Jump to Main Content

Crossfire Traffic | 2006-March

This is crossfire traffic for March 2006

Crossfire Traffic is a means to communicate the activity surrounding crossfire in an accessible and non-technical way, it is targeted at those who are curious about what is happening with the project, but find the existing mailing lists, CVS list. forum, wiki and IRC channels overly complicated, scary, or time consuming to read. As such it does not contain any background details, but instead focuses only on things that are user-visible.

Table of Contents:

Mailing List

Traffic on the mailing list picked up a little this month when compared to February as many interesting topics were discussed:

  • Discussion and possible solution(s) for an XP exploit on PK servers (aka "Sock Puppetting")
  • Feedback on server code clean up & function renames, switch comments to Doxygen's format
  • A discussion that carried over from February was addressed again, Crossfire 2.0+ features/priorities
  • Early stage of using and writing Unit Tests
  • First set of Unit Tests written and deployed
  • Comments on bugs found by Unit Tests
  • DIscussion of Map2 & Animations and what changes are involved with that
  • Patch was sent for player-owner shop proof of concept
  • Proposal to move Crossfire to Subversion (SVN) from CVS
  • Discussion about adding secondary effects to spells
  • Questions about creating an game trailer or preview for promotional purposes
  • Announcement of a new map editor based in Perl with the Gtk2 perl module
  • Suggestion for overhauling the jeweler skill, which would allow a player to change item stats
  • Discussion on problems with updating maps on a live server when the maps are occupied by players
  • Protocol & compression and bandwidth savings
  • Inquiry on a web-based client or portal
  • Followup discussion about creating a system of dynamic alchemy
  • Open invitation for a Crossfire get together in Italy
  • Inquiry about the removal of the random encounter code

Changes that occurred this month:

Crossfire has started to get a unit testing framework, this should allow for automatic testing of bugs in most cases.

Gameplay:

  • Fix a crash with forked lightning on map borders
  • Fix a crash with random map generation
  • Fix a crash with material name changes
  • Fix a crash with monsters who have scrolls with no spells in them
  • Improve speed of archetype lookup
  • Exp penalty at death is now configurable in the server settings file
  • Fix an abuse with alchemy skill
  • Make inscribed scrolls merge better

New Items:

  • A new ice tile that deals cold damage to anyone walking on it

CFJavaEditor:

  • Objects are saved in the same way as crossedit
  • Fix a threading related crash
  • Reduce memory usage

Clients:

You will need to update your client to see the effect of these.

  • Update auto-completion of commands (using the tab key) to work on all of them
  • Fix a memory leak

cfclient:

  • Fix a crash that could occur when pressing tab at login

gcfclient2:

  • Make the main window resizable down to 800x600

jxclient:

  • Add spell listing support