New option AUTO_POWER.
* Sectors now repair allied land units.
* Sectors now repair only own and allied planes.
* Fix repair of planes on foreign carriers: repair allied planes,
ignore the others. Before 4.3.3, carriers destroyed rather than
repaired foreign planes. Since 4.3.3, foreign planes were treated
as recoverable error.
* Fix automatic fortification of land units to use all excess
mobility even when mobility delta exceeds mobility maximum.
* Disable automatic fortification of land units when MOB_ACCESS is
on, because it is prohibitively slow then (broken in 4.2.13).
* Budget now shows level production (tech, education, research and
happiness) rounded instead of randomly rounded.
* Fix update not to randomly flush small level production to zero.
* Fix overly restrictive game file locking under Windows (broken in
4.3.8).
* Fix navigate to charge mobility for sweeping mines without moving
(broken in 4.3.6).
* Code cleanup.
Changes to Empire 4.3.8 - Fri Oct 20 18:30:28 UTC 2006
* Ships no longer produce stuff when the government is broke.
* Fix land unit casualties in revolts.
* Fix security units not to raid friendly che.
* Fix update sequence to ensure stopped sectors don't work on the
ships, planes and land units in the sector. Before 4.3.6, this bug
bit only when you fooled around with budget priorities.
* Fix canal loading (was broken in 4.3.0).
* Fix tend not to tend land units that could not be loaded.
* Make xdump command available before break, but deny access to game
state.
* Lock game files to prevent concurrent access by multiple programs.
fairland does not yet obey the lock.
* Fix production to consider sector item limit.
* Fix swapsector to update coastal flag correctly (broken in 4.3.0).
* Enhanced mapping sub-commands in move, test, explore and transport.
* Code cleanup.
* Info file fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.3.7 - Fri Jul 14 23:05:19 UTC 2006
* Sanctuaries are again fully populated with civilians (4.3.6 changed
the limit, but not the population). Food is now spread evenly
among them.
* Fix path finder to find shortest naval and aerial paths again
(broken in 4.3.4).
* transport's map sub-command now does the right thing for a unit
number argument.
* Fix bug in map sub-command of move, explore and transport that
passed junk to map command. Could theoretically crash.
* Food need reported by starvation was one short for sectors without
food.
* Change land unit ammunition use back to what it was before 4.2.3.
This lets deities customize ammunition use independent of damage.
It also substantially reduces ammunition consumption at high tech.
* navigation and march enhancements:
- Sub-command 'f' now takes an optional ship / land unit number.
- Mapping sub-commands now take an optional ship / land unit
number.
- New sub-command 'd' to drop mines.
* Let minesweepers retreat at their full speed (missed in 4.3.6).
* SUPER_BARS cannot be harmed, so don't interdict them.
* Don't let trains and non-trains march together for now, because the
march code isn't prepared for that.
* New mapping flag 'n' to show nukes.
* Mapping flag '*' now shows nukes as well.
* New command nbmap to bmap around a nuke. Overload command nmap to
map around a nuke when given a nuke argument.
* Fix an inconsistency that gave tactical bombers a small bonus
vs. flak when pin-bombing.
* Fix production to show the designation that actually produces, not
the designation as it is now (broken in 4.3.6).
* Fix accidental whitespace change in output of sdump, pdump and
ldump that crept into 4.3.5.
* Support user-defined sector types and products in custom tables,
not just customization of existing ones.
* Fix off-by-one bug in budget that used to be masked by budget
priorities until their demise in 4.3.6. The bug could crash the
game on certain systems.
* Code cleanup.
* Info file fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.3.6 - Tue Jun 20 18:46:18 UTC 2006
* The shutdown command now terminates the server process correctly
even with LinuxThreads pthreads under Linux 2.4 and earlier.
* Cope with old versions of groff (broken in 4.3.0).
* You can now arm allied planes with nukes.
* Taking a nuke off a plane gives it to the sector owner again.
Feature was accidentally dropped in 4.3.3. Recipient must be
allied.
* Naval path went bananas for impassable end sectors (broken in
4.3.1).
* New econfig key disabled_commands.
* New territory selector dterr, restricted to deities. The territory
command defaults to it for deities.
* Let land units attack as long as they have positive mobility,
except for high-mobility terrain (mountains), where the rules
remain as they were: land units need to have all the mobility
charged for the attack, not counting combat and moving in to
occupy. Rationale: Making sure your land units reach attack
positions with enough mobility left is a pain in the neck.
Requiring only positive mobility is friendlier, but allowed rushing
of mountains, so we make an exception there.
* Can typeset info pages as PostScript. Result isn't exactly pretty.
* Support disabling of infrastructure in infra custom table. Remove
redundant option DEFENSE_INFRA. show command now shows only enabled
infrastructure.
* Fix crash on empty argument in bmap, lbmap, lmap, map, nmap, pbmap,
pmap sbmap, smap (broken in 4.3.1).
* New, simpler sector mobility cost formula:
- The basic cost is still a linear function of sector efficiency,
with customizable cost at 0% and at 100%. The latter used to be
derived from the former. The show command shows both parameters
now.
- Mountains are no longer a special case.
- Tweak costs: mountains now range from 2.4 to 1.2 instead of 2.174
to 1.304, highway, bridge head, bridge span and bridge tower
range from 0.4 to 0.001 instead of 0.2 to 0.001, and wilderness
is 0.4 flat instead of 0.6 to 0.4. All sector types mortal
players can designate now cost the same at 0%. That's a feature.
- Road infrastructure now reduces cost up to 90%, linear in road
efficiency (used to be close to that, but non-linear). Same for
rail infrastructure, but 99%. Adapted from Ice World V.
- Double land unit minimum cost to 0.02, to slow them down on
highways.
- Change land unit cost penalty in newly taken land to an extra 0.2
instead of a minimum of 0.2, to reduce penetration depth.
* Reduce bridge head defense and collect value to match highway's.
* sinfrastructure displayed bogus rail mobility costs when there was
no rail.
* Retreating engineers took full landmine damage instead of half.
* Fix socket creation code not to print a null pointer.
* Fix login option code not to search beyond end of table (broken in
4.2.21).
* Spy planes and satellites can no longer spot landspies.
* Spy planes can now spot surface ships at sea. They can no longer
spot land units loaded on ships or land units.
* Fix train retreat mobility cost, and don't permit retreat off rail.
* Change maximum population to 100 for plains (was 49), mountains
(was 99), bridge spans and bridge towers (was 999), and to 1000 for
the other habitable sector types (was 999).
* Let minesweepers navigate at the speed their stats indicate by
letting them sweep on the move at no extra mobility charge.
* Reduce chance for planes to abort from 100-eff (if eff<80) to
80-eff. This should make it easier to punch through air defense,
flak in particular, and increase the risk of getting shot down.
* Ship and land unit flak intensity is now proportional to efficiency.
* Ship and land unit flak intensity is no longer scaled by the tech
of the owner of the last thing firing. It's still scaled by each
thing's tech.
* All ships and land units firing flak now spot the plane and are
spotted by the plane. Previously, spotting stopped as soon as flak
maxed out.
* Inefficient land units were overcharged mobility when reacting.
Broken when Empire3 changed land unit mobility use not to depend on
efficiency, except for supply units.
* New journal file to log complete player input plus selected
important events. Controlled by new econfig key keep_journal, off
by default.
* Fix unsafe shutdown on SIGINT and SIGTERM.
* Fix land unit path finding: paths weren't always cheapest (broken
in 4.0.2), and trains could be sent down paths without rail (never
worked). Also fixes unit reaction path cost.
* The custom table reader can now deal with sector, item, product and
infra tables more comfortably.
* Remove option BIG_CITY. Deities can customize the sect table to
get the same effect.
* Many more selectors can now be compared with names, not just
numbers. This includes nations, e.g. census ?old=Mirkwood. Does
not fully work for queer names like &&&.
* Let land units on missions support, just like ships.
* Don't let units loaded on a train react.
* Change update sequence to repair ships, planes and land units after
sectors produce. This makes repairs use new avail instead of old.
* Let players stop and start units.
* Remove budget priorities.
* Make plane report easier to understand.
* Change land report to show carriers in the same format as plane and
nuke report do.
* Code cleanup.
* Info file and manual page fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.3.5 - Sun May 28 07:49:54 UTC 2006
* In conditionals, ~ compared to a string selector now stands for an
empty string.
* Change encoding of `not in any group' from " " to "". This makes
fleet=~ work. It also affects xdump.
* Fix plane capture code to clear wing.
* People now eat and starve exactly the same in sectors, ships and
land units. There used to be small differences, and civilians and
uw loaded on land units didn't eat at all. The starvation command
has been updated accordingly.
* Fix bug that makes it impossible to assault or board with land
units (broken in 4.3.4).
* Code cleanup.
Changes to Empire 4.3.4 - Thu May 25 05:46:10 UTC 2006
* Don't use non-portable groff features (broken in 4.3.0).
* Work around potential crash bugs in command argument access.
* Plug major information leak through nation selectors (broken in
4.2.21). The fix unfortunately exchanges the meaning of xdump
nation and xdump country. Sorry about that.
* Minimize redundancy between (mortal's) xdump nation and xdump
country.
* New nation selector rejects.
* xdump nation now shows foreign relations and no longer discloses
hidden relations.
* Fix crash bug in edit.
* Fix number of planes building in budget command (broken in 4.3.3).
* Selectors group, fleet, wing and army are now strings, and obvious
syntax like fleet#a works. xdump also shows the strings now.
Units not assigned to a group currently have group string " ", but
that may still change.
* Don't fold conditionals to lower case, because it breaks valid
conditionals like fleet#A.
* Mobility cost of a plane sortie is no longer limited to current
mobility + 32.
* Various formulas no longer truncate or round intermediate results.
* Interdiction mission charged twice the normal mobility cost for
torpedoes.
* Fix sail not to interpret negative x-coordinates as unsail
argument.
* Improved configure script.
* Code cleanup.
Changes to Empire 4.3.3 - Tue May 16 21:35:47 UTC 2006
* power c can now show powerless countries. power c * works.
* Fortresses now require 5% efficiency to return fire and interdict.
* Range of ship return fire and support fire no longer depends on
efficiency.
* Fix heap smash in login command client. Remote hole!
* Properly destroy nukes on collapsing bridges. Before, you could
rescue them by building a new bridge or arming them on naval
planes.
* Nukes are now numbered like other units:
- New selector type replaces selectors number and types.
- New selector plane points to plane armed with this nuke.
- New selectors effic, mobil, tech, group, opx, opy, mission,
radius. Provided because all units have them; values are
currently not interesting.
- nuke command output redesigned.
- ndump output changed subtly: nukes are no longer sorted by
location, nukes in the same location no longer share id, and
nukes on planes are shown.
- transport nuke now works like transport plane.
* arm and disarm now accept the common plane syntax, not just plane
numbers.
* Fix arm to let you change an armed plane's air-burst/ground-burst
(broken in 4.2.6).
* territory no longer re-prompts when supplied with a bad argument,
it just fails.
* edit lets you edit stuff that is actually computed from other
state, like sector's coastal flag. This makes no sense and is now
deprecated. Stuff deprecated since 4.2.15 is now gone.
* Code cleanup.
Changes to Empire 4.3.2 - Thu Apr 27 17:59:58 UTC 2006
* Fix security units' raid at the update (broken in 4.0.0, fixed only
for 100% units in 4.2.7). Back out 4.2.7's 2.5x deadliness
increase. Make sure empty units don't kill anyone.
* Fix bug in player_init(), which was most likely fatal on 64 bit
hosts. Broken in 4.3.0.
* Fix xdump not to disclose other countries' realms (new in 4.3.0).
* The order in which sectors were visited for `*' arguments disclosed
the real origin, fix. Mapping commands used to work around this
bug, until 4.3.1 exposed it there as well.
* Code didn't compile on some systems.
* Fix edit plane not to truncate large values for keys 'a' and 'd'.
Changes to Empire 4.3.1 - Sat Apr 15 11:40:47 UTC 2006
* Fix check of game state on server startup (new in 4.3.0).
* sail now accepts a destination sector.
* Tend could send bogus bulletins (broken in 4.3.0).
* Plug memory leaks in mission command.
* Close loophole in navigate that allowed players to find all sectors
that are unfriendly or inefficient harbors or bridges.
* Server didn't start when default econfig was missing and user
didn't supply one with -e (broken in 4.3.0).
* Retreat condition 'h' (helpless) never worked, fix.
* Fix retreating mine sweepers to use mobility for sweeping.
* Fix retreating land units to hit mines with the same probability
and to take the same damage as in normal movement. Before,
hit probability was higher, and damage was lower.
* Ships could retreat into sectors owned by whoever made them
retreat, but not in their owner's sectors.
* Fix 'm' at the movement prompt of transport and test.
* Fix march and test not to apply conditionals to sectors mapped,
which led to spurious error messages.
* Fix break not to respect conditionals. The bug let players keep
sanctuaries.
* Fix retreat code not to respect conditionals. Attackers could
abuse this to suppress fleet and army retreat orders.
* Fix retreat and edit to zero-terminate retreat paths.
Theoretically abusable for gaining information.
* Fix format string crash bugs in load, spy and bomb.
* Fix the telegram editor: empty telegrams were broken in 4.2.21, and
~p before the first line of text never worked.
* Fix ancient bridge building race condition that could break the
test whether the player can afford the bridge.
* Fix trade lot change detection in set command. Can probably be
abused to defraud sellers.
* The pthread code now compiles under Solaris.
* navigate and march now permit any whitespace between route and
optional argument for radar, lookout, sonar, not just spaces.
