FreeOrion v0.4.8 released

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Vezzra
Release Manager, Design
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Joined: Wed Nov 16, 2011 12:56 pm
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FreeOrion v0.4.8 released

#1 Post by Vezzra »

FreeOrion v0.4.8 has been released.

This is the version of FreeOrion recommended for those who just want to play and enjoy the game. So unless you want to participate in game development or play the latest development version with all the new features (but potentially more bugs), this stable release is for you.

This is the "Imperial Stockpile" release. The main focus of the release has been a major extension/enhancement of the Production Point (PP) distribution mechanics, allowing for new and different strategies. But, as always, that hasn't been the only thing we've been working on of course. Another new feature are Game Rules which can be selected during game setup, as well as AI and UI improvements, multiplayer has received some noteable improvements as well, and of course a lot of bugs have been fixed.

As this release turned out to be a particularly challenging one (we experienced more difficulties and setbacks than usual), my special thanks to the team and all involved contributors this time are for their patience and perseverance, and their continued efforts to finally get this release out. Thanks, everyone, for sticking with us!

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Download:

Get FreeOrion here, for OSX and Windows.

Linux users can either try to get the new release from the respective package repositories of their distributions (if your distro maintains FreeOrion packages), or need to build FreeOrion with cmake/make per the instructions here and here.


Key Changes:

(since v0.4.7.1 September 2017)
  • Imperial stockpile
    • Unallocated production is stored, and can be used on colonies even if they are are disconnected from the empire supply network
    • Withdrawal limits are empire wide, based on planet stockpile meters and indicated on map and production screen
    • Techs, species, and planet focus settings affect stockpiling withdrawal limits
    • Stockpiling-focused species added: the Sly
  • UI Improvements
    • Fleet icon representation on the map
    • Blockade indicators
    • Ship designs, hulls, and parts can be edited, saved, obsoleted, and reordered
  • Multiplayer improvements
    • Server run in hostless mode, with server-determined rules
    • Password-based player authentication
    • Observers and moderators can join ongoing games
    • Option to concede a game, subject to conditions
    • Allied victory rules
  • Game rules options which can be modified or enabled to affect balance, content, and game mechanics
  • Unallocated research points are automatically allocated to the cheapest available tech
  • Extensive AI improvements

