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