* Fix canal navigation (was broken in 4.3.0).
* Info file fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.3.0 - Sun Mar 19 08:13:10 UTC 2006
* version no longer pretends option SHIPNAMES still exists.
* Remove files auth and ban. They could be used to restrict client
address and user. Restricting user is useless, because players can
send whatever they want. Banning IPs is better done with a packet
filter. That leaves restricting deity IPs. Provide new econfig
key privip for that. Apply it to session kill as well as login.
* xdump escapes GUINEA_PIGS status:
- xdump is now enabled unconditionally.
- xdump sect now dumps selector coastal, because it can't be
reliably computed from other xdump information.
- New xdump realm and country. Realm information is now stored in
a separate file, with appropriate selectors.
- Reviewed for completeness and information leaks. See info xdump
for remaining issues. New treaty selector uid, nat selectors
relations, contacts. Removed useless selectors: news and lost
uid, nat dayno.
- Command syntax changed.
- xdump opt is no more, option information is now in xdump ver.
- xdump can now dump meta-data.
- Header and footer changed to be more compact. You now need
meta-data to identify fields.
- Bug fixes.
- Documentation in doc/xdump.
* New econfig key builtindir.
* New econfig key custom_tables lets you customize configuration
tables without recompiling. Customizing tables other than unit
tables is not recommended for now. See doc/econfig for
instructions.
* Check configuration and game state are sane on server startup.
* Remove option NONUKES and NEUTRON. Deities can load a suitable
nuke table to get the same effect.
* Remove option DRNUKE. Use econfig key drnuke_const to control
whether nukes need research.
* Disqualify land units from performing missions while loaded on
ships or trains.
* Fix dump for strings without terminating zero.
* Fix login command option not to send an extra prompt.
* zdone now displays information about demand update vetoing.
* The Windows port now requires Winsock version 2.
* Remove econfig key powe_cost.
* version report now shows all the configurable settings of interest
to players.
* carg and lcarg now display people as well.
* ldump now dumps civ and uw as well.
* Fix dangling pointer dereference in dogfighting code.
* Tell sector owner when partisans take over. But don't disclose che
casualties then.
* emp_server, files, fairland now support options -h and -v.
* Simplify baroque version numbering to a single version number.
This affects output of version.
* New show item and show news.
* New build process:
- Follow the usual steps: configure; make; make install. The
latter is optional. The only file deities still have to edit is
econfig.
- Use GNU Autoconf for system configuration.
- Use GNU Make for portability and features.
- Support separate build trees.
- Remake out-of-date dependencies automatically.
- Remake out-of-date info files automatically.
- Flatten info directory.
- Formatted info files are no longer distributed in source tarball.
- Use LWP only with UCONTEXT. Autoconfiguring the other LWP
low-level options doesn't seem to be worth the effort, as
UCONTEXT should be pretty portable.
* Fix use of freed memory in sail.
* sail could let large ships enter big cities.
* Fix reject and accept not to require contact.
* Fix sharebmap and telegram to prompt for a missing first argument.
* Fix report to align column research correctly for deities.
* When the optional newspaper argument doesn't work because HIDDEN is
enabled, complain instead of ignoring it silently.
* When BLITZ is enabled, fairland no longer permutes country numbers
in newcap_script so that start islands are ordered from top left to
bottom right.
* Minimize output format differences between options:
- census shows column fall regardless of FALLOUT.
- show nuke now shows column res regardless of DRNUKE.
- report no longer suppress column status when HIDDEN is enabled.
HIDDEN limits status information like for the country command.
- relations column width differed depending on option SLOW_WAR.
Always use the wider format.
* Fix a bug in edit that suppressed the player notification telex on
military reserve change.
* Fix command dispatch not to let deities use commands that are
declared not to be available to them. The only command affected is
break.
* Fix the list command for visitor.
* econfig key m_m_p_d no longer applies to deities.
* Fix the origin command for country #0. Allow moving origin to
another country's origin. Allow deities to reset origin to
absolute 0,0. This turns origin into a superset of the offset
command. Remove offset command.
* Fix a bug that caused unpredictable flak damage when it should have
been maximum damage (was broken in 4.2.19).
* Don't store initial capital location, remove the associated nat
selectors xstart, ystart.
* Fix production command to consider resource depletion.
* Fix justification of coordinate output in cutoff and mission.
* Option UPDATESCHED is no longer optional. Disabling it didn't
work anyway.
* Support IPv6.
* Turn options into ordinary econfig keys.
* New econfig key start_cash.
* BTU regeneration now depends on the capital's work percentage.
* nation now supports an optional argument that lets deities ask for
somebody else's nation report.
* Fix nation to display SANCTUARY instead of VISITOR for countries in
sanctuary.
* Fix capital to let you use a regained sacked capital without
activating another one in between.
* Don't move capital when it is sacked.
* New ship capability canal, replacing obscure formula based on build
materials.
* You now need a capital to request a demand update.
* power now ignores landspies.
* Fix LWP stack checking.
* Clean up LWP, drop dead machine-specific code, fix portability bugs
in UCONTEXT code.
* census now shows the old owner instead of `*'. dump is unchanged
to avoid breaking clients.
* peek no longer prints the old owner.
* When a bombed land unit retreated, collateral damage was applied to
the wrong sector.
* paradrop, drop and fly can no longer abandon the base sector.
* Tending foreign ships now sends a bulletin to the owner.
* Fix bug that permitted login for inactive countries, including ""
* Fix tend for spies.
* Change launch to fire all missiles selected at the same target.
Previously, it prompted for a new target after each missile.
* add, consider, build, launch and fire no longer re-prompt when
supplied with a bad argument, they just fail. Consequently, the
build command no longer lets you list types you can build. It
points to the show command instead.
* Fix add not to truncate country number.
* Fix selector coastal to be accurate at all times.
* Fix obscure bug in fairland: the sector added last to an island
wasn't considered coastal. Affected resource computation.
* Fix sector wiping in add command.
* Remove options NO_LCMS, NO_HCMS, NO_OIL. They were broken in many
ways. Custom configuration tables should become a serviceable
replacement eventually.
* Client no longer freezes on long lines of server output.
* Fix uninitialized signal mask bugs.
* Fix Windows service code's treatment of -e.
* Sub interdiction disclosed sub owner through news' actor selector.
* country reports on all countries, but carefully limits information
disclosed to mortals. Output format changed.
* Market no longer forces sellers to grant loans.
* Fix potential crash bug in set command. Friendlier prompt and
diagnostics.
* Substantial code cleanup and portability fixes.
* Extend empfile abstraction to cover game configuration.
* Overhaul of game state storage.
* The above includes major contributions from Ron Koenderink. Many
thanks!
Changes to Empire 4.2.23 - Sun Oct 23 09:28:26 UTC 2005
* Make version pretend option SHIPNAMES still exists, for the benefit
of clients that still depend on it.
* The change to conv in 4.2.22 could crash or compute incorrect
maximum population.
* Info updates missing in 4.2.22.
* A few code cleanups.
Changes to Empire 4.2.22 - Tue Oct 11 20:23:51 UTC 2005
* Log player login, logout and session kill.
* Close loophole in assembly point rules that allowed players to find
all unowned sectors. The assembly point must now be owned by you
or an ally, or you or an ally must have a ship there.
* Don't let embarked land units fire flak.
* Fix display of the last connection's host when the host name was
not resolved.
* Fix change command to accept full length representative (password),
currently 19 characters. It used to chop off after eight
characters.
* Non-recon missions no longer establish contact to owners of
overflown sectors, because those missions do not identify the
owner. This matches info Hidden.
* The following events now establish contact:
- Catching a spy
- Sighting a ship when toggle coastwatch is off
- Spotting overflying planes
- satellite spotting land units
- lookout and llookout spotting ships, planes and land units
- Any relations change
* The country command's `temporary' state of disorder ended after
ten years.
* Telegram notifications could get lost in exotic circumstances,
e.g. while a second client attempted to connect. Can be abused for
stealthy attacks.
* Remove option SNEAK_ATTACK.
* Fix lboard not to let you board dead land units.
* Fix stack smash in bomb, drop, fly, paradrop, recon and sail.
Remote hole!
* bomb, drop, fly, paradrop, recon and sail now deal with EOF
correctly.
* Fix fly to let the player abort the command at the last prompt.
* Client no longer reads execute scripts in binary mode under
Windows.
* New econfig key listen_address.
* econfig key port can now be a service name. Service empire no
longer takes precedence over econfig.
* Client falls back to compiled-in host only if environment doesn't
supply one, not if it can't be resolved. Same for port.
* Oil derrick could extract slightly more oil than was in the ground.
* test command checked start sector for space and some other things
instead of end sector.
* convert now silently limits conversions to avoid exceeding maximum
population.
* shoot no longer limits you to 999 victims.
* 4.2.19 broke pin-bombing commodities on some platforms.
* Don't block on output while update is pending. This is required to
ensure the update can abort commands.
* Commands submitted while the update is waiting for commands to
abort now fail.
* The force command no longer waits for the specified time. It
starts a scheduling thread instead, just like shutdown.
* Correct grammar and punctuation in output of version.
* Option SHIPNAMES is no longer optional.
* Fix output of qorder and sorder for ships with sail path.
* Don't change capital to agribusiness on retake. From Pat Loney.
* bdes prompt for new designation was messed up for empty bmaps.
* Client now supports pipes under Windows.
* Care for subtle Windows socket incompatibilities.
* Fix strength command not to lie about units reacting into
mountains.
* strength now yields the processor periodically, to keep the game
responsive.
* Schedule commands more fairly. Previously, a sufficiently fast
player could starve out the others.
* launch assumed plane maximum mobility 127 for calculating when
satellites will be ready to use.
* Drop support for for DCE threads.
* Drop support for pthread implementations lacking pthread_kill().
This includes ancient versions of OS X.
* Code cleanups.
* Minor info file fixes.
* The above includes major contributions from Ron Koenderink. Many
thanks!
Changes to Empire 4.2.21 - Sat Jul 16 17:51:01 UTC 2005
* Don't let threads block on output to another player thread's
socket. Such blocking violates basic design assumptions and can
cause all kinds of grief. In particular, it causes player session
hangs under Windows with 4.2.20. Broken since the introduction of
flash and asynchronous telegram notification many years ago.
* Threads sleeping until a specified time could return early under
Windows. This could cause double-updates.
* Fix fallout damage (was broken in 4.2.19).
* Fix show sector s (was broken in 4.2.19).
* Fix deliver not to deliver friendly civilians into occupied
sectors.
* Fix mil duplication in board (was broken in 4.2.14).
* Fix stack smash in lrange, shoot and execute. Remote holes, and
the last one doesn't even require authentication.
* Fix crash bug in emp_config parsing.
* Fix buffer overruns in turn and shutdown.
* Fix second argument of shutdown.
* announce, pray, telegram and turn now abort on EOF.
* Fix display of MOTD and game down message of maximum size.
* Correctly support telnet line termination on input. Previously,
carriage returns could slip into ship names and such.
* Fix flash not to lie about recipients that are just logging in.
* Remove obscure login command list.
* Convert client from obsolete termcap to terminfo, and clean up
terminal handling.
* New fairland option -h to print usage information. Improved
command line syntax diagnostics. Exit unsuccessfully on unknown
options.
* fleet and army now copy retreat orders of the fleet's or army's
first member with group retreat orders in the same sector.
Previously, they used the retreat orders of the first fleet or army
member, which is less than useful, and failed to take ownership
into account, which is an abusable bug.
* New xdump nation.
* Fix xdump not to disclose other countries' losses.
* Fix exit status of files program when it can't create files.
* Support UTF-8 encoded Unicode in human-human communications. This
affects MOTD, game down message, telexes, announcements and flash
messages. See new doc/unicode for technical details.
* New login command `options' for client/server option negotiation.
See new doc/clients-howto for technical details. The only option
so far is utf-8.
* emp_client -u now requests UTF-8. This requires a terminal that
understands UTF-8.
* Fix news for land unit defensive support.
* Properly mark sea mines hit by retreating ships. Unmark mines
cleared by bridges.
* Fix diagnostics for unknown selector names in conditionals (was
broken in 4.2.20).
* Fix selector name clashes: rename ship selector mobquota to mquota,
land selector for reaction range limit from rad to rmax.
* Fix Windows services for relative file names on command line or in
econfig (was broken in 4.2.20).
* econfig keys ship_grow_scale, plane_grow_scale and land_grow_scale
are now float. This gives deities finer control over maximum
efficiency gain.
* Fix production command for sectors with 60% efficiency.
* Improve syntax of read for deities.
* Code cleanups.
* Some info topic names differed only in case, which loses on
case-insensitive file systems, and is a bad user interface even
when it works. Change those names. Rename deity command hidden to
peek because its info topic clashed with that of option HIDDEN.
* Thanks to Doug Wescott sheep are finally covered properly in info.
* Documentation fixes.
* Much of the above was contributed by Ron Koenderink. Many thanks!
Changes to Empire 4.2.20 - Tue Mar 22 21:07:18 UTC 2005
* When units in different sectors marched, only units in the sector
with the highest-numbered unit were interdicted. A marching
non-spy made all marching spies visible to interdiction regardless
of location.
* Fix crash when interdiction sinks second ship in a sector. Broken
in 4.0.10.
* Fix an ancient bug in simulation of level production that clobbered
stack and could lead to low predictions, typically zero, which
screwed up budget. The bug had no effect until 4.2.19.
* When a sector revolts, and there wasn't enough space to liberate
all uw, the number of remaining uw got the wrong sign. Broken in
4.2.14.
* Log and abort when LWP stack check detects stack smash. Server
option -s no longer implies -p.
