Announcing Oolite 1.76

[JensAyton]

Oolite 1.76, the No-Longer Mythical Next Stable Release, is now available from Oolite.org.

We wholeheartedly thank this great community for their support during the development of the game and hope that you will all enjoy playing and modding it to its fullest potential. Right On, Commanders!


Changes since beta release 1.75.3:

Gameplay
General

• When using docking clearance, player now gets an extra few seconds when very close to the dock. (Bug #17997)
• Enhanced missile logic for missiles approaching head-on to a target.
• Enhanced damage calculations for collision and missile damage; damage is no longer dependent on target size.
• Changed the manifest screen to better handle situations when too much cargo, passengers, or contracts were being displayed.
• All mission screen choices should now also be selectable by mouse.
• The game now ignores all keys except ‘Space’ on the Arrival Reports screen.
• Enhanced mouse controls to allow maximum pitch.
• It’s now possible to pause the game when the autopilot is running.
• Improved AI for ships scooping cargo.
• Improved sun-skimming NPCs.

Bug fixes

• Non-tonnage commodities are now cleared correctly after a game reset.
• Avoid negative cargo capacity under certain conditions, especially in conjunction with passenger cabins.
• Various additional checks to ensure ship equipment is not lost when it was already installed (eg, damaged during a fight, loading a Commander).
• Fuel price is now displayed correctly for ships which have a fuel charge rate other than 1.0.
• Large ships no longer block the launch queue in stations.
• Fix NPCs getting far-away holding positions while waiting to dock.
• Docking Clearance: Player is no longer given clearance while ships are in the launch queue.
• Aft-firing weapons on an NPC no longer trigger forward-facing weapons.
• No unnecessary auto-save immediately after a manual save.
• Various bug-fixes to better handle entities when the Universe is full which could lead to crashing.
• No more double spaces in the randomly generated planet descriptions.
• The short range chart no longer shows pre-nova system data for nova systems.
• Regression fix: The autopilot disengages when pressing ‘fast-dock’.
• Escape pods should no longer disappear immediately after they launched.
• A damaged Galactic Hyperdrive now correctly aborts the jump.
• Fixed the first witchjump after a galactic jump.
• Improved handling of ships exiting wormholes; various values are properly reset now and NPCs following the player should no longer crash into the NavBuoy.
• It’s no longer possible to pause the game in invalid situations (such as the witchspace tunnel).
• Fix docking music either ending before docking was complete, or continuing to play after a hyperspace jump.
• Sounds no longer continue to play after player death or resetting the game. (Bug #18108)
• Various fixes for large escort groups; especially Thargoid/Thargons.
• Fix Thargoid message overflow. (Bug #18055)
• NPCs now have the same inactive cloaking behaviour as players.
• Ignore passengers and contracts in hacked strict mode gamesaves.
• Fixed various memory leaks.

Mac-specific

• Fix for incorrect playlist selected in iTunes after startup.
• Switching iTunes integration off now pauses iTunes.
• iTunes is muted while the Oolite theme music is played.

Expansion pack development changes

Equipment

• The plasma cannon now uses the ‘weapon_position_’ keys from shipdata.plist.
• Weapon names are now always displayed as “<position> <type> laser”, irrespective of what is defined in equipment.plist and descriptions.plist.

Other Configuration Files

• Script names are no longer expanded unless enclosed by [] in mission text or mission info.
• Resizing message_gui & comms_log_gui via hud.plists now retains the comms log and the last 2 message lines.
• Added the key to turn the HUD on and off to keyconfig.plist (default: ‘o’).
• A wrongly defined ‘titleKey’ for missionScreens now logs a warning instead of an internal error.

Javascript

• Fixed rounding errors for the angleTo method which sometimes returned a NaN for identical vectors instead of zero.
• Fixed the rotationTo method which sometimes returned an illegal quaternion for some anti-parallel vectors.
• Fixed isValid for entities which were destroyed during the current game tick; always returns ‘false’ now.
• system.addShip() and system.addGroup() now only returns the ships actually added to the Universe, instead of the whole group.
• viewDirectionChanged() now fires correctly when switching between gui screens.
• The startUp event should now fire properly after the Universe is fully initialised.
• Fixed reliability of the Javascript engine when resetting itself.
• Improved logging when loading a commander fails due to JS issues.
• The frame callback is now only called when the game is actually running.
• When the player aborts a jump countdown, the type of the jump is now reported.

Scripting bug fixes

• Regression fix: the legacy_spawnShip function should work again.
• system.name, system.population, etc. should now report the correct values when in interstellar space.
• Changes to system.name, system.techLevel, etc. are now shown correctly on the short range map.
• ships should now always have the correct orientation after being spawned.
• restoring sub-entities on the player ship now adjusts the trade-in factor correctly.
• The AI commands becomeExplosion and becomeEnergyBlast now also trigger the shipDied event handler.
• The game no longer freezes when a script tries to resurrect a ship after it dies; the ship just dies now. (Bug #18054)
• Specifying 0 Cr mandatory equipments no longer freezes the game.
• Specifying illegal flasher declaration no longer causes an exception.

New AI properties and methods

• checkHeatInsulation - returns either INSULATION_OK or INSULATION_POOR.

OXP Verifier

• Fixed bug in the oxp verifyer not recognizing ‘escorts’ in shipdata.
• Added CLASS_MINE to the oxp verifier.

[JensAyton]

The 64-bit Linux version is now available.