Status Report

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Hello Xconquerors,

  Unfortunately I am not going to be able to come through with a 
Christmas prerelease. Debugging various things took longer than what I 
had hoped. However, there will probably be a new file release in the 
next few days, and it will likely contain at least one major new feature 
 as well as several bugfixes. So, hang in there, __a late gift is 
better than no gift. Nonetheless, have ye a right merrye Christmas this day.

  If you are not developing Xconq code or not otherwise intensely 
interested in Xconq, you can ignore the remainder of this message.
  Matthew's recent image scaling patches caused a change in the way 
that the user interfaces needed to request images. This affected the 
display of unit images in some games. I originally set out to just fix 
the way the images were requested and then get back to dealing with the 
unit views/'see-mistake-chance' bug and the networking bugs. However, 
after seeing the appalling state of the Tkconq drawing code (massive 
redundancy/duplication, hacked bits of code pulled in from 'ui.c', an 
oversized set of drawing functions doing similar things, etc...), I 
decided to seriously refactor the whole mess. And refactor I did. 
Hundreds of lines of redundancy have been removed. I still need to 
finish ripping out functions that are no longer used, and so the 
"casualties" are likely grow as the offensive rolls forward. If you are 
planning on doing any hacking on Tkconq, look at the new 
'draw_uviews_in_cell' and 'draw_unit_view_and_occs' functions; they are 
likely all you need wrt to drawing units.
  If you are planning on doing any UI development in general, much of 
the 'xform_unit_*' family is now deprecated and likely to be removed in 
the very near future. Take a look at new 'xform_unit_view' function; it 
supercedes the others, and also has support for some new features that 
are not quite yet implemented in any UI....

  With holiday cheer,
    Eric