* The native Windows build now supports -p and -s.
* The native Windows build now properly deals with ^C when running in
the foreground. It no longer prompts for a quit command on the
terminal.
* The meaning of server option -D in presence of -e is unclear.
Other programs only support -e. Remove option -D. Use -e
DIR/econfig instead of -D DIR.
* New server option -v shows version information.
* Fix the server's exit status with -h. Broken in 4.2.19.
* The linux-pthreads build failed to shut down on signals.
* Fix threading bugs in the native Windows build that made shutdown
unsafe and screwed up update aborting commands.
* New econfig key pre_update_hook to allow automatic, safe backup
right before the update. See scripts/backup for an example.
* The server now prints log messages to stderr as well when running
in the foreground.
* Fix potential buffer overflows in logerror() and lwpStatus().
* Server now requires POSIX signals. It no longer catches SIGUSR1.
* Remove support for ancient versions of HP-UX.
* Fix seeding of PRNG broken in 4.2.19.
* Don't reseed the PRNG in commands, it hurts randomness and could be
abused by crafty players.
* The server now makes the data directory its working directory.
This also gets rid of a bug that changed the file name of the
sector, power, nation and lostitems file unless econfig could not
be read.
* The server now writes a pid file. Thanks to Daniel O'Connor.
* More user friendly server startup: more errors are detected while
the server still runs in the foreground, which makes it possible to
complain to stderr and to exit unsuccessfully.
* Early log messages went to the log file in the default data
directory, even though econfig specifies another data directory.
* Specifying an econfig file on the command line that can't be read
is now fatal.
* Errors in econfig are now fatal.
* The server now refuses to start when it can't open data files.
* News are now sorted and expire sanely.
* Conditionals can now compare strings as well.
* Corrupted down and motd files could cause buffer overflows.
* Fix recon to let player abort at the flight path prompt.
* power no longer rounds worldwide numbers for deities.
* power command failed to recognize deities with non-zero country
number.
* Change output of production command so that columns are aligned
even for large values. Replace column wkfc by more useful column
avail.
* neweff and production miscalculated work when mil exceeded
population limit.
* neweff miscalculated work when the population limit exceeded 999.
* Fix capping of avail when a big city is torn down.
* Fix a bug in fire that allowed players to find all submarine uids.
* Maximum sector population is no longer hardcoded, and now covered
by xdump. Option RES_POP now affects mountains and plains as
well. From Ray Hyatt.
* Fix fina and news not to ignore errors in conditions.
* The native Windows build now requires Windows Sockets 2.
* The native Windows build now supports multiple instances of the
service. The ability to supply additional startup parameters to
the service has been removed.
* Implement fairland command line parsing under Windows.
* Improved fairland and emp_server usage message.
* Code cleanups.
* Minor info file and documentation fixes.
* Much of the above was contributed by Ron Koenderink. Many thanks!
Changes to Empire 4.2.19 - Thu Dec 23 20:24:24 UTC 2004
* Fix order not to unload into full sectors.
* Fix scrap not to dump stuff into full sectors. Excess stuff is now
destroyed.
* Fix distribute not to conjure up a civilian when importing
civilians from a dist center that doesn't have any.
* Fix flak to resupply no more shells than actually needed.
* Fix rounding error in shoot that could result in more people shot
than actually there.
* Fix info and apro error handling. In particular, do not leak
potentially sensitive information on the server to players.
* info no longer shows a random matching page when the topic argument
is ambiguous. Instead, it lists all matching topics.
* Embarked land units and overflying planes no longer spot each
other.
* Fix show command to show only sectors that players can designate
(was broken in 4.2.18).
* Fix a rounding error in production command column `max'.
* Fix production command for overpopulated mountains and plains.
* Fix tradeship ally cut to match documentation.
* Fix plague, which was was broken in 4.2.14: it got stuck in stage I.
* Fix a bug in aerial sonar where ships could mask submarines with
the same number modulo 256.
* Don't allow bombing of subs that were not detected.
* MOTD and the game down message are now entirely separate: use `turn
motd' for the MOTD, and `turn on' and `turn off' for the game down
message. `turn on' no longer lets you edit the MOTD.
* Remove option NUKEFAILDETONATE.
* Option ORBIT is no longer optional.
* New option GUINEA_PIGS to control experimental stuff not ready for
prime time. If your deity enables this in a serious game, run!
* Many xdump fixes. xdump is now enabled by option GUINEA_PIGS.
* New ship and land selectors rflags, rpath.
* New ship selectors for order: xstart. xend, ystart, yend,
cargostart, cargend, amtstart, amtend
* New ship selectors for sail: mobquota, path, follow.
* New news selector uid.
* Implement command line parsing under Windows where it was missing.
* emp_server and and files print a usage message on command line
syntax errors.
* Fix how emp_server exits after being panicked by a signal. It can
now dump core when this happens.
* Fix bug in client that could crash it when a line of input starts
with '?'.
* Client now gets user name from environment variable LOGNAME if set,
else from system.
* The native Windows build can now run as a service.
* Redirecting client input now works under Windows.
* Code cleanups.
* Don't confuse work with loyalty in info Citizens.
* Minor info file and manual page fixes.
* Much of the above was contributed by Ron Koenderink and Marc
Olzheim. Many thanks!
Changes to Empire 4.2.18 - Tue Sep 7 14:08:59 UTC 2004
* Fix info to accept abbreviated arguments under Windows. From Ron
Koenderink.
* Buying planes or land units loaded on something didn't work when
that something moved.
* Fix a bug that could produce update cascades with update policy
UDP_TIMES.
* Fix delivery and distribution to grant packing bonus only to
efficient sectors, just like move. Previously, delivery ignored
efficiency, and distribution behaved as if it were an efficient
sector without special bonuses.
* New sector selectors loyal, access; ship selectors radius, access,
xbuilt, ybuilt, builder, name; plane selectors radius, access,
theta; land unit selectors radius, react, nland, access; lost
selector id.
* Fix sector selectors che, che_target; plane selectors att, def;
nuke selector types; treaty selector exp; news selector time;
commodity selectors type, xbuy, ybuy.
* Option PLANENAMES is no longer optional.
* Ensure config parameter variables and their description in
configkeys[] are consistent. Inconsistencies there caused bugs in
the past. From Marc Olzheim.
* Complain if econfig file can't be read.
* Better messages for errors in econfig file.
* Remove unused econfig keys hard_tech and last_demand_update.
* New econfig key news_keep_days to configure news expiry.
* New econfig key anno_keep_days to configure announcement expiry.
* Fix announcement expiry. It leaked file descriptors and memory,
and could corrupt the anno file. From Ron Koenderink.
* New command xdump: experimental extended dump. Disabled for now.
* Bankers no longer round down debts, and they collect interest for
the time debtors are idling at sub-prompts.
* Loan interest calculation was broken at the due date and after a
last payment made at the due date. With luck, debtors could abuse
this to repay loans cheap (they couldn't gain cash, though), sharks
to purchase loans cheap, and creditors to collect excessively.
* Fix major bug in transport that allowed two cooperating countries
to duplicate items.
* Don't report interdiction damage twice when transporting planes.
* Fix message for attempting to transport a plane in a sector not
owned by the player.
* Fix confusing diagnostics when refusing to improve defense because
option DEFENSE_INFRA is off.
* Simplify confusing code in budget.
* Fix spacing in output of budget and show.
* Change one-way plane sorties to match ordinary sorties: offer
carriers regardless of the sector they're in, require carriers to
be efficient.
* Allow `realm #'.
* Don't print owner of incoming missile twice when intercepting it.
* Simplify constituent storage in product characteristics.
* Replace remaining `variables' leftovers; mainly in unit
characteristics.
* Remove leading spaces in deity unit dumps.
* Replace inappropriate uses of compile time constant ETUS by 60.
Deities don't change ETUS, they change etu_per_update by editing
econfig. This nonsense dates back at least to chainsaw 3.31.
* Change ship production (fishing and drilling for oil) to match
sector production. Ship efficiency and tech are now relevant, and
all people on board work. From Ron Koenderink.
* Code cleanups.
* Minor info file fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.2.17 - Mon Aug 16 16:21:53 UTC 2004
* Fix seeding of PRNG under Windows. The bug made updates occur at
a predictable time in the update window. From Ron Koenderink.
* Close major loophole in drop that allowed players to determine
whether an arbitrary sector is sea, allied land, or other land.
* fly could fly civilians into occupied sectors. For consistency
with other means to move around stuff, this is no longer possible.
* Don't allow flying to a carrier that doesn't have space for the
planes. Previously, planes that did this were teleported home,
which could be abused.
* Close loophole in bomb that allowed players to find all
sanctuaries.
* Fix move and explore not to crash when moving civilians to a sector
without civilians, and interdiction destroys them all. Found and
debugged by Jeff Cotter.
* Fix printing of messages entered with turn command. '%' characters
could cause havoc, even crashes.
* Use sector's actual maximum population to compute chance of plague
outbreak. Previously, code used 9999 for big cities and 999 for
other sectors, and info Plague said 999. This makes all crowded
sectors equally vulnerable, even mountains, plains, and inefficient
big cities.
* Oil derricks no longer drill and deplete more oil than they can
hold. From Ron Koenderink.
* Version 4.2.15's coordinate and list parsing fixes reject trailing
junk. That's too strict. Silently ignore trailing junk as long as
it starts with whitespace.
* Version 4.2.15's selector rewrite broke some type literals,
e.g. `?des=n' was interpreted as `?des=newdes'. Change to prefer
type literals to selectors.
* Nightly build patches game to get repeatable PRNG results. From
Marc Olzheim.
Changes to Empire 4.2.16 - Wed Jun 16 18:56:16 UTC 2004
* Previous version broke sector production when part of the work is
used for sector construction. Fix courtesy Jeff Cotter.
* Add rudimentary tests to nightly build. From Marc Olzheim.
Changes to Empire 4.2.15 - Wed May 26 17:55:58 UTC 2004
* test command no longer asks whether to abandon the sector.
* explore command could generate a bogus `lost' record when it
regains an abandoned start sector.
* edit command now properly updates stats when editing tech level of
ships, planes or land units. A few of these stats can be edited
separately, which doesn't make much sense, and is now deprecated.
* edit command no longer accepts efficiency values that would destroy
the edited unit. Deities can still delete units by setting the
owner to zero.
* upgrade command used to charge an amount of avail that didn't match
info upgrade. Neither the implemented nor the documented amount
made much sense. Change it to 15% of the full build cost. Rewrite
info upgrade.
* Commands upgrade and build could be off by one when reporting
required avail.
* upgrade command reported rounded cost but charged unrounded
cost. Round cost of upgrade down to match behavior of build.
* Upgrading planes now preserves range when it is less than the
maximum range. It used to set it to the new maximum range.
* show bridge and show tower no longer claim bridge building requires
`workers' (whatever that is), since it doesn't.
* Replace option ROLLOVER_AVAIL by econfig parameter
rollover_avail_max, which is the maximum amount of avail that rolls
over. Previously, avail was limited after rollover, and even when
ROLLOVER_AVAIL was off. Fix that.
* Ships weren't always charged mobility for firing with option
NOMOBCOST off.
* Fix shell use of return torpedoes.
* designate no longer complains twice about deity only designations.
* Ensure designate zaps efficiency only when sector type really
changes.
* Fix strength to always report mines to deities.
* Remove option SHIP_DECAY.
* Fix bug in sonar that could crash or yield unpredictable results
near the true origin.
* Fix buffer overflow in flash and wall.
* Fix wall not to strip out first word of message.
* Change market and order to use item types instead of mnemo
characters internally.
* Market now reports sales with full item names instead of single
letter codes.
* buy now requires first argument to be an item name, as documented.
* production command handled production backlog incorrectly, failed
to limit production for production efficiency greater than one,
e.g. agribusiness, and incorrectly limited raw material
consumption. Also fix a rounding error. With help from Ron
Koenderink.
* Sector work was accidentally truncated to even.
* Fix coordinate parsing for large numbers when WORLD_X or WORLD_Y
don't divide SHRT_MAX+1.
* Properly diagnose over-long unit lists.
* Rewrite selector code. Old code let players smash the stack by
supplying too many conditions. New code properly rejects ambiguous
abbreviations and prefers exact matches. Selectors with names that
collide with types, like land units' rad and spy, now work.
Selectors with non-integral values, like land units' att, now work.
* survey used to display hundreds for everything but variables. Now
it displays hundreds only for values that can be large.
* Rewrite info survey. Document ability to survey properties other
than items and resources.
* Rewrite info build, since it was inaccurate and poorly structured.
* Fix info fire on required military. From Marc Olzheim.
* New fairland argument -R to set the PRNG seed. Print the seed.
This allows you to recreate the same world again.
* New facilities to deal with internal errors. These crash when the
server is started with -d, which is appropriate for debugging, and
potentially disastrous for running a real game.
* Automated nightly builds.
* Code cleanups.
Changes to Empire 4.2.14 - Mon Mar 22 09:04:12 UTC 2004
* Options NEWPOWER, NEW_STARVE and NEW_WORK are no longer optional.
* Gripe about unknown options in econfig.
* Remove option GRAB_THINGS.
* Utility program files takes new option -f.
* Remove utility programs land, ore and perfect, which don't compile
since 4.2.0 (Oct '98).
* fairland no longer warns when it added resources, but when it
didn't.
* Fallout code could claim destruction of more items than actually
existed.
* Fix recursive resupply (resupply from supply land unit triggering a
resupply of the land unit) when just testing for how much can be
resupplied. The bug could have led to insufficient resupply.
