2.3 Beta 9 released!

[cybersphinx]

We have fixed a serious bug while saving games that made beta8 less than perfect, and we also have a number of other major bug fixes.

Changes:
A new shortcut to toggle the trap cursor setting, alt-t by default (you need to reset your key mappings to enable this), scrolling will stop when the mouse leaves the window, and the scroll border was increased from 16 to 22 pixels. The rest is mainly bugfixes, see the detailed changelog below.

We decided to disable outdated translations, enabled in this release: German, English (UK), Spanish, Estonian, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Traditional Chinese plus the recently added Croatian and Ukrainian.

The Windows installer for this release was built on a different system than those up to Beta 4, please report any irregularities. If your virus scanner complains about it, please report it to the maker as a false positive (and tell us, so we can report it to them as well). The installer is cross-compiled on a Linux system, the hosting is done on Linux, the file never even touched a Windows system before the download.

Bug Reports:
As usual, we need bug reports to fix problems in the game. Please note that we use tickets only to track bugs, for discussions about how features should work and feature requests we have a dedicated forum section.

For bug reports, see BugReporting for details, in short:

• Search the existing tickets for your problem, if the problem has already been fixed in SVN, the ticket will be closed.
• If there is an open one already, feel free to add more info to it.
• If there is no report yet, make a new ticket.
• Be as detailed as possible in both summary and description, and either log in with your forum account or leave an email address so we can contact you if we need more information.
• The more information we have, the easier it is to fix problems, so include savegames/instructions to reproduce the bug, crashdumps, backtraces, screenshots for graphical problems... if you have.
• When you attach files to a ticket, please add each text/image file separately and uncompressed, so we can view them easily in trac (savegames can and should be zipped, they consist of name.gam, possibly name.es, and the files in the name/ folder).

Download:
As usual, downloads can be found on our download page.

Detailed Changelog:
2010-01-24: Version 2.3 beta 9

• General:
  • Fix: Formation speed limiting should be off (r9372)
  • Fix: Saving games would often crash, and proximity blips not display (r9382, #1443)
  • Fix: AIs would use host's truck templates (r9426)
  • Fix: Miscellaneous bugs and crashes (r9354, r9412, r9425, r9434, r9450, r9479)
• UI:
  • Change: Add key mapping to trap/untrap cursor, alt-t by default (r9481)
  • Change: Stop scrolling when the mouse leaves the window (r9428, r9438, r9449)
  • Change: Increase the scroll area from 16 to 22 pixels (r9443)
  • Fix: No longer possible to start a game with everyone on the same team (r9457)
  • Fix: Speeding up the game sped up some of the GUI (r9462)
• Multiplayer:
  • Change: Players will no longer appear in games for a split second if they have the wrong password (r9425)
  • Fix: Players would sometimes be kicked out after one minute, even if they had the same data (r9378)
• Gameplay:
  • Fix: Shift+click on radar now queues orders as well (r9361)
  • Fix: Projectiles that hit wrong target now do damage to the wrong target (r9430)
• Graphics:
  • Fix: Build progress bar is in the right place now (r9374)
  • Fix: Some water tiles looked weird in 8c-Manhattan (r9418)
  • Fix: Factory had visible seams in some places (r9404)
• Skirmish:
  • Change: AI is now more efficient at research (r9384)
  • Change: Research messages are now more specific: "Machinegun damage +25%" instead of "upgrades machinegun damage" (r9393)
  • Fix: Some numbers were unnecessarily specific: 99% instead of 100%, 999 instead of 1000 (r9394)
  • Fix: Flamer Autoloader Mk2 doesn't prerequire Flamer Autoloader (r9394)
• Translations:
  • Fix: Spanish locale didn't work on Linux (r9371)
  • Updated: Spanish (r9366, r9369, r9410, r9421, r9470)
  • Updated: Polish (r9471)
  • New: Croatian (r9476)

[PkK]

Does changeset 9450 apply to the beta builds as well?

I don't mind assertion failures resulting in crashes that much if it helps warzone development.

Philipp

[Zarel]

Does changeset 9450 apply to the beta builds as well?

I don't mind assertion failures resulting in crashes that much if it helps warzone development.

r9450 applies to all builds built in release mode. This applies to Mac binaries, and I think it applies to the beta release tarballs using default configuration.

Asserts are there because they're useful to have when a developer is debugging the game. Having them apply to users is usually rather useless - most of the time, they're just advance warning that there's memory corruption going on, but not nearly bad enough to cause a crash yet, and the crashdumps they produce are completely useless for fixing anything. It can be useful on Windows, since you can then continue and immediately save before anything worse happens, but since they just outright abort on Linux/OSX, they're kind of useless for that purpose, too.

The times they do produce useful crashdumps, half the time, the fix for an assert is simply to remove the assert. Other times, they help point out ways the code could be improved, but they're not really important enough to be crashing an average user's game over.

So don't worry, we're not losing much by turning off asserts.

[PkK]

Hmm, how about instead just writing something to stderr in places were an assert would have failed? That way we can keep playing, and if it later crashes, you can get a trace of all the asserts that failed before.

Philipp

[Per]

Hmm, how about instead just writing something to stderr in places were an assert would have failed

That is what we do.

[sg1efc]

Cool, Thanks again Developers!

[Saberuneko]

Awesome!

One thing, it crashes when closing for me. Not a real problem, but a little weird anyway...

[KenAlcock]

Power Resource, Power Resource, Power Resource

Played a skirmish last night. Every time an AI found a power resource, I got hear about it as if one of my units found a power resource. (Map 4c-SquaresWarV3.wz). Has anyone else seen (or heard rather) anything like this?

EDIT: I should note that it was an every-man-for-himself skirmish--no allies.

[Terminator]

power resource bugs, Yes I confirm that. If AI found res. you hear that voice msg.

[Saberuneko]

Power Resource, Power Resource, Power Resource

Played a skirmish last night. Every time an AI found a power resource, I got hear about it as if one of my units found a power resource. (Map 4c-SquaresWarV3.wz). Has anyone else seen (or heard rather) anything like this?

EDIT: I should note that it was an every-man-for-himself skirmish--no allies.

Yes. Happened to me too.

[Zarel]

Happened to me, too. I think it only happens to host.

[Dalton]

Yes, had same bug as well.

[PkK]

Happened to me, too. I think it only happens to host.

Had that problem in a multiplayer game, it happened to both human players.

Philipp

[DylanDog]

I wanted to ask what means that this ticket has been "set to external". I think this is not a big issue but sometimes avoids to use "autogame on" for test purposes with DyDo-AI as that AI gets +12000-15000 power as soon as the autogame is activated. This was not happening with 2.2.x version of WZ.

[cycler]

Not sure if this is a bug or not, but when i finish the campaign with beta9 nothing happens. I'm pretty sure there are no enemy units hanging around...

Anyone know?

Paul