Detailed Change Log

Graphics / Interface
  • Galaxy Map
    • Improved handling of overlapping fleets and fleet buttons.
    • Added right-click popup command to dismiss sensor ghosts.
    • Added option to ignore hostile ships while auto-exploring.
    • Added ship design breakdown info to fleets indicator at top of screen.
    • Made pressing escape close open windows in last-opened first-closed order.
    • Added system shield, defense, troops, and supply summary indicators to top of system sidepanel.
    • Let fleets window track moving fleets together.
    • Added an indicator that a fleet is blockaded.
  • Research
    • Items can be deleted from the research queue with ctrl + left click.
    • Added right click popup commands to research list view rows.
    • Added or adjusted tech list view colour highlighting, rounded borders, icon sizes.
    • Added research list tooltips.
    • List view scrollbar position should retain its position better.
  • Production
    • Fixed erroneous early projected completion times for production queue items with multiple repetitions.
    • Added commands to split or duplicate production items on the queue.
    • If the selected system is a production item's rally location, this is indicated on the item in the queue.
  • Design screen
    • Ship designs can be reordered, which will affect their ordering on the production screen.
    • Removed dialog for saving ship designs; a right click popup command is used instead.
    • Added right-click popup commands to obsolete parts, hulls, or ship designs, or to delete designs.
    • Added buttons to toggle part / hull obsolete filters.
    • Indicated part / design availability and obsolescence with desaturated borders in lists.
    • Added prompt to toggle availability filters when the hulls list is empty.
    • Added prompt to saved designs to suggest adding some.
    • Fixed bug where replacing a design twice started added designs.
    • Allowed monster designs to be viewed, edited, and saved.
    • When dragging a part over a slot, a part already in the slot should be hidden unless the part in the slot is being dragged.
    • Ctrl-Dragged parts will remove or replace all parts of the same type.
    • Removed restriction on setting blank design descriptions.
  • Multiplayer
    • Multiplayer lobby remembers previously-used settings when returning to the lobby after a game.
    • Added option to limit manipulation of settings in multiplayer lobby to the host.
    • Added server player name / passwords list, which can require players to password authenticate to join a server.
      • Players may be assigned roles, which control what they can do in the lobby.
    • Added optional timestamps to chat in multiplayer lobby and in-game chat.
    • Ready button in multiplayer lobby will lock if not enough players.
    • Added choice of client type in the network connection window.
    • Disambiguated "Player" connection type from "Human", which is also an in-game species.
    • Allowed joining an game being played as a moderator or observer.
    • Split Resign button into a Concede button and a Resign button.
      • Conceding from a multiplayer game, when conditions allow it, eliminates the empires' assets from the universe.
    • Hid load button in multiplayer games.
  • Misc
    • Improved objects list filter dialog layout.
    • Added granular log detail-level options for specific game systems and clients / sever
    • Made some droplists not respond to mousewheel events when not open (dropped), so that they won't be unintentionally manipulated.
    • Added options for whether to auto-add default or saved designs to the player's empire.
    • Game will auto-save when quitting or resigning. This can be aborted during the save by the user.
    • Added options to enable autosaves at start and end of turns.
    • Improved thoroughness of effect accounting information.
    • Added continue button (and command line switch) to load the most recent saved game.
    • Continue and load buttons only appear if suitable save files are detected.
    • Added button on options screen to save a persistent config file, which will remain after version updates, and will override any subsequent option adjustments when restarting program.
    • Don't render mouse cursor if game window doesn't have OS focus.
    • The pedia and sitreps can now include links to files in the OS file manager or websites.
    • Replaced "planet bombarded" sitreps with "planet attacked" to disambiguation between bombardment and a planet being in a combat.
    • Made chat history longer.
    • Prevented changing the resource directory during a running game.
    • Made resource directory changes when not running a game cause the content to be re-parsed.
    • Various additional optimizations to GUI layout code, particularly when resizing windows.
    • Attempt to determine the system language when initializing stringtable option for the first time.
    • Added random species option to species droplists when setting up games.
    • Clicking the random seed button on the galaxy setup screen now sets the seed to "Random" which will be replaced by the server with a randomly-generated seed.
    • Various values in GUI should now round to nearest rather than next lower value for their displayed precision.
    • Added lists of available parts, hulls, and buildings to empire pedia articles.
    • Sorted researched techs list on empire pedia article by researched turn.
    • Made several GUI widgets react immediately to being pressed, instead of waiting until the mouse is released to complete the "click".
Content / Gameplay
  • Game rules:
    • Enable random reseeding
    • Stockpile import limits
    • Ship, buildings, techs are 1 PP/RP and 1 turn to produce / research
    • Number of rounds of combat
    • Enable Experimentors
    • Enable super test takeover building
    • Enable conceding and max allowed colonies when conceding from a multiplayer game
    • Restrictions on allied victories
    • Scale ship speed, ship structure, building cost, tech cost, hull cost, part cost
    • Planet size balance adjustments
    • How much to over-allocate on production queue to prevent rounding-related extra turns to complete items
  • New pedia articles, article categorization, extended articles, corrections
  • Translation updates: French, Russian
  • Added dimensional matrix engine part.
  • Made additional species playable.
  • Added Replicon species.
  • Tweaked various default ship designs.
  • Replaced multiple fuel parts with upgrades to a single part.
  • Added Nest Eradicator building.
  • Added support for pedia articles for planets having different landscape images per-planet.
  • Added population statistic.
  • Added a sitrep when a ship naturally goes from 0.x to 1.x fuel.
  • Added the Flux Bubble hull.
  • Make the default diplomatic status be war rather than peace.
Balance
  • Super testers now have perfect stealth, which allows testing without AI interference.
  • Restricted engine, detector, stealth, and shield parts to one per ship.
  • Adjusted various species' balance.
  • Made scrying sphere set visibility to the greater of current and partial visibility.
  • Made telepathic detection set visibility to the greater of current and basic visibility.
  • Reworked resupply / upgrading of ship parts, based on the last turn a ship was resupplied and the turn a tech was researched.
    • Upgrades now don't happen during the pre-combat movement phase of turns.
  • Reduced cost of Transcendent Design tech.
  • Required gifted fleets to be stationary.
  • Gas Giant Generator now gives a smaller bonus if the planet is populated.
  • Reduced Space Elevator bonus for Gas Giants by 1.
  • Increased Colony Base hull cost to 3.
