freedink-engine/freedink-108.4/NEWS

108.4
=====

- Never recreate an empty hard.dat in the game, even if there's a
  problem opening it (avoids corruption when running both the game and
  an editor at the same time).
  (thanks CocoMonkey for the report)

- DinkC: load_palette() now searches for palette in the right place
  (thanks scratcher for the report)

- DinkC: Dink position is updated after a new screen is loaded
  (thanks metatarasal for the report)

- New translations for the engine strings in Russian (thanks Yuri
  Kozlov) and Hungarian (thanks Balázs Úr).


108.2
=====

* User-visible changes:

- New, simple versioning scheme, without scary .20YYMMDD date.

- Properly play Dink's intro screen music (see below).

- FreeDinkedit plays sounds on Windows.

- New translation for the engine strings in Brazilian Portuguese
  (thanks Enrico Nicoletto)

- Update translations of the engine strings
  (thanks Translation Project)

- 64-bit support for Windows.

* Developer notes:

- Properly play Dink's intro screen music: the original game actually
  tries both 3.mid and 1003.mid for playmidi("1003.mid").

- Improved build documentation.

- Display SDL audio driver in debug mode.

- Add AppStream/AppData file for GNU/Linux software centers.


1.08.20121209
=============

* User-visible changes:

- Fix game freeze when warping in some special situations, such as
  when lots of sprites are created; this bug was present in the
  original Dink (thanks Bas Wijnen)

- New translation for the engine strings in Catalan (thanks Àngel
  Mompó) and Basque (thanks Gorka Azkarate Zubiaur)

- Update translations of the engine strings (thanks Translation
  Project), including the Dutch translation which was never credited
  in this file yet (thanks Koen Torfs)


1.08.20120427
=============

* User-visible changes:

- New translations for the engine strings: Esperanto (thanks Felipe
  Castro), Slovenian (thanks Klemen Košir), Serbian (thanks Мирослав
  Николић), Croatian (thanks Tomislav Krznar).

- Fix a few bugs (see below).

* Developer notes:

- No palette conversion for dir.ff graphics in truecolor mode (bug in
  The Blacksmith's Trail).

- Play some MIDI files when the original CD is not present - this
  behavior was partially broken a while ago.

- Fix issue in some D-Mods related to DinkC's sp_seq(..., -1) command
  (bug in Day of the Carcass).


1.08.20101114
=============

* User-visible changes:

- Turbo mode: maintain Tab pressed, and FreeDink will run at triple
  speed.  Useful to accelerate cutscenes that you already saw.

- Display "FreeDink" next to the engine version in the title screen,
  so that people more easily identify whether they are using the
  original engine or the FreeDink engine.  This will help when people
  are asking for assistance on the Dink forum, for instance.

- Update Danish and Spanish translations.  New Greek, Italian and
  Czech translations.

- Fix game crashes (experienced in "Agatha's Will", and "The River").

- Improved ms woe installer: do not ask about deletion for each and
  every savegame or D-Mod file; add an entry in Add/Remove Programs in
  the Control Panel; new header pictures.

* Developer notes:

- Some code clean-ups, namely in FreeDinkedit.

- Override transparency for 32bit BMPs.

- The first game crash is related to DinkC variable assignments on a
  line longer than 100 characters (caused by one fixed-length buffer
  that wasn't fixed during the DinkC parser clean-up).  The second
  game crash is when a D-Mod author uses an invalid sequence (number
  >= 1000).

- Document '-t'/'--truecolor' in the command-line output of '--help'.

- Add 'contrib/search_script.c' to locate a DinkC script usage in the
  world map.

- Upgrade gettext infrastructure from 0.17 to 0.18.  Rely on external
  gettext (and libiconv) under ms woe, rather than the previous
  bundled 'intl/'.  In the process we gained .po charset conversion
  for that platform.


1.08.20100420
=============

* User-visible changes:

- None - this release just fixes some compilation issues

* Developer notes:

- Include missing acsite.m4 file in releases

- Update gnulib to fix calls to install-reloc on Debian-kfreebsd and
  Hurd

- Update cross-compilation instructions


1.08.20100321
=============

* User-visible changes:

- Fix a bug where the game would always close in some situations,
  which was introduced in version 1.08.20090916 (related to the
  'sp_custom' DinkC command).

