========================== CHANGES.TXT ============================= GLOBAL WAR CHANGES 1.0 ==> 1.17b ============================================================================ I wrote this file, because I know you like to read stuff like this! Most of the changes that have been made are not of the 'visual' type. I have corrected all reported bugs, and added some nice things to the game that I think you will like. I have also improved the code a lot and rewritten some routines. Despite all the changes and things added the program hasn't grown more than about 15 Kbytes. I have received bug reports and suggestions from a lot of people. Thank you all for your help! See the about text in the program for special credits. WHAT'S NEW IN GLOBAL WAR 1.10? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1 GWterm support (PC compatible). The original GW for the IBM PC has an option to let the player use a special terminal program to display the graphics. Instead of receiving the data for the maps from the bbs, the terminal draws the maps directly on the user's screen. This method has several advantages compared to the gimme-maps- from-the-bbs method. First of all, it is a *lot* faster. In the second place, the player can use the mouse to select countries and move armies. I was asked to program GWterm support in the Amiga Global War (Hi Marc!) so I hope this is what you wanted. The GWterm settings will be saved in the GW.dat data file (but the file will not grow larger because of this!). There is currently no GWterm for the Amiga, but people have been asking me to create one, so mabe it's just what I'm going to do after I have released this program. 2 Unlimited fortifications. Players can now choose to play with limited (only 1 fort. per turn) or unlimited fortifications. This option exists in the latest version of the PC's Global War, so I thought - why not... 3 World map mode. This option will only effect the output of the world map (map #1). If you switch this mode on, all armies will be printed on the world map, instead of just showing the owner's sign (!,#,$,% etc). The armies are printed in the owner's colors. Players that use a black and white screen should select mode 1, which is the old mode (no armies printed, only the owner's sign). This one is also in the latest PC version... The world map mode you choose to use is saved in the GW.dat data file (the file does not grow larger because of this!). 4 Custom screen in Cli. If you run Global War from the Cli, it will put up a custom screen with 8 colors and attach the console.device to it, giving it full ANSI control. Version 1.0 used a lot of CPU time when it waited for keypresses. This version is different - it's *very* nice to the OS, and it uses 0.0% of the CPU when it is waiting for action. You can simulate a log off (or loss of carrier) by hitting the ESC key or clicking on the screen's close box. When the program detects this it will save everything and quit. It will also search in FONTS: for a font called pc.font (size 8). If you don't have this font, it will use any font that fits (but it won't look nice on your screen with just a topaz font). If you don't have a pc.font, you can create your own. Just duplicate a non-proportional font with size 8 and rename it as pc.font. After that, edit the IBM PC characters with a font editor. Or download a PC font from a local bbs. 5 Multiple Global Wars. You can now execute as many copies of Global War as you want. They will all use the same data structures in memory. This should satisfy you who have several lines in your bbs. 6 Join Global War. New users don't necessarily have to register themselves when they run Global War for the first time. Now they can take a close look at the game to see if it's worth to spend time on before they make up their mind. To register, simply press 'J' in the main menu. This nice idea was brought to me by Tommy Green (thanks!). 7 You can now Deploy and Fortify armies on partner's countries in a team game. 8 If the game is a team game with 'unlimited fortifications', you can give away a whole continent, occupied by you, to your team partner! 9 Options-menu added. Check it out to see how it works (it's quite self-explanating). MINOR CHANGES ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1 When you want to quit the game (by pressing 'Q' in the main menu), the program will ask for "Y/n" instead of "y/N". This means that if you just press Enter the program will take it as an "Yes". 2 The Newest news didn't work. I rewrote that part, and it seems to be alright now. Note: If a user that is not playing the game wants to see the Newest news the program will show the last 4 users in the news list. Normally it shows everything that happened since the user played the last time. 3 Systems with very little memory (about 50 Kb left when Paragon and Global War was running) had trouble with the "RAM DISK FULL" requester. The problem could occur when Global War was about to display one of the maps, the about text or even the title screen. The problem has been eliminated now. 4 The hidden names option did not work fully. Bugs in the Standings menu and in the game itself has been removed. 