Change Log (pre 2.25)

Empires 1.031 Beta April 14, 2006

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Version 1.031 Beta

Fixes

• Artillery tank cannon was backwards due to the new client-side turrets

Version 1.03 Beta

Additions

• Vehicle turrets are now handled client-side to eliminate lag
• Holding onto a grenade after pulling the pin will cook off the grenade down to a minimum 1 second fuse, total grenade fuse time has been increased to 6 seconds
• Engineers now get points for healing friendly players, healing 200 points of health will give 1 rank point

Fixed

• Scout's hide was broken with 1.02
• Spectator was causing the client to crash due to an error with the new minimap code
• Random commander GUI based crash due to an uninitialized research variable
• As the commander, selected turrets were not showing the correct image in the selected unit area
• Buildings no longer animate while dead (radar spin, turret rotation, etc)
• Vehicles getting stuck after exiting and re-entering (especially NF artillery tank)
• Changing seats in a vehicle causing the vehicle to stop momentarily
• Walls were not changing their physics collision mesh on raising and lowering (this only affected vehicle interaction)
• Vehicle presets wouldn't save if your language setting was anything other than "English"
• Bringing up the scores panel while the team or class selection panel was open would cause the team or class selection panel to show up again after joining a team/selecting a class

Modifications

• Made extensive changes to vehicle, engine, and armor properties (improved weight as well as other changes)
• Made changes to the research tree
• Improved how engineer buildable map objects handle players standing inside when construction is completed and they turn solid
• Improved engineer repair kit regenerating while not in hand or while in a vehicle
• For engineer revive, increased the distance the ragdoll can be from where the player actually died
• A player's ragdoll is immediately removed when he respawns making it easier for an engineer to know if a player can be revived or not
• Set NF and IMP scout rifle parameters to match in terms of accuracy and damage
• Set engineer camera and radar and radar building to detect players/vehicles through objects
• Increased default tickets to 200 per side

Version 1.02 Beta

Additions

• Removed some unnecessary building and tank network vars that were wasting bandwidth
• 'emp_sv_refinery_interval' server cvar for setting how many seconds pass before a refinery will generate a resource point (default is one second)
• New cvar 'emp_sv_player_think' to set the frequency of the player's post think function which takes up a decent chunk of the server's cpu time when running every single frame

Fixes

• Commander crash when having only one unit selected and that unit dies
• Players could build a vehicle from an unbuilt vehicle factory using the menu bound to "v"
• Bots now spawn when using the commands "bot_add_nf" or "bot_add_imp", all they do is run around
• Using the "f" voice menu while holding crouch would skip the second tier menu
• Unbuilt armory giving ammo to vehicles
• A player's rank in the squad menu was being displayed as one rank higher than it actually was
• Building a turret, camera, or radar as an engineer now requires that the surface angle is greater than -45 and less than 45 (AKA the ground and not the ceiling)
• On the team select screen, 'Northern Faction' was misspelled once and the objectives were the same for both teams
• The Brenodi APC & AFV had areas near the front which were being treated as rear armor instead of side armor
• Players can no longer block the vehicle factory build area to prevent vehicles from being created
• If the interior of a vehicle factory is blocked and prevents a vehicle from being built, it no longer deducts the cost of the vehicle even though the vehicle wasn't created
• Inverted mouse pitch now works when aiming a vehicle turret
• A player who team kills another player loses a rank point instead of gaining one
• Scoring rank points as a squad leader no longer goes toward extra points for the squad; only the other players in the squad's earned points go toward extra squad points
• Commander in command view was able to be killed even though he was invisible
• Server crash when spotting a tank's turret with the scout's binoculars
• Server crash when a tank's turret would collide with a mine
• Server crash when a homing missile's target was removed while the homing missile was still alive and tracking it
• Player RPGs had stopped being guided in 1.01 Beta, they now guide as they did in 1.0 Beta
• NF scout rifle was missing its deathmessage icon
• On death messages in the HUD, the weapon name no longer get cut off
• Client side assertion when bringing up the scoreboard on a 32 player server as the 32nd player
• Entity responsible for sending player minimap positions was causing a crash when attempting to run a 64 player server
• Optimized building collision meshes to reduce cpu usage
• HUD now works with widescreen resolution
• On suicide, a player no longer gains a rank point
• Armor and engine weight and cost values were not being factored into the final weight and cost labels in the vehicle build panel

Modifications

• Moved turret rotation to the client when not attacking to save on bandwidth
• Optimized turret range checking code for less cpu usage
• Optimized commander visibility range checking code
• Cut out the parts on the client dealing with physics collisions that were causing crashes
• Optimized the player's think functions to reduce cpu usage
• Increased cost of all vehicle chassis
• Increased cost of all vehicle engines
• Increased cost of all vehicle armor
• Reduced standing spread on most infantry weapons
• Reduced bio MG total damage done over time to 80 down from 300
• At the end of a game, players are only locked in place now instead of freezing their controls so that they can hide the scoreboard
• A scout using the hide skill in the open will be hidden from turrets instead of being required to be in contact with at least one surface
• Increased max player limit to 64
• Added "emp_env_embers" map entity which copies the "env_embers" entity but allows setting of the start and end sizes
• Set vehicles to kill themselves immediately upon reaching their self destruct time instead of slowly hurting themselves
• Changing class to an engineer starts the engineer kit off with zero ammo, spawning as an engineer starts the kit with full ammo
• On damage to turrets, only the owner is notified unless there is no owner, then everyone is notified
• Optimized netcode for entity responsible for sending player minimap positions by only sending necessary information to each team
• Made the local player arrow icon brighter
• Made the local player arrow show even when inside a vehicle
• Modified: no players can spawn when there is only one reinforcement remaining