* Fix recursive resupply not to consume all fuel in supply units. No
supply units consuming fuel exist in the stock game.
* Limit delivery and distribution thresholds to ITEM_MAX (9999).
Distribution threshold were previously limited to 10000, and
delivery thresholds to 65528.
* Limit items in sectors to ITEM_MAX (9999). Commands give and buy
used to limit to 9990. Market transactions and commands explore,
move, drop and fly to 32767. Limiting in autonav code (order
command) didn't work. Item delivery used to stop at 9990,
distribution at 9999. Food growing and sector production used to
stop at 9999. Grind, assault lunchboxes, demobilization, mine
sweeping and che liberating uw could theoretically attempt to
increase items beyond 65535, which would have been ignored
(destroying the increase).
* Properly saturate fallout at FALLOUT_MAX (9999). Previously,
fallout increases behaved inconsistently. Increases beyond 65535
could get ignored, or fallout could saturate at 9999, or it could
overflow at 65536 (that would take quite some nuking, though).
* Properly saturate mines at MINES_MAX (65535). Previously, a mining
operation that would have gone beyond 65535 was ignored.
* Fix `are we loading or unloading' tests for load, unload, lload and
lunload.
* Fix editing of land unit attack and defense values. Implement
editing of ship defense values. Contributed by Ron Koenderink.
* edit now edits che number and target separately.
* Fix edit to properly extend unit files. Contributed by Ron
Koenderink.
* Major internal reorganisation: Sectors need space for items,
deliveries and distribution thresholds. To save space, the
ancients invented `variables': a collection of key-value pairs,
missing means zero value, space for `enough' keys. This
complicates the code, as assigning to a `variable' can fail for
lack of space. Over time, `enough' increased, and for quite some
time now `variables' have been *wasting* space. Replace them,
except in unit characteristics, where they are read-only, and will
be replaced later. This also removes misfeatures like plague
outbreaks silently deleting deliveries.
* Remove disabled commands dissolve and mult. Remove configuration
parameters minmult and maxmult.
* trade command indexed an array out of bounds when attempting to
display the plague as commodity. Fix.
* New make goal interix. Contributed by Ron Koenderink.
* The type selector now prefers an exact match to a partial match.
?type=sb now selects sb, not sbc, even when sbc happens to be found
first.
* Value of selector sell was always zero, remove it.
* Clean up selector code.
* satellite now displays all sectors owned by other players, and none
else. It used to display all but sea, mountains, sanctuaries,
wasteland and wilderness.
* map commands now display wilderness and plains owned by other
players as '?'. Radar commands now display all wilderness and
plains as '?'.
* Fix power timestamp for Windows. Contributed by Ron Koenderink.
* Make client abort the current command on ^C under Windows, as
everywhere else. Contributed by Ron Koenderink.
* Command line parser interpreted trailing whitespace as an another
(empty) argument. Ignore it instead.
* Properly declare stuff in headers, include proper system headers.
Remove all nested external declarations. Source code is now fully
prototyped. Enable appropriate gcc warnings.
* Fix several type errors. Some may have been show-stoppers on big
endian machines where sizeof(long) != sizeof(int).
* Remove pre-ISO C compatibility cruft (hey, it's been only fifteen
years).
* Various portability fixes. Some bugs may have been show-stoppers
when sizeof(long) != sizeof(int). With help from Marc Olzheim and
Ron Koenderink.
* Move some code to more logical places. Remove some unused code,
some of which was hard to port.
* The files program could print error messages to a log file in some
circumstances. Make it print to stderr.
* deliver can now change direction without changing the threshold.
* deliver now provides appropriate context when prompting for
thresholds.
* Login command play no longer ignores up to two arguments if there
isn't a third one.
* Fix payoff (was broken in 4.2.13).
* Capability fish didn't work together with capability oil.
* Fix and clarify plague outbreak chance in info Plague.
* Fix RES_POP maximum population in info Research.
* Fix info telegram and info announce on ~ escapes.
* Update info Selector to match code.
* Document all undocumented unit capabilities and stats.
* Document submarines' ability to carry landspies.
* Fix info shoot on security units.
* Various small info file fixes.
* Many fixes in the troff macro package for info files.
* Many fixes for translating info files to HTML.
* Many info file markup fixes.
Changes to Empire 4.2.13 - Fri Feb 13 22:12:36 UTC 2004
* Source code reindented and cleaned up somewhat.
* Various small info file fixes.
* Fixed change requiring 254 BTUs even when not charging any
(BLITZ).
* Fixed tactical non-marine missile crash.
* Fixed spy unit detection chance for eff<100.
* Fixed output of sorder.
* `edit' can now work non-interactively. Contributed by Ron
Koenderink.
* Fixed and extended edit for sectors.
* Fixed use of errno.
* Minor security fix: doconfig now writes example auth entry as
comment.
* Fixed reading of country name and password in client for Windows.
* Replace use of some obsolete non-portable library functions by
portable equivalents.
* designate now warns about redesignated capital only when it
succeeds in redesignating the capital.
* attack could be off by one when reporting required unit mobility.
* Fixed command matching. Unique prefixes were not always
recognized, and junk suffixes were ignored.
* Removed bestdistpath. bestpath yields the same results.
* Renamed lstats to lstat for consistency and to match info page.
* Fixed non-portable fd_set * arguments of select().
* New `map' flag `h' to highlight own sectors. Contributed by Marc
Olzheim.
* Fixed `sabo' reporting damage to player in deity coordinates.
* New option ROLLOVER_AVAIL. Contributed by Drake Diedrich.
* Fix Windows server shutdown on reading "quit" from stdin.
* Land units now fortify automatically when mobility plus growth
exceeds the maximum. With code from Marc Olzheim.
* Wandering che are less predictable.
* Land units no longer regenerate mobility faster while it is
negative.
* Fixed emp_client -k.
* No longer allow pirates to ferret out where a ship was built.
* Fixed map commands to reject bmap flags `t' and `r' instead of
turning into bmap.
* Fixed lmine shell resupply.
* News no longer call all sub-launched missiles nuclear.
* Incoming missiles are now reported with coordinates.
* Removed some code that served no purpose except crashing on
Windows.
* Fixed Mac OSX and AIX build problems.
* Don't resolve player IP addresses for now, because it can crash
with certain versions of GNU libc.
* Fixed recording of lost nukes.
Changes to Empire 4.2.12 - Mon Aug 18 16:54:21 MDT 2003
* Corrected contact information for Wolfpack.
* Sector isn't abandoned until move or explore is complete.
* Fixed multiple cases where return value of getstarg() was
used without being checked which crashed the server.
* Used stdarg.h instead of varargs.h.
* Call only_subs and save result before mission frees attacker
list. Call with free list could cause server crash.
* Fixed spy sat map for units on opposite side of world wrap.
* Don't sleep in main thread when called from signal handler.
* Fixed error checking in pthreads.
* Properly detach pthreads.
* Pass unlocked mutex to pthread_mutex_unlock.
* Cope with interrupted sleep in pthread empth_sleep to prevent
double update.
* Added server configurable update window.
* Initialized variables passed to setsockopt in accept.c.
* Fixed bug where sharing bmap with uncontacted country crashes
server.
Changes to Empire 4.2.11 - Sun Sep 1 09:54:59 MDT 2002
* Added compile option for the Mac OSX architecture.
* Fixed bug in cargo where unit array was indexed by shp_maxno
instead of lnd_maxno.
* Fixed bug in reject where aborting the command crashes the
server.
* Can't buy land units into enemy headquarters.
* Added sabotage command and commando unit.
* Spies moving by themselves will not trigger interdiction.
* Fixed error in map distance calculation that caused errant
interdiction.
* Ships going under -127 mobility will be set to -127 mob and
not roll over to positive mobility.
* Corrected plane cost in info Maintenance.
* Changed error message for loans rejected for being too big.
* Land units will take casualty damage proportional to their
ability to carry mil.
* Fixed bug where "route i *" crashes server.
* Cannot upgrade planes in orbit.
* Fixed bug in declare with deity aborting command at last
prompt crashes the server.
* Coastwatch notify works with NO_FORT_FIRE option.
* Thread that kills idle connection will charge player for
minutes the player was logged on.
* Removed separate sendeof at end of execute from emp_client
that logged players off on certain platforms.
* Updated player idle counter during read prompt so players
wouldn't be kicked off during long flashes or writing telegrams.
* LOSE_CONTACT will work as advertised.
* Allied units marching through 0 mobility conquered sectors
are charged at least LND_MINMOBCOST.
Changes to Empire 4.2.10 - Mon Aug 13 14:34:39 MDT 2001
* Assault can reinforce own sector when SLOW_WAR is enabled.
* emp_client no longer converts lines into tags but still verifies executes,
pipes, and file redirect match players input.
* Added pboard command to capture enemy planes in your territory.
* Declaring war when at Sitzkrieg won't return relations to Mobilizing.
* Declaring war won't charge money if you're already Mobilizing.
* Added multiple territory fields.
* "show nuke build" displays the proper avail.
* retreating land units will only retreat to sectors owned by the player
that owns the unit.
* added hard cap of "250 + easy" to limit_level.
* education p.e. calculation divides edu constant by etu per update.
* Added patch for Linux for the PowerPC.
Changes to Empire 4.2.9 - Sun Jan 7 15:49:13 PST 2001
* Fixed data corruption when bogus target gets fired upon.
* Increased size of ancillary stacks to prevent stack overflow.
* Changed all references to empire.cx.
* Ships, planes, and land units lost to lack of maintenance will now be
lost.
* No longer allowed to sack deity's capital.
* Accuracy calculation in land unit support was backwards.
* Corrected formula for likelihood of plague in info Plague.
* Fixed files to correctly size map and bmap files from econfig file.
* No longer allowed to add country 0. It corrupts deity country.
Changes to Empire 4.2.8 - Mon Oct 9 17:35:35 MDT 2000
* Fixed range in radar.t and Sector-types.t. Maximum range at infinite
tech is 16.
* Changed so that player can't drop civilians into occupied sectors.
* Fixed bug that crashes update if etus/update is less than 8.
* Fixed sometimes not reporting overflights
* Fixing flak for units/ships to be in all sectors as they should be
* Updated order of firing flak in Flak.t.
* Fixed 80% efficient planes on ships must be maintained.
* Fixed initial MOB_ACCESS check thread sleep time was set by an uninitialized
variable.
* Removed "TEMPORARILY DISABLED" message from mission command for escort
missions. Escort missions have been re-enabled since 4.0.15.
* Using sonar from the navigate command will print the sonar map.
* Eliminated annoying error messages when using navigate with conditionals.
* Fixed Technology.t to correctly add 1 before taking the logarithm.
* Fixed bug that allowed players to steal opponents maps.
* Put time limit for bidding on market and trade in econfig file.
* Moved hours file information into econfig file.
* Added comments on setting update policy in econfig file.
* Added logging of cases where write extends data file by more than one id.
* Option MARKET is turned off by default.
Changes to Empire 4.2.7 - Fri Mar 10 18:41:04 PST 2000
* Added new NF_SACKED flag to indicate when a country has had it's
capital sacked. This flag is only cleared when the country actively
redesignates it's capital using the "capital" command, and changed
capital.t to reflect this (no more re-sacking after an update if the
country doesn't reset and repeating until they are out of cash.)
* Added land unit to edit command for planes.
* Added nuketype to edit command for planes.
* Changed so that if the leader of a group of units is a train, the
railways are used for bestpath instead of roadways.
* Changed mission command to also print reaction radius of reserve
missions when set for land units.
* Changed Flak.t to reflect guns having to be loaded onto a land unit
for flak to fire.
* Changed so that visitor countries cannot change their name or password.
* Changed so that you cannot upgrade deity planes, ships or units.
* Changed so that you know where missions are flown from.
* Changed so that the airport owner you fly a mission from is informed.
* Changed so that preperations for takeoff are reported to the owner of
the sector, ship or unit a plane is taking off from if it is not owned
by the owner of the plane.
* Changed so that when a sector reverts during a guerrilla revolt, the
mobility is not reset. When MOB_ACCESS is not enabled, this used to mean
you would always get at least an updates worth of mobility. With
MOB_ACCESS, sectors that reverted during the update were useless, since you
got no mobility for a long time. This fixes that problem, and makes che
more useful as well.
* Changed so that air defense missions don't always send up every plane in the
area, but instead always send up at most two times the number of incoming
planes (for each interdicting country.) This helps to stop 1 plane from
stripping the mobility from 25 air defense planes all at once, but doesn't
limit it to n+1 as there is for regular interception.
* Clarified deity reversion of sectors in Sector-ownership.t
* Clarified production efficiency and added pointer to "show sector cap"
in Product.t
* Clarified nuketype selector for planes in Selector.t
* Clarified that fortifying units does not affect mission status in info
pages for mission and fortify.
* Clarified fuel syntax upon error in fuel command in empmod.c.
* Cleaned up comments causing minor complaints in some builds.
* Fixed bug in loans where you could collect on proposed loans.
* Fixed production command to be more accurate (though it *still* has some
rounding errors, it's better.)
* Fixed potential memory leak in air defense missions.
* Fixed bug where you couldn't pinbomb some commodities if other commodities
didn't already exist in the sector.
* Fixed bug where you couldn't build 0 crew planes without military in the
sector. (This is different from needing at least 1 military to build all
planes that need a crew which introduced another related bug earlier.)
* Fixed bug where scrapping land unit 0 could cause erroneous transfer
messages to be displayed for deity owned planes.
* Fixed bug where land units on ships in a sector taken over were blown
up or captured.
* Fixed bug where planes on ships in a sector taken over were blown up
or captured.
