Creation/Dev/Releases/Client/NewFeatures2005: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 01:10, 31 January 2010

2.31

fixed bugs in the conversion of floating point to strings which bugged some scripts
the keyboard configuration is correctly saved and loaded now
npcs on gmaps move correctly when crossing level borders
removed some unused buttons in the option window (F1)

2.3

Graal v2.3 brings several huge improvements. The most important are:

Editor and online client are separated exes now; this increases the security and makes it possible to update them more often
Filename cache: To avoid slow NTFS-operations, Graal is now able to cache the file names and times, so that it doesn't need to scan the subfolders at each startup
New Timer: Graal doesn't take 99% cpu time anymore, the timer has been chanced to be as precise before but not using the cpu as much as before anymore
Fast NPC Lookup: Using new BTree-technology, Graal can detect the visibility and blocking behaviour of objects more efficiently, good for servers with gmaps
Classic Clientside-mode removed: Classic has been switched to use NPC-Server, so the client doesn't need insecure script commands like "toweapons" anymore
ATI 32 bit mode fixed

An almost complete list of improvements and bug fixes:

Editor and online client are separated now: You will find a Graal.exe and a GraalEditor.exe in the Graal folder. To easily start the editor there is a button in the starting window which automatically starts the GraalEditor.exe, but you can of course also start it directly with Windows Explorer or add a file association. The button "Offline Test" also starts the editor, but with option "-play". The editor is more or less the same than before. The online client is more secure now because it doesn't have any functions for loading levels or npcs anymore.
Filename cache: Previous Graal versions sometimes took a long time to start because Graal scans each subfolder at startup, to easily find the files when needed do display objects. The default Windows file system NTFS is very slow for that though. To make Graal also start fast on NTFS, it is now caching the file names, their location and modification time. It is saving all information into FILENAMECACHE.txt, and reading that at the next startup.
- Disadvantages:
  - While the startup is much faster, the login to servers might take slightly more time
  - When you copy files into the Graal folder then Graal will not see that delete FILENAMECACHE.txt in that case, or disable the filename cache in the Graal options
New Timer: Graal doesn't take 99% cpu time anymore, the timer has been chanced to be as precise before but not using the cpu as much as before anymore
Fast NPC Lookup: Using new BTree-technology, Graal can detect the visibility and blocking behaviour of objects more efficiently, good for servers with gmaps; On some servers (especially Zone) some areas are 10 times faster now (or 10 times less laggy). It speeds up all areas that have many npcs. Together with the lookup some other small bugs with drawing objects have been removed too.
- Things that are affected by the new npc lookup:
  - Script functions "onwall" and "tiletype" are much faster
  - Objects using huge ganis (e.g. houses) are drawn correctly and not disappering when half of them are still on the screen
New script functions onwall2(x,y,width,height) and onwater2(x,y,width,height), these functions have been added because of the new npc lookup which is made for checking rectangles, not just points; with them you can check if a rectangle area is blocking or under water
Script function testplayer(x,y) has been fixed for gmaps
When moving on other parts of the gmaps then the focus is not reset anymore (script command setfocus(x,y))
ATI 32 bit mode has been fixed
Problems with the 32bit color resolution where some images were not drawn with correct transparency were fixed
Profiles are correctly displayed even if the option "Save PMs/Profiles" is disabled
New Server Tab: Graal3D - When clicking on a Graal3D server in the serverlist then Graal3D is automatically started and connecting to the selected server; if you often play Graal3D server or want to play Graal with better speed you can also start Graal3.exe directly
When typing in a server name in the text field below the serverlist then the correct server is chosen; perfect matches are preferred, instead of taking the first name on the list
Graal is automatically registering the browser protocol "graal://" and "graal3://", so if you type in "graal://Servername/options" in a webbrowser then it is automatically starting Graal, connecting to the right server, and sending a "serverstartparams" trigger to the Control-NPC of that server with the specified parameters. This is made for making it possible that people can directly join an event or similiar on a server by just clicking a link on a website. If this doesn't work, then please start Graal one time as administrator (for registering a protocol you need administrator rights, although good webbrowsers like Firefox are asking you can again if you really want to start the executable).
The editor doesn't delete levels anymore when it is crashing while saving levels it is first making a copy and renaming the new level when succeeding
"clientside" triggers by the server are always working now
triggers on gmaps sent by the server or other clients have been fixed to always work
entering gmaps has been improved to not crash or display trash
Support for sending and receiving player positions in full precision has been added, also npc positions and moves can be received in full precision now, this will be enabled once all clients are switched to the new version
Scripting variable timevar2 has been added which is giving the time since the start of the machine, but with milliseconds resolution (is not identical to timevar2 on the server, for synchronization of time events use "timevar")
String variable #v(floating point) has been improved to display also integers with more than 6 decimals correctly, which makes it possible to fix the item sorting on Graal Kingdoms
when the player is hurt then the showimgs of the weapons are not removed anymore
When the background image or time of Windows is changed on desktops using comma as decimal separator then Graal is automatically switching back to dot as decimal separator, so not messing up scripts or level warps anymore
Several improvements of the hacking checks
Script variable downloadsize is correctly giving the size of the file that is currently downloaded works together with downloadpos and #D

