Announcing Oolite 1.75.1 beta

[JensAyton]

Oolite beta release 1.75.1 is now available from Oolite.org.

Mac users are encouraged to test the built-in updater (select “Check for Updates…” from the Oolite menu, or wait for it to prompt you automatically).

Changes since beta release 1.75

• Joystick deadzone restored to previous value (does not affect Mac OS X). (Bug #17945)
• (Mac OS X) Support for game pads that don’t pretend to be joysticks.
• (Windows) Uninstaller is now more discriminating about which files it deletes.
• The fast docking button now defaults to the main station if within the aegis, even if it’s outside scanner range, as intended. (Bug #17923)
• Ship mass calculations, and thus mass lock behaviour, have been restored (except for very small ships). (Bug #17940)
• Thargoids no longer randomly shoot in entirely the wrong direction.
• Fixed “jousting” behaviour where attacking ships would veer off after one hit.
• Various fixes for wormhole behaviour in interstellar space, post-nova systems and with ships with escorts.
• Interim fix for mass-dependent fuel prices not working. (Bug #17947).
• Various bug fixes and cosmetic tweaks, including but not limited to Bug #17944, Bug #17968, Bug #17975, Bug #17992, Bug #17993 and Bug #17995.

JavaScript

• JavaScript Ship equipmentStatus() now works for primary and secondary weapons.
• Calling spawn() on a subentity previously put the spawnees near the witchpoint. It now works like calling spawn() on the parent ship, which is suboptimal but less confusing. Relying on the current begaviour is not recommended as it may be improved in future.
• JavaScript system.addShipsToRoute() now adds ships within scanner range of the route, and ships added with system.addGroupToRoute() are clustered.
• JavaScript SystemInfo systemsInRange() once again works as an instance method (which is now the recommended usage).
• New ship event entityDestroyed(). This fires immediately after the ship becomes invalid, regardless of the reason, except when the game restarts.
• New SystemInfo property internalCoordinates and new PlayerShip properties cursorCoordinatesInLY, galacticHyperspaceFixedCoordsInLY and galaxyCoordinatesInLY. This resolves the problem that different coordinate systems were being used for galactic coordinates in different contexts.
• Mission screens can now be run in flight without generating warnings about the player being both docked and not docked. (Bug #17953)

This release uses the version of SpiderMonkey from FireFox 4.0 release candidate 1 and removes all temporary compatibility code. It is expected that there will be no further changes affecting existing JavaScript scripts prior to the next stable release.

Localization note: gameoverscreen-score-@-f has been replaced with gameoverscreen-score-@.

[JensAyton]

We have received reports that the 1.75.1 source code tarball released on BerliOS contained certain makefiles and shell scripts with CR/LF endings. This resulted in inability to build on Linux systems. Other architectures were not affected.

In order to esnure that the game builds successfully across all supported platforms, the source tarball has now been replaced with one which is compatible with Linux. Users who build from source and have encountered build problems can now download oolite-dev-1.75.1-20110315.tar.bz2 from the Oolite Project Filelist page on BerliOS.