- Fix a crash in the developer console when trying to run a command
  that doesn't exist; the bug was already present v1.08 where the code
  originates, but Linux tend to be stricter when it comes to memory
  errors ;)

- New translations for the engine strings: Norwegian Bokmål (thanks
  Alexander Krivács Schrøder), Finnish (thanks Jorma Karvonen),
  Spanish (thanks Fernando Carmona Varo), Polish (thanks Michał
  Trzebiatowski), Danish (thanks Joe Hansen), Vietnamese (thanks
  Clytie Siddall), Indonesian (thanks Erwid M Jadied), German (thanks
  Sarah Evans) and French (thanks me).

* Developer notes:

- Fix mikmod build support under ms woe for newer versions of
  SDL_mixer (version >= 1.2.9)


1.08.20090918
=============

* User-visible changes:

- Correctly locates engine translations under Debian

- Fix crash when quitting under ms woe

* Developer notes:

- Fixed slight memory leak in font lookup

- Updated bundled DLLs


1.08.20090916
=============

* User-visible changes:

- NSIS (NullSoft Install System) script to generate a complete ms woe
  installer (with FreeDink, DFArc and freedink-data)

- Toggle fullscreen works on more platforms (not just X11)

- New architecture: PSP (playstation portable)

- New logging system, enabled with '-d' (instead of writing debug
  information on standard output by default), with different
  priorities (debug/info/warn/error/fatal). You also can easily check
  for DinkC errors in your scripts by searching for "[DinkC]" in
  DEBUG.TXT. In addition DinkC errors often carry the line number
  (rather than the binary offset).

- Dink doesn't crash on very long lines in dink.ini or DinkC scripts

- DinkC: map_tile(...) can modify the first tile square (tile_index=0)

- Lower startup RAM requirements (-7MB so far, and less memory
  bandwidth for sounds); this is mostly useful for small devices.

- Add support for contextual translations: when there are several
  lines of dialog that are identical in a few scripts, but need to be
  translated differently, you can add a context in your PO file such
  as 'msgctxt "s3-chick:57"' (name of the script in lowercase without
  extension + the line number).

* Developer notes:

- Dropped libffi dependency to support more architectures

- Fixed SDL_ttf version check (it failed for macport's 2.1.0)

- Code clean-ups, namely in the input subsystem (joystick) and
  shutdown process.

- Fixed numerous buffer overflows in the DinkC interpreter, and a
  potential infinite loop during search/replace (when the replacement
  countained search term).


1.08.20090120
=============

* User-visible changes:

- Fix game freeze in Pilgrim Quest (return value for DinkC functions
  'get_sprite_with_this_brain', 'get_rand_sprite_with_this_brain',
  'get_next_sprite_with_this_brain' and 'sp')

* Developer notes:

- Added scripts to rebuild snapshots, .deb, .rpm and .exe unattended


1.08.20090109
=============

* User-visible changes:

- i18n ("internationalization") - or support for translating D-Mods.

- Fix some crashes due to improper D-Mod scripts (e.g. attempt to
  modify sprite #1000): DinkC scripts are now better validated to
  avoid this.

* Developer notes:

- DinkC functions are now called dynamically using libffi, for cleaner
  bindings to the C engine core.  The DinkC parser code was also
  clarified and a few string functions were optimized.


1.08.20080920
=============

* User-visible changes:

- Supports playing Ogg Vorbis for background music (will look for .ogg
  extension before .mid extension)

* Developer notes:

- Supports /usr/share/games alternate prefix for game data.

- Can search and use system fonts under FreeDesktop-compliant systems
  (using fontconfig)


1.08.20080828: first official release
=====================================

FreeDink is based on version 1.07 of the original engine and also
incorporates v1.08 improvements.

The main change is that FreeDink is portable, so it can work under
operating systems (e.g. GNU/Linux) and architectures (e.g. PowerPC).

The following describe some differences with the original game engine.

* User-visible changes:

- Backward-incompatible changes in v1.08 can be disabled using a
  'v1.07 mode' (--v1.07 option -- more information in doc/v1.08.txt).
  This allows playing D-Mods that weren't upgraded to v1.08 yet.

- Game graphics

  - Better windowed mode: supports non-truecolor mode, and can switch
    between windowed and full-screen using Alt + Enter (X11 only).

  - Avoid color/palette temporary glitch after quitting show_bmp()
    mode.

  - Smoother truecolor fades, and avoid some glitches in palette mode.

  - Use a different but metric-compatible fonts (alignment and
    wrapping are conserved), due to copyright issues (see
    doc/fonts.txt).

  - Widen debug-mode line to avoid some unwanted line wrapping.