  • Newly created ships and monsters now cannot block supply (until they have survived a turn) or enemy fleet movement.
  • Do not remove production/research on dying planets while there is still remaining population.
AI
  • Made AI consider cancelling colony buildings if a better species becomes available.
  • Improved scout dispatch, to nearby instead of nearest to capital.
  • Improved fleet management during invasions.
  • Improved estimation of troop requirements for invasions.
  • Made AI consider planet defenses more significant when bolstered by fleets.
  • Added limit to troops in AI ship designs, to avoid waste.
  • Let AI grow larger (by adjusting limit on number of colonies it will attempt to create).
  • Made AI avoid blockaded starlanes when moving unarmed fleets.
  • Adjusted AI tech priorities.
  • Made AI consider refueling when calculating fleet routes.
  • Improved AI interaction with stealthed planets.
Bugs
  • Ancient guardians self-destruction only triggers on planets, rather than all possible objects with species.
  • Reduced incidence of the mouse cursor or starlanes disappearing.
  • Fixed issue where allied visibility of ship didn't include knowledge of the ship design.
  • Fixed issue preventing multiplayer games from starting with moderators or observers.
  • Made phototropic effects evaluate after target population setting effects, on which they depend.
  • Fixed issue with negative target population being made closer to zero rather than more negative by effects intended to reduce target population.
  • Fixed various potential crashes while exiting the client.
  • Fixed various GUI memory leaks.
  • Fixed crash if program was closed while a popup window was open on the map.
  • Fixed crash if right-clicking slots while dragging a ship part on the design screen.
  • Fixed issue with visibility-related supply obstructions lasting a turn longer than they should.
  • Fixed issues with manual saves while an autosave was ongoing.
  • Fixed issue where autocycling turns would cause an save-in-progress popup to never go away.
  • Fixed issue with pedia links not highlighting when moused over.
  • Fixed issue when an AI lost all its planets but still had a military fleet, its fleets could not be reassigned.
  • Fixed issue with AI supply calculations.
  • Fixed possible client hang when requesting previews of save files.
  • Fixed issue with filenames with multi-byte characters being shown corrupted on Windows.
  • Fixed various other AI bugs and incorrect or outdated calculations.
  • Fixed memory leaks in content script parsers.
  • Fixed issues with fleet move paths when fleet ownership is changed.
  • Fixed issue with AI not setting research focus on planets without industry focus available.
  • Fixed various issues with the movement blockading mechanic of fleets, space monsters, etc.
    • Fixed issue when a blockaded fleet became not blockaded and its route became invalid.
    • Fixed issue where fleets which had never been moved since their creation were unable to enforce blockades.
  • Fixed potential crash when updating meters on many objects.
  • Fixed erroneous / unnecessary cases of "Unknown" contributions to meter values in accounting tooltips.
  • Fixed issue where troop strength shown before a ground combat was inconsistent with what was actually used.
  • Fixed issue where ship designs could only be redesigned on the turn they were created.
  • Fixed issue where a planet couldn't be colonized on the first turn due to a Tidal Lock special.
  • Fixed issues with AIs replaying their turns when loading a game.
  • Fixed combat log layout / scrollbar issues.
  • Fixed issues with compressed XML saves containing invalid XML.
  • Use correct auto aggression icon for new fleet aggression button tooltip.
  • Fixed missing combat sensor ghosts.
  • Fixed issues with visibility of stale objects.
Technical / Internal
  • OSX version is now built as 64 bit binary.
  • Improved unit testing infrastructure.
  • Removed synchronous messaging; all client-server messaging now uses asynchronous message-response. This should resolve some client hang and lag issues.
  • Changed logging format to show Year-Month-Day only on the initial line.
  • If parsing a ship design fails, just fail that design, not the whole directory.
  • Added UUIDs to ship designs.
  • Added FOCS conditions: binary and ternary comparison operators between arbitrary values, which match all objects if true, or none otherwise.
  • Added FOCS value refs: binary comparison operators between arbitrary values, which return the equivalent of 1 if true, or 0 otherwise.
  • Added FOCS value refs: ternary and quaternary expressions, like binary comparison, but with a value to return if true, or values for both true or false.
  • Various FOCS values exposed: SpecialCapacity, SpecialAddedOnTurn, EmpireObjectVisibility, TurnTechResearched, LastTurnConquered, LastTurnAttackedByShip
  • Exposed FOCS value: HabitableSize (which replaces SizeAsDouble or SizeAsInt)
  • Parallelized and deferred content parsing, reducing program startup lag time.
  • Improved error logging when parsing an invalid ship design.
  • Added checksums to parsed content, so that client and server content can be checked for consistency.
  • Universe object ID generation no longer requires clients to request a new ID from the server for each new object.
  • Don't autosave immediately after loading a game.
  • Don't autosave at end of host's turn in multiplayer, as other players may not have finished their turns yet.
  • Rework Python logging to use standard interface, and to log all errors, not just those manually logged.
  • For Hulls, parts, and buildings, non-trivial cost and production time can now be evaluated in more cases when a source or target object aren't or can't be specified, such as in the pedia rather than on the production screen where the empire and production location are known.
  • Improved robustness of networking when errors happen, hopefully preventing some hung AI processes.
  • Added CMake option to build server only (without requiring client-specific dependencies).
  • Reworked mechanics of effect-set visibility.
  • Reorganized various content scripts into separate files instead of having many definitions in one file.
  • Prevented server from closing when an unestablished client drops its connection.
  • Made human client check for an existing server before launching another.
  • Made AI client respond to command line arguments.
  • Made server have a dedicated saves folder, outside of which clients cannot query for directory contents.
  • Standardized names of options on command line.
  • Added categorized listing of options on command line with --help option, instead of a single list of all.
  • Implemented custom AI state string encoder, which should be safer to load.
  • Improved OpenBSD support.
  • Various meter modifications have been moved out of the engine and into scripted effects.
  • Added FOCS access to immediate meter values, in addition to "initial" values after the last meter update.
  • Converted contents of global_settings.txt into game rules.
  • Added an ID to each game, which can be viewed in the pedia.

User avatar
EnLightning
Space Floater
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri Dec 01, 2017 2:32 am

Re: FreeOrion v0.4.8 released

#2 Post by EnLightning »

Congrats!
疾如風,徐如林,侵掠如火,不動如山,難知如陰,動如雷震

Ophiuchus
Programmer
Posts: 3433
Joined: Tue Sep 30, 2014 10:01 am
Location: Wall IV

Re: FreeOrion v0.4.8 released

#3 Post by Ophiuchus »

Yaaaay :)

That was a long time work - great that its out in the wild now!!!!!!
Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

Look, ma... four combat bouts!

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