* Fixed bug in sdump printing origx and origy in deity coordinates.
* Fixed bug in satellites showing wrong sectors (sometimes) when using the
optional arguments.
* Fixed bug in launch showing wrong satellite target (showed asat instead
of the target satellite.)
* Fixed bug where you could gain information not normally available using
the "fire" command to determine sector type information.
* Fixed bug in market/trade creating extra money when loans are taken out.
* Fixed problem with land units not being reported sunk after being sunk
on a ship that was nuked or wastelanded in a sector.
* Fixed problem with Spies.t using "llook" instead of "llookout".
* Fixed problem in lwp/arch.c including jmp_buf.h instead of setjmp.h
on some Linux boxes.
* Fixed problem with plague infection being way too high in cities when
the BIG_CITY option is enabled.
* Fixed bug in edit command getting confused with arguments.
* Fixed bug in ask_move_in_off asking you to move in a negative number of
troops (hey, it could happen. :) )
* Fixed bug in add command not keeping flags or relations initially correct.
* Fixed bug in torpedo command sometimes telling victim about torpedo
sightings even when way out of range.
* Fixed bug in spy command not reporting planes in adjacent sectors, as well
as not formatting them properly when reporting them.
* Fixed bug in satellite with noisy transmission causing a potential
crash of the server with non-100% efficient satellites.
* Fixed potential crashing of the server during satellite display when not
calculating distances to ships and units correctly.
* Fixed bug where planes in non-allied sectors, ships and units could be
used on missions.
* Fixed bug where planes on the trading block could be used on missions.
* Fixed bug where planes and units that get traded don't have mobility set
correctly when using MOB_ACCESS option.
* Fixed bug which made security units virtually useless.
* Fixed access times and mobility not being set right when building planes,
ships, units, bridges and bridge towers when MOB_ACCESS is enabled.
* Fixed minor formatting problem with launch of satellites.
* Fixed minor formatting problem with planes with greater than 999 tech.
* Fixed minor formatting problem with ships with greater than 999 tech.
* Fixed problem with "llook" showing up in TOP info file.
* Fixed problem with lwp Makefile choking on NT builds with clean target.
* General cleanup of potentially ambiguous statements.
Changes to Empire 4.2.6 - Fri Jun 4 05:55:20 PDT 1999
* Added "TECH_POP" as an option where technology costs more to make
as your population grows past 50K civilians. It is disabled by
default.
* Changed "produce" command to accurately print what the true p.e. is.
* Changed "update" command to display if mobility updating is enabled for
MOB_ACCESS option.
* Fixed bug where toggling off the coastwatch flag also turned off
forts firing on hostile ships coming into range.
* Fixed bug where assaulting your own land would violate any treaties
you have where assaults are a violation.
* Fixed bug where all planes (even those without need for a crew, such
as missiles) needed at least 1 military to build.
* Fixed bug where when a ship sinks during the update due to lack of maint,
land units and planes on it were left stranded.
* Fixed bug where when a land unit dies during the update due to lack of
maint, land units and planes on it were left stranded on it.
* Fixed bug where nukes could be lost due to MOB_ACCESS updating mobility
while arming.
* Fixed bug in "show sector capabilities" not showing products correctly.
* Fixed bug in "show tower build" printing "bridges" instead of "bridge
towers".
* Fixed bug in sectors that don't revolt not showing up as lost items.
* Fixed bug where maps with an X of exactly 200 is not drawing third line.
* Fixed bug where MOB_ACCESS was not updating the mobility just before
the update.
* Fixed bug in the way treaties are examined and sometimes produce
wrong results.
* Fixed edit to allow creating negative mobility for sectors.
* Fixed setsector to allow creating negative mobility for sectors.
* Fixed bug where when writing out the value of a sector that had
negative mobility and was damaged in combat, mobility was being
set back to 0.
* Fixed Taxes.t info page to reflect that captured civvies only pay
1/4 taxes.
* Fixed Technology.t info page to reflect TECH_POP option.
* Fixed navigate.t info page to reflect that only ships in the fleet
in the same sector that are fired upon have damage divided up.
* Made techlists toggle on by default (so things are shown in order of
technological advances.)
Changes to Empire 4.2.5 - Mon Mar 1 06:42:24 PST 1999
* Added optimization to increasing mobility to check if an object is
already at max mob, just return since it can't be increased.
* Added "-ltermcap" for client libs for hp build (it was already in
hpux build.)
* Added clearing of telegram flags after the update so that the next
telegram is flagged as new and not part of the update.
* Fixed Update-sequence.t to reflect MOB_ACCESS.
* Fixed bug where fortification amount was not being limited to
maximum mobility for land units (land_mob_max).
* Fixed bug where land unit fortification strength was being calculated
by using 127 instead of land_mob_max.
* Fixed bug where scrapping land units was creating military.
* Fixed description of sect_mob_neg_factor in econfig file.
* Increased speed of PT boats.
Changes to Empire 4.2.4 - Tue Feb 2 05:47:44 PST 1999
* Added check to make military values match up correctly for land
units.
* Fixed bug in doconfig not putting ipglob.c in the right place.
* Fixed bug where attacking deity sectors will violate a treaty.
* Fixed newspaper.t information file.
* Fixed potential bug in fixing up timestamp information when restarting a
game with MOB_ACCESS turned on.
* Fixed bug in explore command not setting mobility to correct
value when MOB_ACCESS was enabled.
* Fixed bug in enlist setting mobility incorrectly sometimes.
* Added doc/backup file for deities which recommends how backups and
restores of the data directory should be done.
Changes to Empire 4.2.3 - Wed Jan 13 06:02:35 PST 1999
* Added linux-pthreads target and build for using pthreads under Linux.
* Added NO_FORT_FIRE option which disables the ability of forts to
fire when enabled.
* Added more error checking and recovery for corrupt data files.
* Changed alphapos target to alpha-pthreads for better clarity.
* Changed fairland to allow 0 sector distance to other islands and
continents (James Risner)
* Changed "frg" and "dam" land unit stats to "rng" and "fir" so they
match the way ships are described (since this is how they really work.)
* Changed Unit-types.t to now describe "rng" as firing range of a unit,
and "fir" as the number of guns that a land unit fires.
* Cleaned up misc. build warnings.
* Changed artillery damage to be 5 + d6 per gun firing from just d6
per gun firing and updated Damage.t to reflect this change.
* Changed artillery firing ranges to be like ships ranges - divided
by two, and modified them to make more sense.
* Changed artillery units to be "slightly" :) more powerful.
* Changed "cavalry" unit to tech 30 and lowered mil content to 20.
* Changed "artillery" unit to tech 35.
* Changed so that guns are no longer required to build units, and
that guns must be loaded onto artillery units for them to fire.
Client developers note: the show command has not changed yet to
remove the 'guns' column (since guns are no longer required) but
will in a future revision (possibly 4.2.4) so "be prepared" for
"show land build" to change. :)
* Fixed landunitgun to handle all the damage calculations like it should.
* Fixed bug sinking planes when the ship they are on sinks.
* Fixed bug destroying planes when the land unit they are on is destroyed.
* Fixed bug where land units could fire support without enough military.
* Fixed bug in abandoning sectors by marching out a land unit where it
would not let you sometimes (uninitialized variable problem.)
* Fixed gets problem in files.c (James Risner)
* Fixed bug in determinig operations range of a ship.
* Fixed bug in building planes where you could manufacture military.
* Fixed warnings in threading package(s).
* Fixed fire.t to reflect new firing changes.
* Fixed lstat.t to reflect new firing changes.
* Fixed sstat.t to reflect the way things really work.
* Fixed Ship-types.t to reflect the way things really work.
* Fixed the way shutdowns work to hopefully better protect data files.
* Fixed bug in attacking when sector mobility is less than 0 and it would
prompt for attacking with a negative amount of military.
* Fixed typo in fire.t stating wrong parameters for firing from a sector.
* Fixed bug in client when it prompts for country name it was putting
an extraneous end of line on the end that needed to be stripped off.
* Fixed problems running on Linux running on an Alpha machine. Thanks
to Rocky Mountain Internet and Jeremy A. Cunningham for giving us time
on a machine to work out the bugs. (Note that the only build that
works on Linux/Alpha is the linux-pthreads)
Changes to Empire 4.2.2 - Sun Dec 27 12:46:34 PST 1998
* Added some code optimizations into the update code when building paths.
* Added some new cacheing for building paths to help speed up updates.
* Added so that you can use "name" and "password" with the change command
as well as "country" and "representative".
* Added flag to power command so that if you are a deity and enter
a negative number of countries you want to see, you see the power chart
for that many countries without power numbers on the next line. Only
useful for deities that want to see the chart un-broken up by that line.
* Added new functionality to fortify command. You can now use a negative
fortification value to cause the unit to be fortified and leave at
least that much mobility on the unit. I.E. "fort * -67" will fortify
all units and make sure the mobility of each unit doesn't go below
67. If the mobility is already below that level (or equal) the unit
is left unchanged.
* Added that the realm command prints "Realm #n is x:x,y:y" after
you set a new realm.
* Added TREATIES option and enabled it by default.
* Added "no depth-charging subs" and "no new land units" treaty
clauses.
* Added Trannie Carter's basic client fix to use fgets instead of gets.
* Changed market and command to only print the lowest priced lot of
each given commodity by default. If you specify "all" it shows
all lots on the market, and if you specify a specific item, it shows
all lots of that item type.
* Changed start command to only write out sector if it changed.
* Changed stop command to only write out sector if it changed.
* Changed how plane names were changed on server startup if the
PLANENAMES option was enabled.
* Changed move command to use standard askyn function for abandoning
sector prompt.
* Changed plane overlight sightings to take stealth into account,
and if the planes managed to evade all flak and interceptors, they
are not marked as "spotted" over enemy sectors.
* Changed all units with the supply flag to have their marching speeds
based on efficiency since that is their purpose. What this means is
that supply units and trains are more effective at 100% than at 10%
(just as fighting units are more effective at 100% than at 10%, but
their effectiveness is determined by how well they fight, not how well
they "run away, run away!" :) )
* Changed so that flash toggle is on by default for POGO at setup
time.
* Changed so that when a sector is taken, all land units owned by the
current owner are treated as planes are during takeovers (i.e. there
is a pretty good chance they are blown up, and if not, they change owner
to the attacker and are beat up pretty good.)
* Fixed treaties to work again.
* Fixed bug in taking over land units not using correct pointer (can
cause a crash or data corruption.)
* Fixed collect command to wipe deliver and distribution information
correctly.
* Fixed potential bug in bmap not working when destination bmap has
blank spaces in it.
* Fixed bug in shark command not getting right nation structure.
* Fixed bug in server where empty commands (for example, all spaces
or tabs) were being reported as bogus commands. They are now just
ignored.
* Fixed bug in scrap not dropping land units off of scrapped units carrying
them.
* Fixed bug in news where boarding of land units was reported backwards.
* Fixed bug in calculating new people when growing them during an update.
* Fixed missing -ltermcap in HP/UX build.
* Fixed setsector to limit mobility to 127 not 255 (255 was being caught
later and being reset to 0 anyway)
* Fixed Sector-types.t to show a '\' instead of a '/' for wasteland,
since that is what it really is.
* Fixed retreat.t documentation to reflect the "retreat upon failed
boarding" flag.
* Fixed bug where satellites were not orbiting the world during the
update.
* Fixed bug in torpedos being too smart. They knew how to jump over
land! :) Now the "line_of_sight" routine is used to determine if a
torpedo has a straight path to the destination. If it doesn't, the
torpedo no longer jumps over land, but instead slams into it. This was
an interesting bug because you could torp ships on the other side of
a very skinny island as long as they were in range, even if there was
no sea route possible.
* Fixed bug when pinbombing and you run out of an object to pinbomb (land
units for example) but you still have to pick something to bomb. For
ships it worked ok (just aborted that it couldn't find any more ships)
and this was fixed for land units and planes.
* Fixed server crashing bug when flying a plane and not carrying
any cargo.
* Fixed bug in move losing commodities when it runs out of room in the
destination sector. Goods are now attempted to be returned to the
start sector, and apporpriate steps taken if the start sector is no
longer available.
* Fixed march to prompt you before you abandon a sector you own by
marching out the last land unit.
* Fixed check functions to only check the relevant portions of the structure
and not the timestamp info that doesn't affect how the object functions.
* Fixed bug in spy command that always told you if a spy unit was in a
non-owned sector.
* Fixed bug in displaying of land unit missions not showing correct land
unit range.
* Fixed bug in wire command where new announcements that you read at
the last second don't get wiped out properly.
* Fixed bug where announcement file could be corrupted by very long lines.
* Fixed bug where bmap was not set when player was told what kind of
sector they were attacking (this was an old abusable bug that was
removed long ago to fix the abuse, and it's been fixed in a non-abusable
way finally.)
* Fixed bug where change command would warn you about monetary and
BTU costs, but not prompt you to break out if you didn't want to really
change your country name.
* Fixed bug in sub-launched nukes that are intercepted being reported in
the news incorrectly.
* Fixed bug in load where you could abandon a sector and not know it by
loading your last civilians or military onto a ship.
* Fixed potential memory leak in autonav code.
* Fixed potential bug where you could possibly determine if a sector is
owned or not using one way plane missions.
* Fixed Damage.t info page to properly show damages for planes and
land unit shelling.
* Fixed deliver.t to include syntax for command.
* Fixed country.t to include syntax for command.
* Fixed bug where ships on orders were not adding radar information to
the bmap during an update.
* Fixed bug where ships on sail were not adding radar information to
the bmap during an update.
