Darkstars

Rather than go the full hog and do beta 4 and release after xmas, I thought I’d better fix what was wrong here and now and push it out.

And here it is, beta 3.9.8, all the mantis bugs listed have been corrected, all those bugs that people kept coming back to in the last few weeks with 3.9.7 are gone.

But this isn’t just a bug fix release! I’ve also added a command line parameter, gotten rid of the coloured table rows people complained about, and now the battle table is now fully sortable, all columns movable. That’s not all, there’s a new right click menu enabled on the battle list that allows you to filter out battles based on their status.

As always, Linux users set your file paths in settings, and windows users extract into your spring folder.

EDIT:: a bug was found with script.txt and spring not liking AiDLL versus AIDLL. That and one where not all mods where loaded.

AFLobby beta 3.9.8.1 (zip)

This is a bug fix stability patch, however its highly reccomended.

Changes include:

1. A fix for auto login crashing
2. A fix for a map list loading crash
3. Updated links on initial login page
4. Added buttons linking to the bug tracker for reporting errors
5. Disabled the replay site button as it appears to be down
6. A fix for jittery channels
7. Options to turn on and off flags and ranks in ‘xyz joined channel/battle’ messages
8. The colour picker in the skirmish AI tab of the battle window now uses the popup colour picker to save memory.

Windows users must install to their spring directory.

Dont forget to go into settigns and set the paths to unitsync.dll/so and spring on your first run.

Download AFLobby beta 3.9.7 zip

Download AFLobby beta 3.9.7 ubuntu .deb package

Special thanks to rcdraco, overkill and relative for reporting the bugs and helping, and relative for generating a deb package.

After a few failed attempts at installing Trac, I have installed mantis on my webspace, and twiddled it a bit here and there!

I’ve added AFLobby beta 3.9.6 to it, and I’d like it a lot if people would post feature requests, and report bugs for when I work on beta 4.

http://mantis.darkstars.co.uk

Here is a new AFLobby release!

My treks into linux land with ubuntu 7.04, have yielded great improvements in AFLobbies overall stability and usability. Lots of new things have been added fixed and tweaked since beta 3.5, and this is by far one of the best AFLobby releases by far.

Highlights include

• SpringSP and Settings++ Integration support.
• Improved settings page UI, complete with a startup page with better descriptions and shortcuts.
• Chat pane optimizations, and other profiler based speedups.
• To show the user that the lobby hasnt hanged or crashed when logging in, a happy tree friends animation is played just above the loading bar.
• New Substance theme (raven graphite) and password strength checkers, including an update to the latest version fo the Substance library.
• Greater looknfeel support, and a switch from substance to native looknfeel as default. People always choose the native app over the one that doesnt fit in.
• Basic chat text colour customization on top of the existing text highlighting.
• The ability to move the battle list underneath the main tabs like in tasclient. This can be seen in the previous blog post about aflobby progress.
• Vastly improved raw traffic window.
• Experimental ladder integration. Ladder games played will be reported to a temporary ladder site not the official ladder site due to the experimental nature of this code.
• Reduced Colour picker memory usage, most colour pickers show in a popup dialog rather than being blown up and resized to the main window, which takes up a lot of memory
• Proper UI control spacing. No more tasclient style buttons up against the window borders, it looks prettier too!
• Better system font face and scaling support
• The main window is no longer the undecorate blue square and has proper window borders and title bars to fit into the desktop theme.

Get zip here!

Or a deb package here

Requires Sun Java 6. On your first run open settings and set the paths for settings++/settings.exe unitsync.dll/so and spring(.exe) and then restart the lobby.

I keep getting asked “where do I download the latest xyz?”

And I say it isnt quite that simple. So Ill explain how and why in 2 sections:

AFLobby

This is one of the easiest. Look in the big aflobby thread in the linux forum on the main spring forums, and it’ll have the latest official build in the header. Look in the first post or look at the last post and work backwards.

If you manage to get aflobby running and start it up, it’ll automatically check my website to see if there are any newer versions and popup a window with a changelog and a download link.

If you wan’t the very latest bleeding edge version or a version with a bugfix for a newly found bug or a small feature request, you may find a newer development version in the channel topic of #aflobby once you’ve logged in, or you can directly ask me. I have my build setup to automatically zip up aflobby ready to be handed out everytime I compile new code, and generating installers is very easy for me. Just don’t ask everyday.

If you want to stay at the very very latest aflobby with all the fancy new features, you can find aflobby in /trunk/lobbies/aflobby/ as a netbeans 6 project in the spring SVN. You can find links to the spring SVN in a sticky in their development forum.

NTai

This is where things might get problematic. Latest NTai hasnt been stable in a long time. I learnt a lot of stuff doing NTai and with age its become bloated in the code at times. That combined with a long run of bad luck with compilers and profiling tools means that there’re crashbugs and a longrunning lag issue that creeps in. The source of the latter issue has yet to be identified.

So while I’m rewritting and refactoring old code to try and keep things as tidy as possible to help squash bugs and improve the code readability, time has ticked by and the old user base is wondering where NTai has gone?

If you really need NTai you can find it in the spring svn in /trunk/AI/Global/NTai/AI/ where there should be a Visual Studio 2005 project and a codeblocks project. They may need minor modifications to make them work (the pure svn versions are specific to my system in one or two minor values). If you can’t compile yourself you’re best asking me for a copy personally however I doubt that anything I give you will actually work atm as it is probably a highly experimental build I haven’t finished fiddling with yet.

Alternatively you can look in my 700+ page NTai thread on the spring forums in the AI section, but I dont post binaries regularly so don’t rely on anything.

If you aren’t going to develop with NTai and your just a player who wan’ts an AI then you won’t find anything. When NTai becomes stable and the lag bug is squished Ill gather up all the configs and release an installer, and that’s when everyone can go hooray NTai! But untill then the average user has little business messing with NTai unless they want to learn the tricks of the trade and have an active interest.

Everything else

You’re likely to find it on Unknown-files, a file hosting site ran by iamacup. http://spring.unknown-files.net