Version 1.01 Beta

March 17, 2006

Additions

• Linux server.so for running a linux server
• 'emp_sv_vehicle_resource_interval' and 'emp_sv_player_resource_interval' cvars for setting the interval between updating player & vehicle resource managers which send all info needed for the minimap
• 'emp_sv_vehicle_fadout_time' cvar for determining how long vehicle wreckage exists before being removed
• 'emp_sv_netvisdist_player', 'emp_sv_netvisdist_building', 'emp_sv_netvisdist_vehicle', and 'emp_sv_netvisdist_commander' cvars which determine how far each type of entity can be seen, commander affects how far the commander can see other entities
• Support for 'mp_autoteambalance', if a player tries to change teams and it would make the teams uneven, then the player is forced to the team with the fewest players
• 'emp_sv_vehicle_selfdestruct_time' cvar (default: 300 seconds) that determines how long a vehicle will go unoccupied before it starts to damage itself and then die
• Successfully moved all server-side vehicle wheel physics simulation to the client (steering, wheel height, wheel rotation) which reduces a lot of wasted network bandwidth
• Three new voice taunts
• "commander under attack" warning when the commander takes damage, only played once every 30 seconds
• "<building name> under attack" warning when a building takes damage, only played once every 30 seconds
• Map specific config files located in the "/cfg/maps/" dir; the .cfg file that has the same name as the map name is executed on map start; specifically for setting the number of resources/reinforcements per map (emp_escort NF reinforcements for example)

Fixes

• A research item was missing an icon
• Brenodi Empires could continue to build vehicles past their limit
• 'mp_timelimit' works correctly now, when time is reached, both team reinforcements count down at a rate of 2 per second
• When recycling a building, your team would gain the refund as reinforcements instead of resources, whoops
• As grenadier, oldest dropped mine was not always being detonated when attempting to drop more than eight mines
• Minimap would not show spotted/binocular targetted vehicles and buildings if they were out of your PVS (ie, not visible)
• Reduced network bandwidth used by minimap
• The player in the last slot on a server was not being shown on the scoreboard
• Northern Faction MG Level 3 turret's barrels were spaced too far apart to hit infantry
• Crash when canceling/completing an order and the target of the order was already removed from the game
• Crash when trying to issue praise to a squadmate that didn't exist
• Crash when a shell/mortar detonated and couldn't find its owner
• Crash when spotting a target with the binoculars, then 120 secs would pass and the binocs would try to remove the spotted status except the target had already been destroyed/removed
• Crash when a mine was checking if a vehicle that touched it had a passenger with mine defusal to prevent detonation
• Crash when denying a player from joining your squad
• Various client crashes (the big crash that affects everyone is a real pain, it's not fixed but it's rearranged to give me more info in the memory dumps on what exactly is going wrong)

Modifications

• Increased horsepower for some vehicle engines
• Various infantry weapons (hmg, scout rifle, pistols, brenodi rifles)
• Removed server vehicle wheel dust generation to reduce network traffic and time spent thinking
• Reduced time spent calculating physics
• Set voice commands to require at least a 3 second wait time before issuing another command
• Added a larger arrow over the local player on the minimap
• Increased rate all players can build buildings to 1 HP per every 0.5 seconds (engineer's build at 1 HP per every 0.2 seconds)
• A scout can use secondary attack while hidden and not be revealed, can also use binoculars and not be revealed
• A scout's rank affects how fast his invisibility skill hides him by lessening it one second per rank achieved (to a minimum of 2 seconds)
• Scout's invisibility now goes into effect even if the scout is not touching anything (50% transparency)
• Both command vehicle driver view points now sit atop the vehicle so that you have a frame of reference while driving
• Instead of putting '(Comm)' in front of the commander's name, the commander's class is set to 'Commander'
• Engineers get points for repairing the commander's walls
• Reduced frequency of updates for when a turret is playing its idle animation, need to move it fully client-side though
• Changed turret collision mesh from a pyramid shape to a box so that vehicles won't drive up onto them and get stuck
• Split resources and refinery cvar multiplier into separate cvars for each team, this is so that the reinforcements for NF can be increased by the server for emp_escort
• Set HMGs to increase in spread with each bullet fired, inaccuracy starts to take hold if the weapon is fired for too long

Removals

• Engineer's ability to build buildings via '+use'

Version 1.0 Beta

March 4, 2006

• Initial Release
• Added: ALL