* Fixed bestownedpath code to use the bmap properly. Note this is a very
important bug fix. When navigating a ship, players are no longer given
free information that they would not normally know. For example, if you
try sailing your ship off into uncharted areas of your bmap, the bestpath
code will only use as much information as you have on-hand (i.e. your
bmap) to plan out your path for you. If you have no information on an
area, it just keeps forging on, until bumping into something. Of course,
after the initial exploration through an area, the bmap will be set and
used for all future sailings through that area. Harbors and bridges
are still checked for construction worthiness if you know where they
are (i.e. they are on your bmap.) (Overall, what happened before
was that the bestpath code would route your ship around islands that
you didn't even know were there, and you could use various commands
to see how that ship was going to sail during the update and thus you
gained information that you wouldn't normally know.)
* Merged bestpath and bestownedpath and wrote new wrappers, "BestShipPath"
and "BestAirPath" to use it properly. It is also good to note that
bestownedpath is used to determine paths for ships and for planes,
and that best_path (which uses the A* algorithm) is used for all land
based paths, and that the two are never interchanged.
* Removed "jet recon" plane (it slipped in during the PLANENAMES conversion,
and RECON was never used before.)
* Removed extraneous "resnoise" and "resbenefit" functions and combined
the two for setresource and setsector commands.
Changes to Empire 4.2.1 - Tue Nov 3 12:56:20 PST 1998
* Fixed problem with global/plane.c not defining last structure element
properly, and thus causing crashes when accessing certain plane
routines. This happened during the move to make the PLANENAMES option
run-time configurable.
Changes to Empire 4.2.0 - Thu Oct 29 06:27:15 PST 1998
* Bumped rev to 4.2.0 since this is a major release (the server is now
run-time configurable for just about everything and is released under
the GNU GPL.)
* Put in official licensing information.
* Re-arranged and commented the econfig (Empire Configuration) file. The
auto-generated "data/econfig" file is now pumped out chock full of
comments (which may or may not be useful.) Since the server is
pretty much fully run-time configurable (MAXNOC is not, but it gets
a default of 99 anyway) deities will probably be spending more time
in the config file.
* Added server support for building under NT, including mods from
Doug Hay and Steve McClure to get the server building and running
under NT. (This was built using MSVC++ 5.0 on NT 4.0 and command
line "nmake nt")
* Added Doug Hay's ntthread.c implementation for NT threading.
* Added max pop column to "show sector stats" output.
* Added lboard command for boarding land units from sectors. Only raw
mil can board land units, and only mil and land units aboard the unit
being boarded fight back.
* Added GODNEWS option. When enabled, the deity giving people stuff
is shown in the news.
* Added bridge tower sector ('@')
* Added BRIDGETOWERS option. When enabled you can build bridge towers
from a bridge span. You can then build bridge spans from the tower.
If the tower is destroyed ( <20% eff) bridges connected fall unless
supported on the other side. You can only build bridge towers in open
water not adjacent to land and other towers. Expensive.
* Added plains sector ('~') - Max pop is 1/40th regular sectors, and
it is deity creatable only (can't redesignate unless you wasteland it
with a nuke :) )
* Changed "info all" to no longer use printdir, instead it just uses the "all"
info page which contains this information.
* Changed so you can now load up to 2 spy units onto non-land unit carrying
submarines if the LANDSPIES option is enabled. Useful for sneaking up
to shore and spying on your neighbors.
* Changed so spies unloaded from ships are not given as gifts, they are just
unloaded quietly.
* Changed build command to handle building towers ("build t")
* Changed show command to show tower stats ("show t b")
* Changed reject so you can now reject things from any country except
deity countries (this now includes sanctuary countries and visitor
countries you don't want to deal with)
* Changed ndump to dump nuclear stockpile ID as well.
* Changed flash so that if someone allied to you is either not logged on or
not accepting flashes, you are notified. This is info you could gain
otherwise since you can see other countries that are allied to you via
players.
* Fixed bug in news command when HIDDEN mods are enabled.
* Fixed distribute command to only write out to the database if we
actually changed the sector (i.e. if we really moved the dist
center, we write. Otherwise, it makes no point.)
* Fixed threshold command to only write out to the database if
we actually changed the sector (i.e. if we really changed the
threshold, we write. Otherwise, it makes no point.)
* Fixed - population growth and truncation in "Update-sequence.t" info
file is now clearer
* Fixed the way fortify takes mobility away from a land unit if
engineers are present.
* Fixed bug in buying commodities at the last minute not resetting the
time correctly in all situations.
* Fixed bug in building nukes where it would always ask if you tried
building more than one at a time.
* Fixed bug where if you put (either by building or by transporting)
more than 127 of one type of nuke in a sector, they all got lost. A
negative wrapover sort of thing.
* Fixed ndump to print # of stockpiles dumped.
* Fixed ndump.t to reflect changes
* Fixed bug in build command that didn't account for EOL characters.
* Fixed bug where you could use planes to drop conquered populace
* Fixed bug in distribute command in how it checked for current distribution
sector.
* Fixed pr_flash and pr_inform to no longer send messages if the player
is still in the process of logging in (i.e. not in the PLAYING state)
* Fixed report command output for deities.
* Fixed bug in nuclear damage either taking out submarines when it
shouldn't, or not taking them out when it should.
* Fixed bug in loading units that are carrying units onto other units
(note that it doesn't happen since only HEAVY units can carry other
units and that check works, but that might change some day, and we
don't want units carrying units to be carried by other units, etc. :) )
* Fixed info pages to reflect new sector types.
* Fixed info pages to reflect new spy unit capabilities.
* Fixed show commands to only show trade ships if the TRADESHIPS option
is enabled.
* Fixed build command to only allow building of trade ships if the
TRADESHIPS options is enabled.
* Fixed up some definitions located in many places used for checking
sectors for navigation rights.
* Fixed power.t to correctly describe NEW_POWER formula.
* Made HIDDEN option run time configurable.
* Made LOSE_CONTACT option run time configurable.
* Made ORBIT option run time configurable.
* Made SAIL option run time configurable.
* Made MOB_ACCESS option run time configurable.
* Made FALLOUT option run time configurable.
* Made SLOW_WAR option run time configurable.
* Made SNEAK_ATTACK option run time configurable.
* Made WORLD_X and WORLD_Y run time configurable.
* Made MARKET option run time configurable.
* Made LOANS option run time configurable.
* Made BIG_CITY option run time configurable.
* Made TRADESHIPS option run time configurable.
* Made SHIPNAMES option run time configurable.
* Made DEMANDUPDATE option run time configurable.
* Made UPDATESCHED option run time configurable.
* Made LANDSPIES option run time configurable.
* Made NONUKES option run time configurable.
* Made PLANENAMES option run time configurable.
* Removed SMALL_SERVER stuff (unused baggage)
* Removed trading post sector ('v')
Changes to Empire 4.0.18 - Thu Sep 24 06:54:27 PDT 1998
* Fixed bug in aircombat where planes in flight could intercept air
defense planes and take no damage (i.e. they got to fight twice,
once for free.)
* Fixed bug in freeing memory after performing missions that could crash
the server (it mainly happened after an interdiction mission using
planes and escorts, where some escorts came from airports that didn't have
bombers going up. Freeing the leftover escorts was crashing the server.)
* Fixed bug where you could load non-existant units if you were allied
with country #0.
* Fixed bug where you could pin-bomb a plane with itself.
* Fixed bug where satellites over a bridge may get killed if the bridge
is sunk.
* Fixed bug where land units on a ship in the same sector as a bridge
that is splashed may get sunk.
* Fixed bug where planes on a ship in the same sector as a bridge
that is splashed may get sunk.
* Fixed doconfig with correct empire site text.
* Fixed major problem with abms not firing, and sometimes crashing
server.
* Fixed bug in land units counting up loaded units wrong.
* Fixed doconfig makefile to have doconfig.c as a dependency.
* Fixed bug in resetting commodities (the comm_uid was not being
properly set.)
* Fixed bug in repaying loans not working correctly (the l_uid was not
being properly set.)
* Fixed bug in buying items from the trading block not allowing you
to due to a perceived change in item status.
* Fixed bug in mfir.c where a bogus input to a target could crash
the server.
* Fixed bug that after you read telegrams new telegrams may not send
an inform message (the old telegram flags were not cleared.)
* Fixed bug where fort support distance calculations are calculated
twice instead of just once. This bug caused a lower percentage
of support fire than designed.
* Fixed bomb.t to reflect land unit changes.
* Put in some integrity checking for planes returing from bombing runs.
* Added ability to edit land unit that a land unit is loaded on in
edit command.
* Consolidated bridgefall code into "knockdown" function (this code
existed in at least 3 places, and was different in all of them.)
* Subs returning fire are no longer reported in the news.
* Visitor countries can now use the 'motd' command.
* When trying to use a visitor country, if it is in use, you are not told
by whom, just that it is in use.
* Optimized (slightly) support fire from forts not getting supply and
shells if not needed (out of range)
* Updated Education.t
* Modified (increased) chances of hitting mines slightly.
* Removed unused variables from shp_check_mines.
Changes to Empire 4.0.17 - Fri Jul 31 06:12:21 PDT 1998
* Added ability in edit to change coastal flag for sectors.
* Added ability in edit to edit plague values for ships.
* Added ability for "spy" to report all units/planes not owned by you
that exist in the sector you are spying from.
* Modified naval planes and anti-sub planes.
* Changed so that missiles and bombs that miss their targets cause
collateral damage in the target sector (they have to land somewhere!)
* Changed llook so that non-spy units are required to have at least 1
military personnel on board to see anything.
* Fixed "llookout.t" to reflect change for military requirement.
* Updated Plague.t
* Updated upgrade.t
* Added "lmine" flag for deities to see what sectors have mines in them
(works for sea and land mines, used "lmine" to distinguish it from "min"
which determines mineral (iron) content of a sector.)
* No longer able to pin bomb land units on a ship.
* Land units are required to have at least one military loaded to perform
a mission.
* Firing land units are required to have at least on military loaded to
be able to fire (or return fire.)
* Spies are not always seen when being pinbombed. You have to look very
carefully for them (as you usually would.)
* Fixed typo in "Spies.t"
* Added new info about spy ability to spy.t.
* Updated tax information in Innards.t and Update-sequence.t
* Fixed typo in fire.t information about units firing on ships.
* Loading military onto land units now resets fortification. (You gotta
re-fortify the new guys.)
* Fixed bug where planes that were mine capable could not drop mines if
they were not cargo capable.
* Fixed bug in potentially crashing in update code for nations tech/research.
* Fixed bug in execute putting you into execute mode incorrectly.
* Fixed bug in board not allowing land units to board from 0 mobility
sectors.
* Fixed bug where interdicted land units that were missed displayed
a "SPLASH! Bombs miss your ships" message.
* Fixed bug in minesweeping sectors where, even with mobility or
having the sweep ability, ships would get hit by mines for doing
nothing.
* Fixed bug in count_land_planes always writing out land units unnecessarily.
* Fixed bug in count_planes always writing out ships unnecessarily.
* Fixed bug in lnd_count_units always writing out land units unnecessarily.
* Fixed bug in count_units always writing out ships unnecessarily.
* Fixed bug in llook that reported units on ships.
* Fixed bug in llook that reported satellites launched over the unit.
* Fixed bug in llook that always reported spies (it should be a 10-100%
chance)
* Fixed bug in anti possibly not saving lost items correctly.
* Fixed bug in planes getting extended range when on missions and the
op center is not where the plane is located.
* Fixed bug in land unit defensive strength not being based on the eff of
the unit when calculating odds of a battle.
* Fixed bug in board not reporting consistant information.
* Fixed bug in the way land unit casualties were being taken.
* Fixed bug where land units on ships could return fire.
* Fixed bug where land units on other land units could return fire.
* Fixed bug where land units on other land units could fire.
* Fixed bug in attacks/assaults/boardings spreading plague incorrectly.
* Fixed bug in updating plague for ships.
* Fixed bug in updating plague for land units.
* Fixed bug in updating plague for attacking/defending land units.
* Fixed bug where you couldn't pin-bomb land units that were < 20% eff.
* Fixed bug which revealed the owner of torping subs when on a mission.
Changes to Empire 4.0.16 - Fri Jun 12 08:52:06 EDT 1998
* Added patches sent in by Steve McClure, Sverker Wiberg and Curtis
Larsen. They are described with other changes below.
* Fixed bugs in the following commands that allowed two cooperating
countries to create infinite numbers of any commodity and/or cash
at any time (race conditions in the server): build, board, deliver,
designate, distribute, explore, fuel, improve, load, ltend, mobquota,
move, name, order, reset, sail, sell, set, tend, territory, test,
threshold, torpedo, transport, unload
* Fixed bug in board command giving out too much information about a
non-owned sector when it shouldn't be.
* Fixed bug in board command when firing on a sector in defense before
checking mobility.
* Fixed bug in rangeedit allowing plane(s) to possibly be stored wrong.
* Fixed bug in launch allowing plane to possibly be stored wrong after
launch.
* Fixed bug in lrangeedit allowing land unit(s) to possibly be stored wrong.
* Fixed bug in morale allowing land unit(s) to possibly be stored wrong.
* Fixed bug in arm/disarm allowing a plane to possibly be stored wrong.
* Fixed bug in loan sometimes not writing database correctly.
* Fixed bug in collect.
* Fixed bug in dropping mines from land units.
* Fixed crashing bug in sector_strength routine when oceans take
collateral damage.
* Fixed bug in transport possibly decrementing too much mobility when
moving a nuke.
* Fixed some little warning type messages building with gcc -Wall.
* Fixed problem compiling lwp threads with glibc6 under Linux.
