NEWS-2.3.0-RC1

WARNING: This is a tentative list, by no means exhaustive. See the full ChangeLog in the source for a comprehensive list of all changes.

Download links for older releases can be found in the download archive.

Welcome to Freeciv 2.3.0-RC1

Thanks again to all our developers, who continue to work so hard.

WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 2.3.0-beta4

Server / General

• Bug fix: server crash and assertion failure associated with civil war. GNA#17439
• Bug fix: clients were not always updated when a city was lost (for instance, due to civil war):
  • The loser's client, and anyone who shared their vision, could still show the city as owned by the losing player, leading to client crashes. GNA#17990 GNA#17860
  • The loser's client could still show units in the city as owned by that player. GNA#18194
• Bug fix: the server's stack could overflow (causing a crash) with large maps, particularly on Windows (where the trouble was observed around 80,000 tiles). GNA#17962
• Bug fix: the server could crash with rulesets where gold_upkeep_style=2 due to ending up with a negative gold balance. Previously, if there was not enough gold, at most one unit and one building would be sold per turn. Now, as many units/buildings are sold alternately as necessary to restore a positive balance. (This doesn't affect the supplied rulesets.) GNA#18221
• Bug fix: pillaging a road (or removing it in the editor) under a road-native unit (such as a Big Land unit in the experimental ruleset) could cause a server crash. GNA#16281
• Bug fix (Windows binaries only): the modpack installer, freeciv-modpack.exe, was completely non-functional on Windows; it crashed immediately on launching. It can now download files. GNA#18354 GNAPATCH#2812
• Fix a warning loading some old savegames. GNA#18209
• Suppress a recently-introduced assertion failure that could show up in some circumstances. GNA#18095
• Changes to the 'timeout' setting now always have immediate effect, as in 2.0.x; previously, changes between non-zero values would not take effect until the next turn. GNA#18079
• Allow the 'unitwaittime' option to be used when 'timeout' is 0 (disabled). GNA#17975
• When global warming or nuclear winter occur, changes between land and water are now restricted to coastlines. Also, city tiles are no longer protected from climate change in certain circumstances. GNA#17953
• Bug fix: inaccurate message when trying to accept an alliance pact which is invalid due to the other party's war. GNA#18066
• Bug fix: it was impossible for existing users to log in to servers with authentication enabled running on big-endian machines (such as sparc64). GNA#18170
• Bug fix: more accurate reporting of network errors on Windows. GNA#18210
• Bug fix: freeciv-modpack didn't always find the user's home directory correctly (notably on Windows). GNA#18262
• Change path handling to allow scenarios to be downloaded with freeciv-modpack. GNAPATCH#2500
• Clean up handling of changing default metaserver URL between versions. GNAPATCH#2764
• Fix path handling of the ser and civ scripts to be consistent with the behaviour of the unwrapped binaries. GNA#17461
• Apply latest lua-5.1.4 patch (9).
• Fix a minor server memory leak. GNAPATCH#2540
• Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNAPATCH#2630 GNA#18091 GNA#17757 GNA#16457 GNAPATCH#2736 GNAPATCH#2772

