Battle Tanks 0.8 finally released!

At last! What Bolsheviks were dreaming about for so long now comes true: after a whole month of work we present a final Battle Tanks 0.8.7656. And even for Mac users! Thanks to all for your bug reports, and please send more!

The full changelog is more than 100 lines long, so we will only mention news after 0.8-RC1.

General:

• The engine is ported to MacOS X 10.5 Leopard. We also think about a port for 10.4 Tiger.
• For linuxoids, an “install” target is added for scons.
• A new Ukrainian localization is added, as well as new diacritic marks for the Cyrillic codepage.
• Thanks to a better algorithm of counting the delays (based on bar chart of errors) and a new method of serialization of floats, the quality of life network game became better.
• A DNS cache is added to eliminate delays on scanning the servers.

Interface:

• Servers in the connection dialog are now colored: live servers are green and dead ones are white. We have also added a progress indicator for the scanning process.
• Buttons are now highlighted on mouse hover. Easy but looks great!
• System messages are now displayed using user’s language, not server’s.
• System icons are re-drawn for WinXP, Vista, and Mac.

Gameplay:

• Damage is increased for tank ammo.
• Shilka now unloads its cargo when it is killed. So if there were troopers or nuclear mines inside–they drop for everyone’s joy and surprise :-) .

Fixes:

• An incorrect work of UDP on BSD systems is corrected.
• Hanging on scanning servers is eliminated.
• Crash on machines that don’t have a sound card is fixed.
• A wrong number of channels in ogg stream is now right.
• Problems with broadcasting UDP are no longer problems.
• A bug is fixed that allowed some objects to be immortal. (Everyone should have seen a non-destructible spaceport on cooperative maps.)
• A swarm of small but nasty errors is fixed.

Warning! The Internet game server is also updated, so please don’t try connecting to it using an old client.