* Changed flash so that players can always flash deities.
* Changed players command to always show deities and visitor countries
that are logged on, and only show allied countries for normal player
countries.
* Fixed bug in anti command not stopping sectors when they revolt.
* Fixed bug in set_coastal function not counting bridge spans as
water based sectors (after all, the land is still a coastal sector,
even if next to a bridge span.)
* "flash" and "players" is re-enabled for visitor accounts.
* Fixed bug in bleeding of technology and research to other players.
* Fixed bug in explore not spreading plague correctly.
* Fixed bug in move not spreading plague correctly.
* Fixed bug in deliver not spreading plague correctly.
* Fixed bug in distribute not spreading plague.
* Included "postresults" script in the scripts directory which can be
used to auto-post daily power chart/announcements to rec.games.empire.
* Updated Plague.t
* Updated Innards.t
* Removed OVCONFIG from build.conf, and patched doconfig to match.
* doconfig is only run if needed
* emp_client and emp_server are only linked if needed
* Added list of disabled options to the version command.
* Fixed bug in survey allowing you to see hidden variables.
* Re-enabled escort missions due to above bug fix most likely the problem.
* Changed one instance of "restrict" to "restricted" in bestpath.c. For
some reason, this was causing a problem on one of the Linux builds (??).
* Added "show sector capabilities" functionality (this didn't exist
before.)
* Fixed bug in neweff not reporting stopped sectors. It now (correctly)
reports them as not changing eff.
Changes to Empire 4.0.15 - Wed May 20 12:35:53 EDT 1998
* Fixed the spelling of Markus' name in CHANGES4.0 files.
* Added Markus' patches/fixes. Some are detailed below.
* Added 'mipsultrix.gxx' build target.
* Fixed doconfig to write ipglob.c in the correct target area.
* Fixed a bunch of type casting that needed to be done correctly.
* Only print out last connect by for non-visitor accounts.
* 'players' command is only useable by non-visitor accounts.
* Fixed ask_off in attsub.c to not print out allied sector mil counts
when attacking from neighboring sectors.
* Fixed targetting of che when taking over sectors.
* 'anti' command only fights che that are targetted at you.
* Fixed update not updating timestamps of objects (ships, planes, land
units, sectors.)
* Fixed bug delivering conquered populace.
* Fixed potential bug scuttling ship with land units on it.
* Moved heavy bombers to tech 90.
* Fixed bug in setsector telling the deity coordinates of sectors being
granted/taken away.
* Fixed bug in setting budget of enlistment sectors to 0.
Changes to Empire 4.0.14 - Wed Apr 8 08:47:54 EDT 1998
* Fixed time_t problem in common/log.c
* Fixed bug in headlines
* Replaced vaxultrix build flags with proper vanilla ones.
* Fixed bug in update/prepare.c (sometimes not getting charged for
mil on units and ships)
* Fixed bug in printing of "No ship(s)" twice in cargo command when no
ships were selected.
* Temporarily disabled escort missions until a fix is found. They are
randomly crashing the server.
* Fixed morale.t to reflect that retreat percentage is based off of
morale_base and not 75.
* Fixed bug in bridgefall where planes and units on ship in a sector
that has a bridge collapse are being sunk.
* Fixed bug in update/produce.c when a sector overflows it's capacity
on production.
* Fixed bug in produce command reporting incorrect costs (sometimes).
* Land units on ships will now try to draw supply from the ship they
are on.
Changes to Empire 4.0.13 - Mon Mar 2 11:04:28 EST 1998
* Fixed bug in distribute when world sizes are other than 64x32
* Fixed bug in getcommand (not really a bug, just made it work like
it used to so that the players command is useful for deities
again)
* Fixed building of POSIX threads on Alpha running Digital Unix.
* Fixed line_of_sight prototype in sona.c
* Fixed fairland not to conuse stupid C++ compilers.
Changes to Empire 4.0.12 - Tue Feb 24 11:27:31 EST 1998
* Fixed client build on linux (whoops)
Changes to Empire 4.0.11 - Tue Feb 10 10:53:10 EST 1998
* AIX build seems to only work with gcc right now (but at least that works)
* Vax Ultrix (vaxultrix) build should work now (hopefully) out of the box.
* Took out autosupply of airports when bombing or dropping shells.
(This was the only commodity this was done for, and it was creating
problems since supply is still somewhat broken somewhere)
* Included Curtis Larsen's, Markus Armbruster's and Sverker Wiberg's
submitted patches, which collectively included cleaning up most
of the server prototypes and bogus declarations. Many thanks.
* Increased incoming command buffer to 1024 from 512 bytes
* Increased the # of parsed arguments from 64 to 100
* Fixed bug where spies were not dying when damaged.
* Fixed bug in HIDDEN mods in declare command not printing country # of
uncontacted country correctly (or at all as a matter of fact)
Changes to Empire 4.0.10 - Mon Aug 18 12:34:58 EDT 1997
* Fixed bug where fleets were being interdicted but the damage was being
spread to ships not in the same sectors.
* Fixed but in market when buying goods without enough cash.
* Planes in orbit over airports are no longer fixed up during updates.
* Planes in orbit are no longer damaged when the sectors they are over
are damaged.
* Planes on ships are no longer damaged when the sectors they are in are
damaged, unless the ship is damaged.
* Fixed problem with no newline after partisan activity telegram in
anti.c
* Fixed problem in chan.c printing out change costs incorrectly.
* Fixed problem in dispatch.c screwing things up on redirection.
* financial should now handle 6 and 7 digit loans.
* Planes on ships that are in sectors that revolt are no longer taken
over.
* Fixed bug in powe.c where the power report was mis-calculating the
efficiency of planes.
* Fixed doconfig.c to use STDC instead of multi-level #ifdefs.
* Fixed bug in parse.c that was screwing up double quotes in conditional
arguments.
* Military in a sector now only produce up to maxpop, just like civvies
and uw's. No more stuffing 6K mil into a mountain to max it out. You
can still hold more mil there over the updates, but the extras just
won't produce anymore.
* Fixed bug in shark that allowed you to shark up loans even if you couldn't
cover the debt.
* Fixed bug in day of week calculation for server up time in common/keyword.c
that is used for gamedays.
* Documented what happens to standing military in collect.t when you collect
a sector.
* Documented mountains only holding and using 1/10th of the normal sector
population in Sector-types.t.
* Fixed documentation on ship's firing ranges in fire.t to be less
ambiguous.
* Updated nukes in nuke.t
* Added apropos command (thanks to Mike Wise)
* Added case-insensitivity to the info command (thanks to Mike Wise). If
there are two files of the same name, and you don't get a complete match,
then whichever file is found first in the directory is used.
* Changed documentation in wantupd.h
Changes to Empire 4.0.9 - Sat Apr 19 23:01:51 EDT 1997
* Fixed dump info pages that were getting formatted funny.
* Fixed improve info page.
* Fixed bug in allied planes/units not moving when the carriers move.
* Fixed bug in satellite output for <100% satellites.
* Fixed bug in load/unload not putting a newline after some unloadings
in allied sectors.
* Fixed bug in harden not printing correct values.
* Fixed bug in creating/moving/etc. nuclear stockpiles.
* Fixed bug where subs were trying to torp commodities moving on land when
on interdiction. (This was funny ;-) )
* Fixed bug in "move" where you could keep a sector even after someone else
took it from you.
* Budget now correctly reports the # of units being built.
* Mil on units & ships are now reported as normal military costs, not
ship or unit maintainence costs in budget.
* Fixed bug in update code where taxes could potentially be initialized
incorrectly (affected budgets too.)
* Fixed bug in nat.h header so that it uses SCT_MAXDEF instead of a fixed
number (that was incorrect.)
* Fixed bug with trains - they needed the xlight flag to carry planes.
* Revamped and improved flak.
* Added "Flak" info page.
* Added "Fallout" info page.
* Fixed repay/offer/consider to all need a capital to be used.
* Fixed bug with air defense missions not running when not AT WAR. They now
fly when HOSTILE.
* plane/ship/unit short names are all now 4 characters, padded if needed.
* pdump/sdump/ldump/ndump now just print the short name for the type.
* sdump now has ship name at very end in quotes.
These were done at the request of some client developers for ease of use.
* Fixed extra space in the dump output.
* Fixed fallout - not quite so nasty anymore.
* Fixed fallout - things on ships/units are damaged now.
* Fixed and balanced planes/ships/units/nukes in conjunction with each other.
* Fixed bug in doconfig.c calculating wrong s_p_etu sometimes.
* Fixed bug where harbors weren't being used to resupply.
* Fixed bug where selling units loaded with planes and units wouldn't take
the loaded planes or units - they are now dropped.
* Fixed bug in arm/disarm where you could arm/disarm planes on the trading
block.
* Deities can now remove things from the trading block/market.
* Fixed bug in "work" not charging engineers enough mob.
* Fixed bug in "work" not adding teardown and buildup avail costs together.
* Subs no longer need mobility to return fire when fired upon.
* Fixed "reset".
* Fixed bug in "trade" allowing 2 players to pay for the same item, but only
the last player gets it.
* Fixed bug where you couldn't launch missiles from allied ships or sectors.
* Fixed bombing so that pin-bombing can cause collateral damage too.
* Fixed sector damage to damage planes there too.
* Fixed flag in lload so that it doesn't always print if not needed.
* Fixed "sell.t" info page.
* Fixed bug in "buy" where not entering the price correctly could cause
a crash.
* Fixed "sell" so that at least 1 mobility is required to sell goods. Keeps
the midnight "raid and sell" abuse down. :)
* Fixed "show plane cap" to move the last column over 1 more where it should
be.
* Fixed timestamps to be updated for units/planes on ships/units that move,
since those units/planes move too.
Changes to Empire 4.0.8 - Wed Feb 26 23:00:51 EST 1997
* Fixed bug in nstr_exec that was wiping out the previous conditional.
This was major because it affected timestamp values which are more
than 65535.
* Fixed bug in sdump.c for typo in reporting the trade ships origin.
Changes to Empire 4.0.7 - Mon Feb 24 22:48:54 EST 1997
* Fixed bug in aircombat.c when calculating the air combat odds. Negative
numbers were screwing things up good...
* Fort sector's coordinates are no longer printed when auto-firing at
ships.
* Subs can now surface and fire deck guns (again) They can also be
hit by return fire when doing so.
* Fixed bug in setting of plane attack and defensive values so that
negative numbers don't keep going further negative.
* Fixed incorrect military control calculation in the sell command.
* Trading posts are no longer required to sell goods from. You can sell
from harbors and warehouses now too.
* Spy now prints out the owner of land units you see when spying. Before
this was assumed to be sector owner, which is no longer true.
* Loading land units now prints out what was loaded onto each unit,
just as loading ships do.
* Added fallout, coast, c_del, m_del, c_cut and m_cut to dump output.
* Added "GO_RENEW" option. This option means that gold and oil resources
are renewable.
* Added "lost_items_timeout" config variable, and set the default to
48 hours. This determines how long lost items stay in the lost items
database.
* Fixed land unit names to be more consistent.
* Fixed mission.t info page.
* Fixed bug in that if mission_mob_cost was set to 0, even negative
mob units should be able to be put on missions.
* Removed restriction on things needing to be at least 60% to be put
on a mission. Note that while you can put them on missions at < 60%
now, when trying to do the mission, it still checks the eff. This
is to help in automatic setup (build, put on mission, forget) instead
of having to come back repeatedly.
* Spies caught in Neutral or Friendly countries cause the Neutral or
Friendly country to go Hostile towards the owner of the spy.
* Tweaked ammunition numbers for artillery units.
* No more automatic declarations of War should be made. You will go
hostile, but since going to war doesn't increase your countries
defenses, and is purely political, it is left to the player to go
that final step.
* Fixed bug in trade that wasn't incrementing the time if last second bidding.
* Fixed bug in "lmine" that was crashing the server if the land unit was
out of mobility.
* Fixed buy so that if you specify a product, you can only bid on that
type of product.
* Added "lost.t" info page.
* Added "lost items" database (EF_LOST)
* Fixed bug where you could move in allied forces after an attack if they
bordered the victim area.
* Fixed nstr_comp to deal with values > 16 bits coming in from
client for comparisons.
* Changed last minute market/trade timers to increment 5 minutes. 2 minutes
was too quick.
* Fixed decode in lib/common/nstr_subs.c to deal with NSC_TIME better.
* Commented out the logging of the market checking in server/marketup.c,
lib/commands/buy.c and lib/commands/trad.c It was generating lots of
pretty much useless data that made parsing the server.log file more
more difficult than it needed to be.
* Fixed crashing bug in ldump.
* sdump, ldump, ndump, pdump and dump now print out the current
timestamp on the "DUMP XXX" line.
* Fixed denial of service bug in lib/player/accept.c in
player_find_other function.
* Fixed bug in shark reporting incorrect buyer of the loan.
* Fixed bug in sdump.c (case 0 should have been case 10)
* ldump and sdump now always print the fuel column if asked for,
even if opt_FUEL is turned off. In the case that it is turned
off, the fuel is listed as 0.
* Added "timestamp" field, which is updated every time an item is
changed.
* Fixed up the Clients.t info page.
* sdump now prints trade ship building origin.
* sdump now always prints name even if SHIPNAMES isn't defined. If
it is not defined, then the name is empty.
* Added "timestamp" to info/Concepts/Selector.t
* Added some more relevant info to info/Server/Empire4.t
* Fixed Infrastructure.t info page to reflect the fact that infrastructure
is no longer torn down when a sector is re-designated.
* Fixed sell.t to more accurately reflect the time-delay market.
