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Empire Server Changelog

What's new in Empire Server 4.3.32

Dec 20, 2013
  • Fix an LWP stack overflow observed on AIX 7.1.
  • Fix portability bug in standalone client Makefile
  • Fix portability bug in configure test for curses.
  • The break command now honors new designation of sanctuaries.
  • Changes to edit, give, setsector, setresource, swapsector:
  • Generalize edit to multiple objects: accept <SECTS|SHIPS|PLANES|LANDS|NATS> argument instead of just <SECT|SHIP|PLANE|LAND|NAT>. Obsoletes setsector and setresource.
  • Make interactive "edit c" detect and handle concurrent updates, like other edits do.
  • Don't reprint edited object when done with it.
  • Always print a message describing the actual change. Necessary to give the deity a chance to catch unexpected changes, e.g. a player moving away stuff right before a give command, leaving fewer items than the deity intends to take. Existing messages improved, missing ones added.
  • Consistently send bulletins to the victim / beneficiary of deity meddling, except when changing stuff mortals can't see.
  • Report much more deity meddling in the news (subject to option GODNEWS).
  • More robust argument checking. Before, careless deity edits could cause internal errors. Much bounds checking was missing, inconsistent or wrong.
  • Teleport planes and land units to carrier on load.
  • Refuse to move planes and land units on carriers.
  • Fix stack smash in edit l key 'L' that can mess up sector file.
  • Fix setsector to again print actual landmine change for occupied sectors. Broken in 4.3.31.
  • Suppress bulletins for acts of god to himself.
  • Suppress news for acts of god to gods.
  • Suppress news and bulletins on no-op acts of god.
  • Always send bulletins from POGO. Name the meddling deity in the bulletin text instead. Inconsistent since Chainsaw.
  • Make interactive edit accept empty key argument again.
  • Make interactive edit treat blank input like empty input.
  • Don't let edit put a land unit or plane on two carriers
  • Do not disclose when a deity destroys a ship, tell the ex-owner only that he lost it.
  • edit p and u now show the edited unit like edit s.
  • edit s now shows the edited ship even when its owner is invalid.
  • Clean up output of satellite, land, sorder and mission for world sizes between 200 and 1998. cutoff and level still have issues there.
  • Plug harmless file descriptor leak on OpenBSD with IPv6. Broken in 4.3.31.
  • New doc/contributing explains how to contribute to Empire.
  • Code refactoring and cleanup.
  • Info page, manual page and documentation fixes and clarifications.

New in Empire Server 4.3.29 (Mar 21, 2012)

  • This version plugs a few minor memory and file descriptor leaks.
  • Code cleanup.
  • Info page and manual page fixes.
  • Gameplay fixes.

New in Empire Server 4.3.28 (Oct 9, 2011)

  • Numerous bugfixes.

New in Empire Server 4.3.20 (Feb 21, 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.
  • 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.

New in Empire Server 4.3.19 (Dec 13, 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.

New in Empire Server 4.3.18 (Oct 19, 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.