Skulltag Version 97D Released

After months of testing and somewhere around 330 changes since beta 4.3, Skulltag version 97D has been released.

Amongst other things, the more interesting features are Linux OpenGL support, an update to ZDoom SVN revision 622 and GZDoom 1.0.29, full Heretic support, and limited Hexen and Strife support.

You can find a full changelog here and you can download it here.

fp etc

April fools!

ADEzor said:

April fools!

You wish.

Logitech G15 Support!? YES!

Sweet :3

Source code?

exp(x) said:

Source code?

If your asking whether or not it has been made public, then the answer is no. I doubt it will be made public for a long time, if ever.

You are clearly unaware of what it is that I am asking.

exp(x) said:

You are clearly unaware of what it is that I am asking.

Apparently so :P. What are you asking?

I'm not asking anything. I'm saying "Shame on you, Skulltag. Shame on you for taking John Carmack's gift and selfishly abusing it."

Ahahaha, I gotcha now ;). Though for future reference, if you aren't asking anything, don't use a question mark so poor saps like myself don't get confused.

exp(x) said:
Source code?

Looks like a lot of people thought this was an April Fools gag. If the announcement had mentioned source availability then we would have known for sure...

Mechadon said:

Ahahaha, I gotcha now ;). Though for future reference, if you aren't asking anything, don't use a question mark so poor saps like myself don't get confused.

Wikipedia said:

A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for rhetorical effect rather than to receive an answer. Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to reflect on what the implied answer to the question must be. When a speaker states, "How much longer must our people endure this injustice?" or "Do you really think I want to have a Star Trek themed wedding?", or "How many times do I have to tell you to stop walking into the house with mud on your shoes?"; no formal answer is expected. Rather, it is a device used by the speaker to assert or deny something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

;)

Vulture said:limited Hexen and Strife support

I don't think Hexen is limited at all, you could play RoC on Coop, or full DM, without any issues in the Public RC, same with itself and I guess that applies the new final version, too(unless aliens wanted to h4x ST and I didn't knew about it).
But, yeah, Strife is fully playable too, the problem is that Coop support is completely unguaranteed, since something related to the way it handled Player Spawns didn't support it, I don't quite accurately remember the issue with it, but it was something like that, the good news about Strife's MP support is that DM should be playable on ST.

That, and getting more Off-Topic, I felt the urgue to thank lots of people, since this work is amazing: big thanks to randy & Graf, and lots of love to whoever contributes for ST, specially the ST Devs, I love Skulltag, these Source-Ports are the best.

Mangetsu said:

But, yeah, Strife is fully playable too, the problem is that Coop support is completely unguaranteed, since something related to the way it handled Player Spawns didn't support it, I don't quite accurately remember the issue with it, but it was something like that, the good news about Strife's MP support is that DM should be playable on ST.

Strife DM was possible in the original game. However, Skulltag's netcode is written in a way that lots and lots of things are not done automatically but have to reported to the netcode explicitly. And I don't think they implemented this into the Strife code yet.

Strife Coop suffers from 3 problems:

- some maps don't contain the spawn spots.
- some map actions will break when there's more than one player
- the dialog system is not network safe (this has been fixed in one of the most recent ZDoom revisions that hasn't been ported to Skulltag yet. ZDoom r622 is 3 months old, btw.

Oh, and for those who are complaining about the source: ZDoom recently incorporated some LGPL code. Needless to say that Skulltag either has to remove it or change their handling of the source code... ;)

Nuxius said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

;)

Ya, ya, ya, but with text speech we can`t make tone sounds. Written sarcasm or fake questions are hope-it-works situations.

Don't mind that, Graf, I'm sure the ST Devs are going to plan lots of things besides what's available on the present time, while they already announced that the other changes are going to be ported on their next version, 97E, but I dunno what much.

Graf Zahl said:

Oh, and for those who are complaining about the source: ZDoom recently incorporated some LGPL code. Needless to say that Skulltag either has to remove it or change their handling of the source code... ;)

Muahaha.

LGPL allows you to link proprietary code to it still, so it really poses no threat to Skulltag's greediness.

It still can't run on Windows 95.

MikeRS said:

LGPL allows you to link proprietary code to it still, so it really poses no threat to Skulltag's greediness.

That it does - but it imposes rather severe restrictions. The only way a proprietary program can link to LGPL code without any need of releasing its source or making compromises is if it uses the LGPL code as a DLL.

In this case my guess would be that they simply leave it out as it is nothing important.

Skulltag's greediness

You mean, ambitiousness, right?

Closed source = ambitiousness? Lolwut

Well, I'm happy that I can once again play Skulltag.

Although I wonder who said yes to including D2Duel1

esselfortium said:

Closed source = ambitiousness? Lolwut

Ditto, though I'm not sure how it's greediness either. I think a better word would be "overprotectiveness".

How about 'paranoia'? :D

you guys do realize that no ammount of 'community pressure' is going to make the team release the skulltag source, correct? it sucks, but its not like there are any better alternatives.

besides, after not playing it for a longass time, I've come back to actually be quite impressed with the skulltag in general. It's had voting for a longass time and has added demo recording support, which is important for leagues and such, and the netcode feels solid to me.

that said, i would love for skulltag to start getting OSP-style features. as a start, here's a feature request from me:

* warmup mode. when i was playing private ctf the other day, when players wanted to start the match, they had to revote the map. a much better solution is one that OSP-style mods introduced, where if a 'tournament mode' is enabled, players can walk around and practice shooting each other until everyone enables their 'ready' flag or until 'allready' is voted. Then, a countdown starts and when the countdown finishes, the map is reverted to its initial state and players are all spawned at the same time with no loading screen.

OSP has tons of other awesome features, like programmably enforced team captians with /pick <playerid> options to get people to join their team, referees who can change any arena option without going through a vote, enforced clientside team and enemy colors (for example, being able to force all teammates to a specific color (say...cyan) and all enemies to another specific color (say...bright green), clientside). i would love to see those sorts of features to appear in skulltag, because with their appearence, I think that skulltag can finally start to make a dent in zdaemon's competative scene.

All good suggestions, Alex. Hopefully Rive or someone else on the dev team will think about those. I too have seen a need for more things of that nature when playing in those private CTF matches.

By OSP, you mean this, right?

AlexMax said:

you guys do realize that no ammount of 'community pressure' is going to make the team release the skulltag source, correct? it sucks, but its not like there are any better alternatives.

Sellout :D