Clients

• Bug fix: the client could make invalid accesses with rulesets with variable city radii (such as the experimental ruleset). GNA#17710
• Bug fix: the client could potentially behave as though it had made a successful connection to a server when in fact the connection had failed. GNA#18211
• Bug fix: the client could use invalid information about the relationship between cities and tiles leading to an assertion failure. GNA#18005
• (Gtk) Bug fix: cancelling the "build city" name dialog by pressing Escape could make it impossible to issue the build order again for some units. GNA#18163
• (Gtk) Allocate less space to the minimap when the "Arrange widgets for small displays" option is enabled, since this area had grown since 2.2.x. GNA#17802
• (Gtk) Bug fix: scrolling the minimap could cause confusion / corruption with large maps. GNA#17825
• (Gtk) Bug fix: when the minimap is detached from the main window, allow it to fill its window vertically as well as horizontally. GNA#18180
• (Gtk) The "Build Fortress" and "Build Airbase" entries on the Combat menu did not necessarily build the named bases (depending on the unit/ruleset). Renamed to "Build Type A/B Base". GNA#16566
• (Gtk) Bug fix: reinstate the Shift+Ctrl+R shortcut to start a revolution. GNA#18296
• (Gtk) Do not display hotkeys twice in some menu entries. GNA#17954
• (Gtk) Allow shift-right-click-drag to add units/cities to an existing selection. GNA#18301
• (Gtk) Left-click on the overview map now selects a new unit, and shift-left-click adds a unit to the existing selection, as on the main map. Previously, the overview map controls were swapped. GNA#18300
• The "Sell Obsolete" button in the Economy report could never be pressed. It has been renamed to "Sell Redundant", and now lets 'redundant' buildings be sold en masse (redundant buildings are those whose effects are entirely superseded by another, for which you may still be paying upkeep -- for instance, Power Plants are redundant in cities with a Hydro/Nuclear/Solar Plants). In the Gtk client, the "Obsolete" column in the Economy report has been replaced with a "Redundant" column showing how many of each building in your empire are redundant. GNA#17937
• Bug fix: the city dialog Happiness popup text could incorrectly indicate a penalty when there was none in the ruleset. GNA#18150
• Break long lines in the city dialog Happiness popup, to avoid long lists of buildings/wonders going off the screen. GNAPATCH#2688

Tilesets / Art

• Fix unit upkeep icons in supplied tilesets so they don't overlap with each other (for instance, gold upkeep in the experimental ruleset). GNA#17906
• Minor glitch fixes for Amplio2 tileset (mainly in city map). GNA#17998
• freeciv-modpack.exe on Windows now has an icon. GNAPATCH#2787

Gameplay / Rules

Supplied rulesets

• In the civ2 and multiplayer rulesets, Fundamentalism now has a happiness penalty for empire size (as it did in 2.0.x). GNA#18133
• Rearrange implementation of the Hanging Gardens wonder so that it is not mentioned twice in the city dialog happiness popup. GNA#16471
• Minor changes to nations. GNA#18182 GNAPATCH#2710

Help / Documentation

• Fix misleading autogenerated help about the requirements for city celebration and rapture. GNA#17949
• Help now documents that non-military units can enter foreign territory regardless of peace treaties, and don't prevent enemy cities from working tiles. GNA#17378
• Refreshed and expanded the Controls section of the help. GNAPATCH#2648
• Other minor improvements to in-game text. GNA#17858 GNA#17976 GNAPATCH#2526 GNA#18207 GNAPATCH#2524 GNA#18276 GNA#18281
• Fix some inaccuracies in README files. GNAPATCH#2431 GNAPATCH#2695 GNAPATCH#2696 GNAPATCH#2698 GNAPATCH#2697 GNAPATCH#2768
• Several invisible changes to assist with translation. GNA#17928 GNAPATCH#2619 GNA#18031 GNAPATCH#2744 GNA#17137

Translations

• Updated translations:
  • Complete translations: French, Polish.
  • Incomplete translations: Spanish (99.8%), Catalan (99.5%), Finnish (85%), Ukrainian (77%), Japanese (70%), Simplified Chinese (40%).

Build/portability

• Fix/suppress some build-time warnings from GCC 4.6. GNA#18219 GNA#18217
• Fix a build-time warning when NLS is disabled. GNA#18237
• Fix a built-time warning when building with NDEBUG. GNA#18264
• Allow freeciv-modpack to be built without Gtk client. GNAPATCH#2712
• Use Lua path set by configure script, to assist packagers. GNA#18263
• Changes reflecting the fact that the --enable-client=gtk option to configure will become ambiguous in a future release. GNAPATCH#2725 GNAPATCH#2786
• IPv6-enabled builds no longer rely on the deprecated function gethostbyname2(), which may enable building on a wider variety of platforms. GNA#16623
• Portability fixes. GNA#16457 GNA#18329
• The example Debian packaging arrangements now include freeciv-modpack. GNAPATCH#2796

See NEWS for older lists of changes.

KNOWN ISSUES

• There are some regressions in the SDL client relative to 2.2.x:
  • The city dialog has not been redesigned to accommodate the larger city map required by variable city radius support. As a result, the city map display is scaled down and difficult to read. GNA#15804
  • Not all setting types can now be modified; bitwise and color settings are not yet supported. GNAPATCH#1631 GNAPATCH#1957