a-renet distributed gaming net for UNIX / News: Recent posts

a-renet-1.1.0rc4 has been released. Protocol has been changed to add support for congestion/latency notification and timeouts/keepalive probes; modules have been changed accordingly. A lot of #defines have been changed to options. A lot of bugs have been fixed.
Client-gtk package has been reintroduced (still just sketched though).

This release features minor bugfixes in all the modules.
Porters from the PPC porting context should use this release as codebase.

a-renet-1.1.0rc2 fixes some bugs and inconsistencies in the recent rc1 release. It adds a game developer-oriented manual, a better parser, and draggable windows for the SDL client.

The sketch of a new manual for game developers is available in the documentation section, it lists all requirements necessary for games to be neatly supported by a-renet.

Release candidate 2 for a-renet-1.1.0 is going to be out soon. It will contain important bugfixes (or checkout the current CVS, the fixes are already there).

a-renet project is proud to enlist Ronald Chaplin as the lead tester. He comes from many years of C/C++ programming experience, and was the lead coder for Mysts of Turmoil (an online MUD).

a-renet also welcomes Chris Throup as the web designer, whose job will be to bring some order to the big mess of the old home page.

After a lot of work, 1.1.0rc1 has been released!
There have been very big changes from the last version, in fact all main game support features (which have been available since some time as CVS) have been included in this release.

See the included user-manual.html for a comprensive guide about compilation, installation and usage. If you still have questions, contact the new a-renet-help mailing list.... read more

A user manual is now available in the documentation section of the sourceforge project page:

http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=103646

All this information refers to the current CVS and the coming 1.1.0 release.

Enjoy!

All main game support features have been implemented in the CVS development version (Yayy!!!). See the project home page for all new features (both for gamers and for game developers).The new skins have been made available in the client-sdl-skins package. Use them only with the development version!
A new stable release could be coming when the new code is...stable of course :)

If you checkout from a-renet cvs beware! a-renet is currently under heavy development and the newest cvs may not compile at all. Revert to last stable release (1.0.3) for a working package.

The SDL client now features auto(tools)-installing skins, auto-line-wrap, more efficient handling of alpha surfaces.
Still looking for game-developers' help, please help us making the last planning decisions!

This version contains mayor bugfixes and code restructuring in all modules.
The client-sdl features now a better-looking standard GUI and many additional skin customization options. Mouse support has been made more consistent.

Finally we released a-renet-1.0.1; there are many new features and bugfixes, and much work has been done on the client side. Now we'll move onwards to restructure the existing code and bring new code to life (client-gtk), before beginning to think about the game-spawning.

We're still stuck in the inital burocracy issues, using and testing CVS script code. However, client code has been improved, and some fix have been made to all modules. I have surrendered to the autotools, so we might have gained some portability. A mailing list to get info about CVS commits has been created (a-renet-cvs); and last but not least we'll soon release a much better version, much easier to configure and install.

Here we are with our first arena-revival network release!
You'll find all three packages (metaserver, server, and sdl-client) available separately (users should probably only need a client and optionally a server, when our metaserver is up and running). What you can do with the released code is essentially chat in a distributed environment.
Some help will be available soon in the form of project documentation, an upcoming mailing-list and the project web site.

We're working for the first file release; in the mean time you can fetch all the code using cvs.