Creation/Dev/Releases/Client/5.006

Release date

July 13th 2007 for Mac, Linux and Windows

New Features

Graphics

• Video capture:
  • press Alt+6 for recording videos, configure it in the options
  • the video is saved in the Graal folder under videos/ (*.avi format)
  • it is currently saving uncompressed and without sound
• Easy skinning of GUI controls:
  • set GuiControl.style to "mytheme.wba" or "mytheme.zip" for skinning controls
  • it will replace the graphics and colors for most controls, except the font size/style
  • use the new attribute "clientrelative" for GuiWindowCtrl for making them compatible with different styles without needing to reposition the sub controls
  • known problems:
    • not all styles look perfectly yet
    • when switching between styles that use the same name for graphics then it might still show the graphics from the old style; restart the game to fix that
    • some controls still use the font type and size defined in the regular GUI profiles (control.profile)
  • there are new GUI controls for using taskbar skins:
    • GuiTaskBar - displays a bar with space for a start button on the left side, 'task'-buttons in the middle, and a tray or time display on the right side; if the control is not using any 'style' then it will look like a normal GuiControl
    • GuiStartMenuCtrl - similar to a GuiContextMenuCtrl, but displays a bigger menu like the Windows start menu
    • GuiButtonCtrl.stylesection - buttons can be skinned, by changing 'stylesection' you can specify what look the button should use, e.g. "Taskbar.StartButton", "Taskbar.ButtonHorz"
• players and npcs can be made transparent - you can now use the same attributes like for showimgs/findimgs for setting red,green,blue,alpha and mode
• fixed a bug with reading pngs that had a bad palette size
• added support for 1-bit pngs
• when an image is downloaded from the web and doesn't have a known file extension then the engine is trying to guess the file type by reading the content and displaying it correctly in most cases
• when a web image is not existing then it is printing an error in F2 now and is not saving the data returned by the webserver anymore
• Windows version graphics:
  • printing an error in the F2 window when the graphics card is out of video RAM (some images will not appear then)
  • trying to free all possible resources when the graphics card is out of video RAM to reduce that error
  • when loading images the engine is cutting out all fully transparent parts to minimize the use of video memory
  • fixed some problems with icons and classic bodies not refreshing or not displaying
• Linux/Mac version graphics:
  • optimized the usage of graphics - it is using directly 8-bit palettized images with OpenGL and for tile drawing (before: always converting to 24 bit or 32 bit)
  • smoother drawing of stretched images (like in windows version)
  • improved font system which is more compatible, better looking and taking less ressources
• Text drawing: right-aligned italic text is shifted 2 pixels to the left to prevent clipping problems
• Improved support for bmp:
  • fixed a bug in the bmp reader so that bmps with odd width or height are correctly displayed
  • support for 32 bit bmps
  • not crashing on unsupported formats
• particles support text shadow (emitter.particle.textshadow, shadowcolor, shadowoffset)
• Linux/Mac: the scripted effects can be turned off directly in the options now (that only works when servers support those options)

Sounds

• playlooped() is updating the volume each time it is called depending on the distance to the player
• music files are now played non-looped by default when using the play() command, use playlooped() if you want to play a looped music or stream
• when the volume is zero then wavs and mp3s are not downloaded anymore
• downloaded wav files are automatically played (with the right volume and looping if requested)
• when a music file (mp3, midi etc.) is played but is not existing yet then it is automatically played once it is downloaded
• on Windows XP/Vista 64 bit it is by default not trying to use sounds because it freezes Graal, you can turn off this behaviour by setting "tryloadsoundson64bit=true" in the Graal options file - open game_config.txt with Wordpad

Bug Fixes

• General bugs
  • fixed a problem that crashed the client on serverswitch when still having PMs on the player list from players that already logged out
  • when downloading files with the scripted RC into the Graal folder then it is using the correct path and is not moving the file to the level/images/download folder anymore
  • fixed a problem with defaultmovement where the player was not moved on the map when the player was moved by script
  • on vista it doesn't display a runtime error when you close the program anymore

• Script engine bugs
  • fixed the script garbage collector (deleting unused/unlinked TStaticVar)
  • showimgs/findimgs that are attached to the player via attachtoowner=true are correctly synchronized to the player position (and don't lag behind)
  • hideimg() is not crashing the engine anymore if it contains gani scripts
  • the destroy() function for GuiControls and TStaticVar are not causing crashes anymore, but the objects are disappearing from scripting so you can correctly recreate them
  • fixed a problem with the random function - int(random(0,upperlimit)) was sometimes returning 'upperlimit' due to rounding if a floating point value is very close to an integer value - the random() function is now preventing that the result is identical to the upper limit
  • fixed a script problem where "-" was seen as number (-1)
  • fixed a crash when returning a temp. array from a suspended function (sleep/waitfor in a public function)
  • fixed the modulus operator 'a % b' for the case that a is negative and b is high number (>10000), previously it was giving a negative number which should not happen (-3 % 100000 should give 99997)