* Fixed read.t and wire.t to reference accept and reject.
* Fixed reject.t not referencing accept command.
* Fixed collect.t to more accurately reflect what goes on when collecting
sectors.
* Fixed financial.t to reflect defaulted loans.
* Fixed dump.t, sdump.t, ldump.t, ndump.t, pdump.t to reflect new
timestamp info.
* Fixed "census.t" (had incorrect reference to "info syntax" instead
of "info Syntax".
Changes to Empire 4.0.6 - Thu Jan 16 11:33 EST 1997
* Increased damage from depthcharges because on increased damage from
torpedos. Sub frange decreased to be more balanced with destroyer frange.
* Intelligence reports (spy) on units will now report the estimated number
of mil on the unit.
* Fixed equation for ship visibility so it will drop as tech increases.
* Added new commands sdump, ldump, pdump, and ndump to dump data on ships,
land units, planes, and nukes.
* If fields are provided, dump will only supply those fields requested.
* Decreased speed of subs.
* When options NO_LCMS or NO_HCMS are set, those commodities are no longer
required for infrastructure improvements.
* Units that lose an assault or a boarding attempt from a ship will no
longer swim back to the ship they came from.
* Units that take extra casualties will no longer lose all their mil at
once.
* Infrastucture is retained when redesignating a sector.
* Dieing spies will no longer crash the server.
* Units, planes, and ships must have mobility to perform missions.
* Units on ship being scrapped are transferred to harbor.
* Food is no longer autoloaded onto units when they are built.
* Fixed show plane stat to show correct range.
* Infantries now take damage at same rate as casualties.
* Fixed bug with hap_fact. Having more happiness now helps with fighting
che.
* Fixed anti to write back target country so che will continue to fight
when they survive.
* Fixed llookout to show correct estimate on number of mil on unit.
* Added buildable architecture "hp". This type will build the server on
a HP/UX machine using the standard compiler instead of gcc.
Changes to Empire 4.0.5 - Thu Dec 12 10:28:48 EST 1996
* Fixed bug in update/distribute.c where pathcost was not being called with
the MOB_ROAD argument (and thus distribution costs could be GREATLY
affected.) - Thanks Ice!
Changes to Empire 4.0.4 - Mon Dec 9 11:00:00 EST 1996
* Fixed Solaris port using gcc.
* Fixed doconfig.c to create directories with right modes.
* Fixed install macros in makefiles to move binaries to the right
places.
Changes to Empire 4.0.3 - Wed Dec 4 22:46:53 EST 1996
* Added HP/UX port.
* Fixed doconfig.c (put exit(0) at the end of main.)
* Fixed improve.c (moved the prompt[] string outside the fcn.)
Changes to Empire 4.0.2 - Mon Oct 14 12:26:40 EDT 1996
* Put in LND_MINMOBCOST in land.h
* Put in change in lnd_mobcost in lndsub.c
* Put in new nuke costs in nuke.c
* Put in fix so that total work can only be done by the max pop. No more extra
civvies tossed in will do it anymore in human.c.
* Put in fix for src/util/Makefile - beefed it up.
* Put in fix to show where your ship is when it gets shelled in mfir.c.
* Changed infrastructure of roads from .040 to .020 (122 instead of 150 in
common/move.c)
* Fixed Update-sequence.t.
* Put in fix for mobcost bonus for 0% highways.
* Fixed stop.t
* Fixed commodity.t
* Spruced up torpedo damage somewhat. :) :)
* Fixed "assault bmap bug" in attsub.c
* Fixed Produce.t (bars cost)
* Changed mountains to get an automatic "2" for defensive bonus in attsub.c
* Fixed consider.t
* Fixed repay.t
* Fixed offer.t
* Fixed "offer" and "consider" not being legal commands in player/empmod.c
* Fixed Damage.t
* Fixed sstat.t
* Fixed lstat.c, pstat.c and sstat.c
* Fixed cutoff command in cuto.c
* Fixed attack value in attack_val in lndsub.c
* Fixed lload in commands/load.c
* Fixed defense_val in lndsub.c - Made it a minimum of 1, so that units will
always fight until dead or retreating. 0 makes them get stuck.
* Fixed update/deliver.c - no delivery of non-oldowned civvies (or anything
else for that matter.)
* Fixed llook in commands/look.c
* Fixed che bug in subs/nstr.c
* Fixed bug in strv.c by overcompensating by 1 food per sector (minute amounts
of people would starve.)
* Fixed update/human.c - feed_people rounding problems (I hope.)
* Fixed morale problem in update/land.c
* Fixed count_bodies in attsub.c
* Fixed lnd_mobcost.
* Fixed subs/land,plane,ship.c to handle sunken units and planes correctly.
* Fixed interest rate in commands/offe.c
* Fixed bug in buy.c.
* Put in DEFENSE_INFRA soption o you can turn on/off the use of the defensive
infrastructure. When off, the defensive infrastructure is the same
as the sector efficiency, and you can't improve it. This is OFF by
default.
* Fixed Empire4.t
* Added Wolfpack.t
* Land units are now built with a default reaction radius of 0.
* Changed name of lt artilleries to "lat" from "lart" so you can now build
"lar"s again.
* Lowered the speed and firing range of pt boats.
* Lowered the initial att strength of cavs from 1.5 to 1.3 (they were TOO
powerful.)
* Changed the max mob gain defaults of units/planes to 1.0 and ships to 1.5
(This is * ETU_RATE, so it is equal to ETU_RATE for units/planes and
1.5 * ETU_RATE for ships.)
* Conquered civvies only pay 1/4 taxes.
* Railways don't get torn down when you rebuild sectors anymore (but roads
and defenses do (if enabled.)
Changes to Empire 4.0.1 - Wed Aug 28 11:35:40 EDT 1996
* Added "extern double tradetax" to check_trade in trad.c
* Improved description of data directory in build.conf
* Fixed bug in attacking land units that retreat so they now get
charged mobility for attacking.
* Fixed dump to report road, rail and defense of a sector at the end.
* Fixed doconfig bug in not checking the right directory to see if the
"data" directory existed or not before trying to create it.
* "change" now works for sanctuary countries.
* Fixed the description of "sinfrastructure".
* Added more info to "Infrastructure".
* Units/planes are no longer reduced to 75% when bought from the trading
block.
* Supply units were slowed down to the speed of infantry units.
* Trade-ship payoffs have been lowered to 2.5, 3.5 and 5.0
* Bars interest is up to $250 per 1K again.
* Civ taxes were raised back up to a 10:1 mil/civ tax ratio (was 20:1)
* Fixed various info pages.
* Fixed bug in people not getting truncated when broke (this was thought
to be fixed, but wasn't. Now it is, dammit!)
* Fixed bug with units marching across oceans (scuba gear not included. ;-) )
* Market/trade taxes and trade ship payoff figures were added to version.
* "cede" has been removed as a default command.
* Makefile rule was fixed for depend build.
* Fixed bug in mapdist not taking world edges into account nicely enough.
* Added a "scuttle" order for autoscuttling trade ships. Makes using them
easier. Cleaned up scuttle code while in there.
* Fixed bug with scuttling a ship with units on it not scuttling the units
too.
Changes to Empire 4.0.0 - Wed Aug 21 1996
* Initial Wolfpack release - Long live the Wolfpack!!!!
* Cleaned up the build environment. Now all that is needed is to edit the
build.conf file, answer the questions there and type "make <arch>" to
build for a specific architecture. Thus, no more reliance on gnumake
or special shell scripts.
* We are now shipping the pre-built info pages with the server for those who
Don't want to build them. You can also still just type "make" and have
the info pages build, but it doesn't completely work (i.e. rebuild new
Subjects) if you don't have perl5 installed.
* Put in the "help" command that does the same thing as "info".
* Removed C_SYNC. This is done for 2 reasons. 1) None of us like it or
wish to support it. 2) We envision a better scheme for doing similar
things will come along.
* Put in MOB_ACCESS - This allows real-time updating of mobility.
* Put in MARKET - This is the time-based market (yes, still teleports,
but it's not as bad as it was.)
* Lots of the documenation has been updated, but there is more to do.
* Added NO_LCMS, NO_HCMS and NO_OIL options. When any of these options are
enabled, you don't need any of that type of material to build things.
If NO_HCMS is enabled, you don't need HCMS to build bridges, you need
lcms. If both NO_HCMS and NO_LCMS are enabled, then you don't need
any materials to build a bridge.
* There is no mobility cost for assigning missions. But, there is also
no longer any benefit for being on a mission either.
* Damage is the same for all commodities (people too.) This means you
can deity shell/bomb sectors again.
* Units are now dependant on tech. What this means is that their statistics
now increase with tech. In addition, there is only 1 type of each basic
unit now (i.e. just "cavalry" instead of "cavalry 1", "cavalry 2", etc.)
This reflects the idea that as you learn more, you learn how to not only
build better units, but you learn to build units better. :) This also
opens the door for a "lupgrade" command along the same lines as the
"upgrade" command for ships.
* Units now have a minimum mob cost for attacking a sector. Marching
mob costs have not changed.
* Starting units have been removed. This means that at the beginning, people
may live a little longer since their neighbor can't come visiting quite
as quick.
* Shells are no longer required to build units.
* Mil are no longer required to build units.
* Mil are no longer an intrinsic part of a unit. They are now a loadable
commodity. The way a unit's defense/att bonuses work now are
attack = (att * mil * eff)
defense = (def * mil * eff)
In addition, when a unit takes damage, both the eff and the mil go
down. You can quickly toss in new hacks, but you need to wait to repair
the unit at the update. Thus, you can now look at unit's efficiency
as their training.
* You need at least 1 mil on a unit to march it (spies are the exception.)
* Units always react if in range and they have the mobility, no matter
what their efficency.
* Units may now march anywhere - in your own sectors, deity owned sectors
or allied sectors, with 1 exception, spies. Also, your units can get
trapped if your ally declares non-alliance with you while your units
are still in his country.)
* Units always march at their speed, efficiency doesn't matter.
* LANDSPIES was added - This creates land unit based spies. Spies may march
anywhere, with a chance of getting caught (except in allied territory.)
See "info Spies" for more info on them.
* Planes may now be based out of allied airports. Landing planes on
ships/sectors you do not own no longer changes thier owner. You can only
land on owned/allied sectors/ships, and you may only
fly/bomb/para/recon/drop from owned/allied sectors. So, if a country
you are allied with goes hostile at you, your planes are now stuck there.
Note that if you are using an allied airport, their commodities get
sucked up, not yours (obviously.)
* Planes are now tech-based. Their statistics increase as their tech
increases. Deleted extraneous planes.
* There is a new toggle, "techlists", which allows you to see what you
can build/stats/capabilities sorted by tech instead of groupings.
* Ships are now tech-based. Their statistics increase as their tech
increases. Deleted extraneous ships.
* Che can now be lessened by making happiness. If you have more happiness
than your conquered populace, they don't fight as hard or recruit as
much. If you have less than them, they fight harder and recruit more.
It's not much though - it ranges from 2.0 in your favor to only 0.8
against you (whereas it was always 1.0 before.) So, it definitely
favors the attackers to make lots of happy now.
* Bridgeheads can only be built on coasts.
* Players command was fixed so you only see allies, and don't get
approx #'s of players anymore.
* POSIX threads support has been added.
* The attack bmap bug has been fixed.
* BTUs regenerate 3 times faster now.
* GRAB_THINGS is off by default.
* Big nuclear bombs are back, and FALLOUT has been fixed and enabled
as a default (you couldn't make wasteland before with FALLOUT, now
you can.)
* You can now deliver military and civilians.
* Added SHIP_DECAY option - off by default (turns off ships decaying out
at sea if not enough mil.)
* The reverting owner bug has been fixed in territory, thresh, dist
and deliver. There are probably more, and when found, will be fixed.
* The "sectors don't starve when stopped or broke" bug has been fixed.
* The "people never get truncated" bug has been fixed.
* Added infrastructure to sectors. What this means is that a sector
can now have it's mobility improved by building both roads and
railways. It also means that a sectors defense is now based on the
defensive infrastructure you build into the sector (no more intrinsic
better defenses based on the sector, you determine which sectors are
defended heavily, and which aren't.)
* The defensive value of a sector no longer relies on the efficiency of
the sector. Instead, it relies on the defensive efficiency of the sector.
Thus, the "production" and "defensive" aspects of sectors have been
separated.
* "show sect stats" now shows the maximum defensive value for sectors.
* Changed sector structure to take floats for off/def values so we can use
a base of 1 instead of 2.
* Added "improve" and "sinfrastructure" to support the infrastructure
concepts.
* Added L_TRAIN units which can only travel along railways. Very fast on
efficient railways, slow on non-efficient ones.
* Added the ability for units to carry other units.
* Fixed census (shortened up "fallout" and "coast" to "fall" and "coa".)
* Forts only cost $500 to build and 100 hcms now (since they don't get any
better defenses automagically.)
* Modified "show sect build" to show the costs for building up the
infrastructure of a sector.
* Changed "spy" and the satellite recon stuff (which shows sector stuff for
spyplanes too) to show the new infrastructure stuff, rounded of course.
* Added Drake's info->html scripts, with some modifications, so you can
now type "make html" and have your info pages built as html files too.
This adds a new directory, "info.html", to the build tree.
* Modified upgrade so that planes and land units may now be upgraded.
* Added pstat command to list the statistics of your planes.
* Added lstat command to list the statistics of your land units.
* Added sstat command to list the statistics of your ships.
* Added nmap command to show a map of your sectors after their new
designations have taken place.
See also : Clients , Server , Infrastructure , Sectors , LandUnits , Planes , Ships