5 The autodeploy did not work. In fact, some people used a bug in the routines to cheat! They began the game normally (Take turn) and deployed all armies but 1, and after that they logged off and called the bbs again. The bug made Global War to reset the user's date to what it was before the user logged off. When the user logged on again he could Take his turn again and start deploying with new armies and the armies from the last time were already deployed! Anyway, this has been fixed and autodeploy works ok now. 6 When a player destroyed another player and received new commendations, the event wasn't saved in the news file. 7 If you logged off in the middle of the creation of a new game, you could crash the machine ("memory list corrupt"). I never received a report of this bug, so you had probably never trouble by this... Anyway, it works okay now. 8 When you select a game that has been finished, the winner of the game will be shown to you. In some cases the program did write another text on top of the winner's name, which was quite annoying. That shouldn't happen any more. 9 "October" was mis-spelt in the ranking list - with a 'k'. I took the source code that calculates the dates from a Swedish program that I had written some time ago (we spell it "Oktober" in Sweden). 10 BOLD text can now be chosen on or off from the Options menu. Some people wanted bold text, others didn't - so I made this compromise that should make everyone happy. 11 Version 1.0: If a game had spent enough time waiting for more players, the game was deleted irrespective of how many players had joined the game. Corrected in 1.10: Instead of just deleting the game, the program now checks if there are enough players (=the minimum) in the waiting game, and if there are the game will begin immediately. Note: This concerns only non-team games. Team-games must have six players to start. 12 If the system clock ever goes "crazy" (like showing 1978...), then Global War will refuse to run. So you who have problems (?) with the internal clock don't have to worry that this program will mess up things because of a strange clock. 13 New score-table. This looks nicer than the one in 1.0. 14 Finally - *lots* of small 'adjustments' here and there!! ============================================================================ GLOBAL WAR 1.11 - Bugfixes!!! ============================================================================ Some bugs managed to slip away with the 1.10 version, despite all testing. Below is a short list of what's been changed. 1. Only a small bug fix: The News routines recorded a false date stamp (=1 day after the game had started!) for a news event, and the real date stamp was stored on top of the date of the first news in the event-list. The result was a *lot* of news events that started with "DAY 1: ...", while the first news showed something like "DAY 14: ...". Bug found and corrected - the News stuff works fine now. 2. Added to the sysop's menu I:nfo item: If there is no default log-in name at line 12 in the config file GW.con, the info screen in the sysop's menu will tell you that the name buffer is "". 3. The total number of armies received (when choosing T:ake turn) was misplaced (1 step too much to the right). Don't ask me how these bugs are born... ;-) 4. When a player fortified one of his own countries in a team game, the armies of the fortified country were colored with the partner's color. The wrong color was only a 'visual bug' - the owner id (=color) never changed in memory, only on the screen. 5. Added a nice feature to the function that searches for a country given by the player. If the program finds more than one country that matches the string entered by the player when Global asks for a country name, it will pick the country differently, depending on what the player is up to. For example, Siberia is before Siam in the list. Earlier the program always picked Siberia when you typed "si" at the gimmecountry-prompt, without doing any calculating whether it is the country you really want. Now the program compares the countries it finds, and picks the right country depending on the game phase: Attack - by checking the neighbour countries Deploy - searches the countries owned by you Fortify - checks both neighbours and your countries, depending on if you Fortify, Give or Exchange countries. 6. When I moved the Toggle GWterm on/off option from the main menu to the Options menu, I forgot to remove all code - players could still toggle GWterm on or off in the main menu (looked very ugly!). 7. If player deploys over 255 armies on a country, the program will inform about the limit (which is 255 armies/country) and won't let the player to deploy more than the limit. However, if the player has 255 armies in all his countries, the program will clear all left undeployed armies (a player with that many armies doesn't need more armies anyway ;-)). ============================================================================ GLOBAL WAR 1.12 - released 5. April 1991 ============================================================================ 1. Players could change their votes (Wait for more players/Start game ASAP) in team game - this should only be possible in single games; fixed. 2. The password in a (waiting) team game can only be changed by player 1 and only if there is no 2nd player. In version <=1.11, due to a bug player 1 could change the password when the team was full, causing player 2 to be removed. ============================================================================ GLOBAL WAR 1.13 - released 13. April 1991 ============================================================================ 1. The 'Give continent to partner' stuff didn't work ok - corrected. 