- Gamepad: the threshold for joystick axis is slightly greater - with
  the same threshold than the original game (~10%) Dink is going diags
  too easily.  Feedback welcome :)

- Game speed: set maximum framerate to 50 FPS, which is compatible
  with v1.08 (see doc/framerate.txt)

- Installation: supports separate directories for original data and
  additional D-Mods.  This permits installing the game as
  administrator in a write-protected directory, while allowing normal
  users to install D-Mods in their personal directory.

- Memory usage

  - Requires less memory in truecolor mode (by not converting paletted
    graphics to truecolor)

  - Fixes memory leaks, in particular when loading a savegame
    (reloaded graphics were duplicated in memory)

- Editor fixes:

  - To avoid issues with non-US keyboards in the editor, F1->F10-F11
    and NumPad 0->9-. are used in addition to 1->0-` for tiles
    selection.

  - When vision is changed from the minimap mode in the editor, don't
    display the current screen's sprites over the minimap.

  - When text or number is asked in the editor, user now can press
    'escape' to discard changes.

  - In editor "Alternative Tile Hardness Selector", when going
    completely to the right or to the bottom of the screen, avoid a
    postponement for the square selector. Reported at
    http://www.dinknetwork.com/forum.cgi?MID=57829

  - When editing hardness, print the hardness index actually being
    edited, instead of the one associated by the current background
    tile.

  - Display real-time information about hardness in hardness mode.

* Developer notes:

- Compressed BMP support: afaics in some situations, the original Dink
  engines does not support compressed (RLE?) BMPs. Such BMPs are
  notably used in "Prophecy of the Ancients" (like the 3 alternate
  colored orbs) - when support is lacking, graphics are simply not
  displayed which much complaining in DEBUG.TXT. I believe this
  support depends on which DX version is used. More surprisingly:
  there's a screen, still in PotA, where you can pass above and under
  and bridge (you need to pass under the bridge to blow up a rock in
  the above screen and thus reach the secret island). There's no way
  to pass under the bridge when there's no compressed BMP support - I
  haven't investigated much, but I guess either a missing sprite does
  not clear the hardness for Dink to pass, either the missing sprite
  is causing a DinkC script to stop.  So, vanilla SDL does not support
  compressed BMPs, so I used SDL_image everywhere to do so. This means
  that FreeDink always support compressed BMPs.

- Fix several array-out-of-bounds issues while reproducing the
  original de-facto engine behavior.

  - For example, in 'init_scripts', the script may check the active
    status of sprite 1000, while the sprite array has 300
    elements. This caused bugs after the port and is now
    fixed. Curiously it didn't seem to cause bugs before. Such bug did
    'appear' in v1.08 too.

  - Sometimes, a init() or dink.ini line would be more than 80 chars,
    which is its allocated length in the 'sequence' structure. This
    would overwrite parts of the next sequence. Possibly this never
    was an issue, because sequences were initialized incrementally,
    but an init() line was more likely to cause breakage. This is
    fixed anyway.

  - When reloading a sequence through init() with a longer sequence,
    v1.07 will overwrite bits of the next sequence, for dir.ff loading
    only. v1.08 overwrites for both BMPs and dir.ff sequences to avoid
    to a bug with mixed dir.ff and BMPs sequences. This bug is
    documented in dink.ini and loads the sword (longer) hit sequence
    before the first (shorter) sequence to work-around it. See
    http://www.dinknetwork.com/forum.cgi?MID=92733 for details. In
    FreeDink, sequences are never overwritten.

  - Some D-Mods have sequences with more than 50 frames. This triggers
    a buffer overflow in the original game BUT the overwritten data is
    the animation metadata ('delay' and 'special' fields), which is
    not critical for non-animated sprite sequences. Example: "The
    Green Voice in my Head - Part 1 - Hangover & Agony", first save
    game then east then house on the right: it shows a shelf with
    broken vases with is seq 66 frame 65 (> 50). FreeDink reproduces
    this behavior by allowing up to 1000 frames in a sequence but
    without the buffer overflow part.

- Command line: fails on invalid options.  Supports undocumented
  '-nomovie' for compatibility with DFArc2.  Supports short aliases
  (e.g. -window -> -w) and double-dash options (e.g. -window ->
  --window).

- Search path: Dink search data in additional places to support
  separating reference data and user D-Mods. Check
  doc/directory_layout.txt for information.

- Dinkedit

  - Dinkedit creates a custom sequence #1 but mark the 4th frame as
    '-1'.  This made FreeDinkEdit crash, so it's set to 0, which means
    "end of sequence".

  - The editor palette is now Ts01.bmp instead of esplash.bmp - just
    like the game. This is simpler that way, and nobody changed the
    editor palette anyway.