Beta 2

July 25, 2022, 22:25

Two months after beta 1 has been released, we present beta 2. There's been lots of changes and improvements. The most important ones are:

• small towns (those sharing the same town number) can be considered either different or equal; depending on this setting, races have to start or end either at the particular town or at any town with the chosen town number
• in racing joint-ventures, income and expenses are shared between players
• speed improvement in finding tiles for extending tracks to, finding a route for building tracks between two tiles, and for finding itineraries
• the route for building new tracks is chosen more intelligently now: it considers tracks of other players and might choose an alternative route to avoid expensive interconnection costs to other players
• in network games, support has been added to skip players to which no client is connected after a customizable time-out
• the award for races is configurable depending on the number of players now; the session options dialog has been enhanced to allow configuration of the race award up to the 5th place
• all defaults for game rules (and for further options, too) are now taken from the game database
• issues with declaring building stage as closed should be fixed
• improved handling of minimum length requirement for itineraries: if multiple choices of start and/or end terminal are possible, all combinations have to fulfill the requirement
• the concept of connections to a session has been removed; clients only need to connect to players from now on
• the internal handling of building costs, interconnection costs, operating costs, and ferry lines has been rewritten; please report if you observe any drawbacks
• no interconnection costs are charged anymore along ferry lines and abroad
• fixed costs for purchasing ferries have been charged when restoring games from game database
• rework handling of players must leave home towns in different directions rule: enforce the rule only as long as it's the player's first turn and there is any other player who hasn't built any tracks yet; this resolves the issue that all home towns (even others than the player's particular home town) were forbidden to build a second track during the whole game
• the side panel shows the remaining distance to the destination terminal during a race now
• hovering over named tiles shows the name in status bar
• print town numbers on top of railroad tracks for better readability
• the menu item Game → Refresh can be used to update the current game in case the client gets out of sync
• fixed label positions in rotated maps
• fixed manually selected terminals were not set correctly
• fixed itinerary shown wrong on rotated maps
• fixed setting a game's map not working if the map contains an ampersand (&) character
• fixed changes to hometowns not being shown
• fixed game display not being updated when starting or stopping sessions
• fixed clicking on the map caused a wrong tile being detected if the cursor has quickly been moved after the mouse click

Please note the following limitations:

• This is a beta version which is expected to have bugs. Use at your own risk.
• Only a 32-bit release is available. (The final releases will support 64-bit, too.)
• There may be some maps which are not fully functional. The Germany map has been tested most intensely and is recommended for the first game. Please report map errors to contact@dampfross.net.
• Please report any issues to contact@dampfross.net (A ticket system for reporting bugs will be established soon.)

It is still recommended to use local operation mode because client-server mode hasn't been tested exhaustively in combination with the installer.