2. When inactive players were deleted from the roster of registered players, the score table wasn't always updated correctly; the first player in the roster was sometimes listed twice or more times, depending on how many 'empty' accounts was left after the deletions, and what scores the other players had at the time. Fixed. 3. When displaying a graphic file (the ansi maps, for example), the '@' character is now printed out only if the XenolinkManagerPort is found in the system messageport list. The '@' character disables the "More Y/N..." prompt in Xenolink's doorfunction #19 ('@' is _not_ used if GW was executed from Cli or Paragon). ============================================================================ GLOBAL WAR 1.15 - never released public. ============================================================================ 1. Improved the time-check routines. The program will now quit immediately when the user runs out of time, no matter what the user is doing at the time. Earlier this only worked if the user was in the main menu, or the game menu. When a user runs out of time in the middle of a game, it is stored by the News as a 'Player ran out of time' event. If running the program from Cli, you can simulate a no-time-left situa- tion by pressing Left-ALT and Q simultaneously. 2. New feature, team game only; players can give commendations to team partner. This is done in the Fortification phase, by pressing 'G'. Only one commendation/turn can be given to partner. 3. New feature in team game; if a player hasn't played for 2 days, the team partner can take the player's turn instead. All actions, like Deploy, Attack and Fortify can be done as usually. This is registered as a 'Player A began campaign, played by team partner Player B' event by the News. 4. Improved the Auto-deploy routine, team game only: Now avoids deploying armies on countries that are surrounded by own AND partner's countries. Earlier it only avoided countries surrounded by own troops, meaning the auto-deploy could add armies to a country that already was protected by partner. ============================================================================ GLOBAL WAR 1.16 - released May 5th 1991 ============================================================================ Added a memory available-option, that can be toggled on/off in the options menu. Found a bug in the Play Partner's turn-stuff. If the player who was doing partner's turn logged off, the partner's current date and time wasn't updated, which means that after the Autodeploy routine had deployed all undeployed armies, the player could log in and play partner again - several times a day (gaining new armies every time)! ============================================================================ GLOBAL WAR 1.17, released Jun 2nd 1991 ============================================================================ 1. The lowest access level to enter the sysop's menu can now be defined in the gw.con file. Suggested by Andy Smith, UK. (Thanks!) This solves the problem with different sysop-levels in different bbs- systems (it was 'hard coded' as level 15 in earlier GW-versions). 2. Correced a bug; the date wasn't updated if a player ran out of time. If the player ran out of time during, say, the Attack phase, and called back after some days, the player was still Attacking (_should_ have gotten a new turn instead) - thus missing lots of new bonus armies. For clearance, this is what happens if a player runs out of time, or logs off during a turn: Deploy - game will wait for user to call back in 2 hours. After that, all undeployed armies are handled by the Autodeploy routine, and the player's date is updated, and player status in that game is set to "has already played today". The player will be informed of the Autodeploy actions next time he enters the game. Attack - Player's date is updated, and player status is immediately set to "has already played today". Fortify - see Attack. To see if these things have occured, check out the News of the actual game (can be viewed by all). ============================================================================ GLOBAL WAR 1.17b - just a quick update, Jun 4th 1991 ============================================================================ Check out the S:how info part in a game after a player has been killed! There is more info about the destroyed player (like who killed the player, and how many days ago after game the start it happened). Hadn't changed the 'visual' version number in the About in v1.17 - updated it to 1.17b in this version (however, the *real* version number used in gw.dat data file was correct in 1.17). Recompiled and optimized everything (210 Kb source code in 21 modules), program size shrunk with 4 Kb! ============================================================================ If you find a bug in Global War, then please write to me about it. My netmail number and adress are written in the README textfile that was included in the Global War archive. -Enjoy! Janne Paakkonen, June 4th 1991 ============================================================================