Darkstars

I did say I would add a few twists to my file hosting to set it apart didn’t I?! Well I’m not sure how unique this is, not that it matters, but I have solved a problem faced by spring for years.

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With the recent mess up at Unknown Files and the absence of iamacup, UF has remained down for the last week. In its place has risen 2 new hosts ran by sefidel and JJ, however these are not the best solution and have their own problems.

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A long overdue release with a lot of fixes, and new additions, including support for lua and map options.

AFLobby beta 4 Installer

AFLobby beta 4 zip

The recent update to 0.76b1 has introduced several protocol changes. One such change that wreaks havoc on the current stable AFLobby is the introduction of two new ranks with make AFLobby crash almost immediately. The other change is the introduction of SETSCRIPTTAGS and the deprecation of UPDATEBATTLEDETAILS. AFLobby 3.9.8.1 and several alpha versions of 3.9.9 do not support these new commands, and thus fall apart in the new server protocol environment.

To this end a working version of AFLobby is needed. Support for mod options has been added along with a pretty new GUI page for setting them.

This release is more of an in between of 3.9.9 and beta 4, and you’ll notice many changes.

Numerous UI components have been torn out and replaced with tables which run hundreds of times faster while eliminating rafts of bugs in the process. A lot of internal structures have changed too, increasing stability and overall speed, aswell as other speed ups to prevent the user thinking the program has frozen, such as loading messages on mini maps. The map browser on the main view has been removed as it was a silly thing to have there and added more tabs, the colours on the battles are gone, substance GUI updated, a proper swing window rather than swing controls in an old AWT window, there’re a lot of changes going on.

In other news, I’ve been differentiating this site a little more, so you may see a lot more in the way of blue diagonal stripes. A good dose of css and png transparency goes a long way.

AFLobby beta 3.9.9-4 experimental

I have been implementing the new protocol specifications, and correcting GUI issues since my last post. Sadly I have not been paying spring as much attention as usual but thats due to University, and impending coursework deadline monopolizing my time among other things.

Of note would be the new lua mod and map options. Other lobbies have added these but have made no or little attempt to take advantage of the necessary changes, resulting in perhaps an extra tab as in tasclients case. Whereas I however have decided to take full advantage of this opportunity to breathe a little life into the battlewindow.

Thus I present the beginnings of the new way of setting and viewing game options, lua and nonlua:

All the nonlua controls will be removed in favour of this approach rather than being left in as cruft for the sake of it. Map and mod options will be distinguishable via icons when completed, and eventually modder definable images for each option. In the far future a search option would be available, but don’t expect a search box for many months just yet.

I currently have checkboxes/boolean options implemented. I now need to tie in lua unitsync functions and create the other option type UIs for the list.

As it stands I have implemented client side support for options so desyncs should not occur, however the visual representation in the list is a todo. Hostside implementation is limited to those items in the list that where in 0.75b2.