WARCRAFT FOR TEN version 1.0b7 ============================== This is the seventh beta release of WarCraft for TEN. It has the join-time dialogs and help & game speed change Chris Lombardi suggested, plus a couple of bug fixes. Installation (Same as 1.0b2) ---------------------------- This release uses the production Blizzard installer mechanism, customized as appropriate for TEN. 1. Insert the CD and execute the DOS command "d:\war10\install" or whatever letter your drive is. To install without the CD, you can copy the entire contents of d:\war10 to your hard disk and run "install" from there. For instance, the contents of d:\war10 could be pkzipped, sent from place to place, unzipped, and used to install War10. 2. The installer is a DOS program, but it works fine in a window under Win95. You can choose either a "minimal" install which only runs when the CD is mounted, or a self-contained "full" install. A full install needs about 9 Mb of free space on disk. Game-time performance of a minimal installation is just as good as full, if you're short of disk space and have a War10 CD. You can choose to install into any directory path; the installer will create directories if necessary. The default path is "c:\war10". 3. When the installer is done it automatically runs "setup.exe" from the installed directory, which is used to configure War10 for your machine's sound hardware. Setup is also a DOS program which works fine in a Win95 window. It needs many gritty details of your machine configuration but can guess them pretty well. Once, setup failed for me under Win95 with some claim about the sound hardware being in use; I resorted to running setup in MS-DOS mode and it worked. You can re-run setup any time you want to change War10's configuration. The info is written into a file "config.war" in your install directory. 4. After installation and setup, run "war10.exe" in your install directory to start up War10. Of course it only works with TEN. When War10 runs, it expects to find "config.war" in the current working directory. If it doesn't, it proceeds without playing any sounds. This can happen if you have 'ansilobby' in some other directory and use a shortcut to run War10. 5. I've included my version of the sdk in WATCOM2.ZIP on the CD. Known bugs in 1.0b7. -------------------- 1. Putting the game into a Win95 window causes problems with sound and with palette changes, even though it sort of works. 2. If the game is terminated abnormally, the MIDI music playing at the time loops forever. Yuck. 3. The handicap lock flashes unattractively when toggled. Changes since 1.0b6 ------------------- 1. Added dialogs to tell the creator who joined and the joiner what the game options are. 2. Removed the TEN-specific help screen. 3. Increased the pace of game play by brute force ("packet speed") so "Normal" is about what "Fastest" used to be, assuming latency of 150-200 msec. 4. Disabled all cheats. 5. Gave this release a new internal version number so it will refuse to play with earlier releases. 6. Enabled checking that the .exe and the DATA.WAR file match so this release will refuse to run with earlier data files. 7. Fixed a crash when enemy had latency measurement on and the game stayed in a dialog for more than about twenty seconds. 8. Fixed a crash when help was used more than once from the creator's game options dialog. Changes since 1.0b2 ------------------- 1. A debugging feature is added to display packet latency statistics; ctrl-L toggles this on and off. 2. When the game creator was "Waiting for an opponent" and clicked "Cancel", an extraneous "can't contact TEN" error alert was displayed. 3. The "Connecting..." screen briefly displayed after two players are ready to go no longer has a "Cancel" button. Previously, using that button would cause a hang or crash. 4. When the remote player quit, the "enemy has quit" dialog box sometimes had a "Cancel" button as well as the "OK" button. 5. A disconnection during the game exit sequence (after players quit) sometimes caused a bogus error dialog or crash. 6. No-message packets are one byte instead of 12, => 50% total traffic reduction. 7. Latency spread across multiple game steps for smoother animation. 8. Dialog controls respond faster when comm is slow. 9. Game play speedup enabled. 10. Right clicking implemented as in Warcraft II. 11. If opponent disconnected, game just said "not responding". Now the game says "disconnected". 12. Investigated packet dups issue (no savings possible). 13. Assertion failures in Blizzard code produce nice messages now. 14. TEN error return codes produce nice "can't contact TEN" message now. 15. Player status reporting interval is increased to 10 seconds (was 2). 16. Code to reject 3rd joiner is fixed, I think (STILL NOT TESTED!). Changes since 1.0b1 ------------------- 1. The "game menu" (F10), "really quit" dialog, and "really restart" dialog are no longer siamese twin. The remote player sees a "please wait", perhaps followed by a dialog telling him what happened (e.g. "enemy is quitting"). 2. If the players get disconnected, say by the remote one crashing, a "not responding" dialog will appear after ten seconds offering the choice of retrying or quitting. 3. The cursor now tracks the mouse more smoothly, both normally and when placing e.g. road segments. There is still some delay in changing cursors and responding to mouse clicks, but it's not bad. Changes since 1.0a3 ------------------- 1. The player joining an already-created game can now choose whether he will play as Orc or Human. This makes the creating player's choice of "enemy" race irrelevant, but that's what you asked for. Actually, you might have hoped that the creator's choice would be the default on the joiner's screen, but for an odd technical reason relating to the Arena api, that is not possible. Ask me for details if you're interested. 2. The help dialogs are no longer "siamese twin": the remote player sees a "please wait" instead of the help screens. Sadly, for now the other dialogs are still the way Blizzard wrote them. Changing them is harder and didn't make it into this release, but it will be in the next one. 3. The production install/setup mechanism is now used. 4. The War10 footprint on CD is now about 9 Mb, down from the original 59 Mb. The savings came from omitting movies and speeches not used in the TEN version of WarCraft. 5. War10 now checks for TEN on startup and politely declines to run if TEN is not found. 6. A third player attempting to join a game in progress is now turned away politely, I think. (WARNING: I didn't even try this code after I wrote it. Sorry!) 7. Alert and debug messages from the TEN libraries are now properly displayed in a dialog box. Previously the code to do so caused a crash instead. The harmless "error 3002" is still not displayed. 8. The "Cancel" button displayed while waiting for an opponent now really cancels the game. 9. A number of cosmetic improvements have been made to the various dialogs, including the removal of the nonworking and dangerous "save" and "load" buttons. 10. The known bugs in 1.0a2 are fixed: game options dialog doesn't swap "random town" and "random map", its static text items don't turn golden during auto inc/dec, and the joining player uses the right race (now, the one he picks). Changes since 1.0a2 ------------------- 1. The new game options dialog is implemented. It is exactly as we discussed except that typein of lumber & gold amounts is not allowed. Instead, I made the arrows increment by 100 and auto- matically accelerate after a short while. Blizzard's implementation of typein fields was inadequate and not easy to fix, so I made the executive decision not to spend more time on it. 2. As part of (1), the game options returned to TEN now include lumber and gold amounts. 3. The harmless "error 3002" is not displayed. Other debugging messages will appear if printed. Changes since 1.0a1 ------------------- 1. The game is linked with the new TEN libraries I received 1/24/96. 2. The "Hang Up" button on the creator's customize screen now works. 3. If a customize subdialog's "Cancel" button was clicked before any "OK" button had been clicked, the game proceeded to "Connecting..." instead of going back to the main customize dialog. This is fixed. Changes in 1.0a1 from Blizzard version. --------------------------------------- 1. The Blizzard logo and intro movies are deleted. 2. The main menu, connection-type dialog, and network-node dialog are deleted; you always get a 2-player game via TEN. 3. If you are the game-creating player, you immediately see the "customize your game" dialog. You are in sole command; there is no back-and-forth with an opponent. When you finish, you see the "connecting..." screen until a second player joins your game. 4. If you join an existing game, you immediately see the "connecting..." screen for a moment, then both players see the game begin. 5. Saving and loading games doesn't work -- don't try it.