Dear List,
as the project lead of The Secret Chronicles of Dr. M. (TSC), I am
pleased to announce that -- finally, after so many delays -- the new
stable version of TSC has been released today!
Welcome version 2.1.0, the first stable release of TSC 2 after version
2.0.0 was released back in 2015. I would like to take this as an
opportunity to thank every single contributor to the new TSC version. We
know that there are still so many things that could be improved, but we
believe that after five years, it is more than overdue to issue a new
release even if some features did not make it into 2.1.0 which we would
have liked to (for instance, there is still no replacement for turtle
boss that was removed in 2.0.0). But still, this release is in many
parts better than the preceeding 2.0.0 release from 2015. New enemies,
an improved level editor interface, new music, and several bugs fixed.
And last but not least, this is the first stable version of TSC that
finally compiles again on current Linux distributions.
If you want to help TSC now for the next release, please note: we are
urgently looking for a graphics artist. There are numerous tickets on the
tracker open that require someone to draw SVGs for TSC, but as of now,
there is no graphic artist in our team anymore. If you are one or know
one, please speak up here on the mailing list, on the forum at
https://lists.secretchronicles.org/hyperkitty/list/tsc-devel@lists.secret...
or in our IRC channel #secretchronicles on Freenode! There will be no
new enemies or other graphical additions until we find a graphics artist.
The release has been tagged on the Git repository as v2.1.0 and has
been uploaded to our web server. The source code can be found at the
following URLs:
Source code:
https://ftp.secretchronicles.org/releases/TSC-2.1.0.tar.gz
PGP signature:
https://ftp.secretchronicles.org/releases/TSC-2.1.0.tar.gz.sig
MD5 checksum: 1f598a39667ff979d1b9075e173eac9b
SHA256 checksum: 6a16765b4951e3d5d1ea2b84e6da8f67b0271460f0c570b53ccdab80d7396261
The TGZ file has a total size of slightly more than 240 MiB. Please
consider this before downloading.
Precompiled versions will be made available soon via the website.
Let me note that we would welcome Linux distributions to package TSC
again. If you would like to package TSC and find problems with it,
please report those problems on our tracker at
https://github.com/Secretchronicles/TSC/issues and we'll see if we can
resolve them for the next release.
Future of TSC
The 2.1.0 release terminates an effort of many years to finally get TSC
into a distributable state again. We have fought with numerous API break
and backward compatibility break issues from our dependencies for this
release (SDL1 was deprecated, CEGUI 0.8 broke its API heavily, libxml++
came out with a new breaking API, and I think there were other issues
that I do not even know off the top of my head), which probably are the
largest part of source code changes between version 2.0.0 and 2.1.0. TSC
still has a large number of dependencies, and it is a goal for future
versions to reduce this number of dependencies, so that such problems
may not occur again.
It is too early to give definitive statements about TSC's future, but we
expect there to be some maintenance releases and probably smaller
feature releases over the next years. The large overhaul that should at
some point result in TSC3 however is not anywhere near to see.
What has changed since RC2?
* A compilation error in Release mode was fixed
* A misuse of the save dialog that could crash TSC was fixed (ticket #687 by datahead)
* Default campaign description updated to make our plans more clear
* The Desert Break In and Desert Fortress levels received updates by datahead
* The "Reset progress" dialogue can now be confirmed with a joystick in
addition to keyboard and mouse
What has changed since version 2.0.0?
If you followed the beta and RC phase, you already know this, but for
completeness' sake I give the list from the beta1 announcement here
again, with additions from the beta and RC announcements:
* Several new background music tracks
* Switched some SMC graphics for original TSC ones
* New enemies: Larry and Doom Larry, which fuse and ultimately explode
if hit
* Improvements to level scripting
* Editor UI overhauled
* Multiple level exits with different overworld pathes possible now
* Levels load much faster compared to 2.0.0
* Secret Area markers are available in the editor
* New in-game scripting console on pressing [F7]
* Several bugfixes, including some crash fixes
* Several build fixes
* Several scripting API documentation fixes, and build documentation fixes
* Upgrade CEGUI dependency from 0.7.9 to 0.8.7
* Support for and requirement of a C++11-capable C++ compiler
* It compiles again on modern Linux distributions!
* New desert levels by datahead. They were added to the campaign in
world 3.
* Scripting documentation system was overhauled and the dependency on
RubyGems for the scripting API generation was dropped
* Level music is now stopped rather than faded out on death
* New great title theme music by refi64
* Scripting expansion packs are back
* Experimental build support for FreeBSD/OpenBSD
The CEGUI upgrade deserves a separate mention. CEGUI 0.8.x broke their
API and as more and more people do not have access to the outdated
CEGUI 0.7.9, it was necessary to conduct this upgrade. This upgrade
however bound so many of TSC's team resources that the 2.1.0 release
ultimately ended up with fewer new features than it was originally
intended. Now that the upgrade has been done it should be much easier
to compile TSC on modern Linux distributions than it was the case with
the old 2.0.0 stable release.
A feature that did sadly not make it into 2.1.0 is a story. We have
adopted a final story draft for the future of the game, though. It
can be found here:
https://github.com/Secretchronicles/documents/raw/master/gd/documents/pdf...
The levels contained in version 2.1.0 are mostly equivalent to those in
2.0.0. Some small changes have been made to the levels, and a few new
levels included. We encourage users to provide quality levels here on
the mailing list for inclusion into TSC. Levels that implement parts of
the story mentioned above are preferred.
-quintus
On behalf of the TSC team.
--
Blog:
https://mg.guelker.eu