Empire Server Files

Release notes for Wolfpack Empire 4.4.1

This release fixes bugs, some of them critical.  Player visible
changes include fairer worlds when the deity uses fairland, and
mountains having the same amount of gold per resource point as other
sectors.  Deity visible changes include deletion of exotic fairland
options, and game customization improvements.

Deities are advised to use this release for new games.  Upgrading
mid-game is not supported, and expected to result in total disaster.
Fine print: you should be able to upgrade with the empdump utility, if
you know what you're doing.

This release was made from the Git repository at

    http://git.pond.sub.org/empserver/


Released files:

Source code
 * empire-4.4.1.tar.gz              Everything
 * empire-4.4.1.zip                 Same thing, different wrapper
 * empire-client-4.4.1.tar.gz       Just the client
 * empire-client-4.4.1.zip          Same thing, different wrapper

Pre-formatted documentation
 * empire-info-text-4.4.1.tar.gz    Text
 * empire-info-text-4.4.1.zip       Same thing, different wrapper
 * empire-info-html-4.4.1.tar.gz    HTML
 * empire-info-html-4.4.1.zip       Same thing, different wrapper

Binaries
 * empire-client-4.4.1-*            Clients for various systems

User contributed files:
 * contrib/empire-server-4.4.1-i386-win32.zip
                                    Server binaries for Windows
                                    (Ron Koenderink)


Change log:

Changes to Empire 4.4.1 - Sat Feb 21 2021
 * Fix land unit casualties in guerrilla fighting.  Broken in 4.4.0.
 * Changes to edit:
   - You can now edit bars on ships and land units, and missile
     fortification.
   - Fix to reject fortification of embarked land units.
   - Fix to zap land unit and plane fortification on load.
   - Fix to take satellite off its carrier when moving it to orbit.
 * Changes to load, unload, lload, lunload, tend, and ltend:
   - tend land with multiple target ships now tends each land unit
     just once.
   - tend land now reports "not on ship" only when the land unit was
     explicitly selected by UID.  Matches unload.
   - Fix load, unload, lload, lunload to suppress messages and skip
     foreign ships / land units when the second argument starts with a
     digit.
   - load and unload no longer prompt for land units to unload when a
     carrier can't carry any.
   - Fix load plane to reject satellites in orbit.  The stock game
     does not have loadable satellites.
 * Fix launch to take satellites off their carrier when moving to
   orbit.
 * Shield embarked planes and land units from sector damage, like
   their ships.
 * Rewrite much of fairland to make it more robust and more fair:
   - Show a more useful map.
   - Fix error handling, fix and tidy up error and progress messages.
   - Drop option -a.  Deities can find continents with ?dterr<N, where
     N is the number of continents.
   - Drop option -o.  Deities can unset resources with "edit l * i 0 g
     0 f 0 c 0 u 0".
   - Drop a useless warning about small world.  It was downgraded from
     error in 4.3.25.
   - Check arguments more thoroughly, and don't silently "correct" bad
     arguments.
   - Fix checking of minimal distance arguments.  Has always been
     broken, but 4.3.15 made it worse.
   - Ensure the continents' first two sectors obey minimal distance.
   - Correct bias in placement of expansion islands.  These were more
     often placed to the right of existing land.  Players could
     exploit that to guide their search for land.
   - Fix island growth and correct its bias.  Growth could fail even
     when there was space to grow.  Islands tended to curve around
     obstacles in a counterclockwise direction.  Besides fixing that,
     the new code also gives better results for high spike
     percentages: it produces shorter spikes extending from a core
     rather than long snakes that tend to curve into themselves, and
     is less prone to put capitals on the coast.
   - Size and place expansion islands fairly: ensure each start island
     "owns" the exact same set of expansion islands, where "owns"
     means it's closer than any other start island.
   - To make that work, fairland now requires the number of expansion
     islands to be a multiple of the number of continents, and fails
     when it can't place all the islands the deity asks for.  You
     can't fill the world with islands anymore by asking for
     impossibly many of them.
   - Fix silent failure to place mountains.  Fairness issue.
   - Fix unfair mountain resources.  Neglected when Empire 3 made
     mountains produce gold dust.
   - Drop undocumented, silent limit of 1000 mountains per island.
   - Location of resources is more varied, in particular for islands
     with few mountains, and for sea.  Resource remain pretty much the
     same overall.
   - Performance improves for large minimal distances, especially for
     crowded worlds.  It can suffer for huge worlds and small minimal
     distances.
   - Manual page improvements.
   - Code refactoring and cleanup.
 * Test suite improvements:
   - Fix empdump-test for "make check-accept".  Has been broken since
     its addition in 4.3.33.
   - Improve give and edit coverage.
   - Cover load and tend.  There are known gaps.
   - Improve fairland coverage.
 * Game customization improvements:
   - Configuration tables now have more extra space deities can use
     for customizing their games: 31 product types, 63 sector types,
     127 ship, plane and land unit types, and 63 nuke types.
   - Work to produce stuff is now independently configurable, and
     "show product" shows it.  Before, it was a function of raw
     materials and resource use.
 * New product selector "bwork" is work to build one unit of the
   product.
 * Fix build with compilers that require the depcomp wrapper for
   dependency tracking.  Broken in 4.3.31.
 * Fix LWP signal code.  Messed up in 4.3.6, some more in 4.3.10.
 * Improve POSIX conformance for portability.  Observed to fix the
   build on Solaris 10.
 * The client's password prompt now behaves the same on all POSIX
   systems: read from standard input in canonical mode with echo
   turned off.  Before, it commonly read from /dev/tty in noncanonical
   mode.
 * The server crashed on some systems when bomb, launch and
   interdiction missed the target.  Fix that.
 * Fix truncated "info Empire4.3" on systems with a losing nroff.
 * Make client's fancy line editing and persistent history work on
   more systems.
 * Fix ground combat not to wipe out commodities supplied to defending
   land units.  Broken in 4.3.33.
 * Don't permit SAMs on escort missions.  They work, apart from a
   recoverable internal error, but it makes no sense.
 * Don't permit marine missiles on support missions.  They can't
   actually go.
 * Drop support for ABM and a-sat missiles consuming shells.  The
   shell use is logistical busy-work, and economically irrelevant.
   The stock game's abm type didn't consume any, but its asat type
   did.
 * Stricter plane configuration validation.
 * Increase mountain process efficiency from 75% to 100%.  Gold
   resources in mountains are now worth the same as elsewhere, and a
   third more than before.
 * Fix crash when a deity runs neweff or production on a sea sector.
   Broken in 4.4.0.
 * Don't let embarked engineers work.  Screwed up when the work
   command was added in Empire 2.
 * Fix buy to handle concurrent lot change more robustly.  The flawed
   handling goes back to 4.0.0 and 4.0.2.
 * Fix MOB_ACCESS mobility update for ships owned by countries with
   even country number.  Broken in 4.4.0.
 * Journal entries for output are no longer flushed to disk right
   away.
 * Code refactoring and cleanup.
 * Info page, manual page and documentation fixes and clarifications.

Change log just for the client:

 * The client's password prompt now behaves the same on all POSIX
   systems: read from standard input in canonical mode with echo
   turned off.  Before, it commonly read from /dev/tty in noncanonical
   mode.
 * Make client's fancy line editing and persistent history work on
   more systems.