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-'''http://www.antiunixmad.com/
+[[Category:Scripting Reference]]
+==2.31==
-Viper's Graal Issues.
+* fixed bugs in the conversion of floating point to strings which bugged some scripts
+* the keyboard configuration is correctly saved and loaded now
+* npcs on gmaps move correctly when crossing level borders
+* removed some unused buttons in the option window (F1)
-Hello everyone, as of late, many people have been attacking me on the issues and matters, trying to lie about things, bend the truth, and downright spin to make me and others of my cause look bad, in this text document i will discuss and lay to rest the issues that matter.
+==2.3==
-I have been involved graal for over three years now, and i used to really like Graal and its admins alot, then slowly after about a year Graal and its admins went in a bad downward spiral, i still stuck with graal in hopes graal would pull itself out of this hole and unixmad would go back to the right path, this however did not happen, instead unixmad and even stefan went fouler and lower than i could have imageined, First with fireing Pachuka and Fuitad, two of the BEST graal admins ever in my view for no other reason than disagreeing with his future plans, then if just fireing them was not bad enough, he threatend to sue them and kill they're families, this was so wrong and bad Fuitad even said he would punch unixmad in the face for saying that if he met him in real life, but that was just the beginning of the downward spiral unixmad foolishly invoked onto graal, he then blatantly STOLE a domain name graal.net from Owl Shimy which costed over 30$ US Dollars, and never gave it back to him and never paid him for the cost of the domain, he also threatend to sue Owl Shimy and kill his family although it was Unixmad which stole the domain from Owl Shimy, then around Graal1.3.1 he blocked off Gservers officially and threatend to sue anyone that ran the former Gservers, although they were released as "Freeware" and actually used to encourage people to use the Gservers, this was a blatant attempt to monopolise , threaten, and intemidate that players that actually helped graal and supported him, he then made claims he copyrighted "Graal" and would contact so called "Lawres" about anyone that used the name "Graal" or had "Graal Files" on there websites, although graal was distributed as "Freeware" or "Shareware" and had no official software copyrights related to it, and that the name "Graal" was actually the name of a holy sacred golden cup used in some religion, and in that he has commited blasphemy against whatever religion has the so called "Holy Graal", then later on Unixmad fired SuperNick, because of his country and his origion and called him an American Asian slut, this was the first sign of racism on the part of Unixmad, towards Graal1.4.1 Unixmad was secretly unwrapping his sadistic plans, he then started claiming credit and claiming to own the copyrights to graal, although unixmad has done nothing but host some stupid weak as servers, and yet Stefan Knorr has done all the real work for Graal, and was the one to make ZeldaOnline , GraalOnline in the first place and has written every bit of codeing for the Graal Client , Gserver, RC, ect, yet unixmad the worthless pile of trash that he is steals all credit for Graal, then in February 2001, Unixmad and Antago release Graal2001 and the start of the "Pay to Play" system, now i have no problem with the fact that it is pay to play, the issue is when you PAY for something you actually expect to get the worth while of your money in this product, but instead they got a shittily made level generated land that was 99% empty, the NPCs were and are laggy as hell, and there were no quests, and there is only two shitty things today for hearts that suck so much i refuse to even call them quests, and to add to that about 40% of everyone that paid and gave unixmad there credit card number NEVER got the accounts they paid 27$ or more for, and those that did clearly got chumped out by a cheap peice of crap that aint worth paying for, it sucked so badly that most people played on Graal Classic still, even those that foolishly paid for pay to play accounts, and in an attempt to "FORCE" people to pay for a shitty product they do not want against they're will Unixmad hired "Tyhm" to deface and ruin GraalClassic in an attempt to make it buggier and less fun than even Graal2001, about this time i was disgusted with unixmad and most of the other admins and decided to downright turn against Graal and for the most part stop playing the peice of crap in general. People starting getting angry, complaining, asking for help, and asking for refunds, of coarse unixmad gave noone a cash refund, and simply deleted and banned "PAID ACCOUNTS" of those who complained, asked for help, or asked for a refund these are PAYING CUSTOMERS, they have the rights of basic service that they PAID for, unixmad promises pay to play players a quality product and customer service, but instead gives them a grade F product and ripps off his customers and delete they're accounts that they PAID HIM money for, his excuse? Credit card fraud, when infact at least 90% of the people he bans for credit card fraud pay legitamately with there OWN credit cards or pay via paypal by check, and yet Unixmad has stolen and used others credit card numbers to buy things for himself on several occassions, he also claims he needs pay to play money to keep graal alive and running, yet there has been evidence that he makes at least 90% profit out of the monies he gets, and that he uses illegal porn ad banners and illegal cookie style web tracking and giveing email adresses of the players and even phone numbers of every player to spam and telemarketting companies without there permission, he even keeps personal player info, includeing email, adress, and phone number on unsecure servers which have already been leaked out, such info about people should not be on a public webserver accessable to the internet in anyway, then after all that Unixmad starts banning african american people, asians, koreans, and or people with images of people of that race from the Graal2001 forums and graal itself, yet again they are paying customers and this is another sickening act of racism on the part of Unixmad and GraalOnline, and then even more disgusting is what Stefan posts on the Graal2001 forums, he makes several anti american, racist, pro terrorist, pro nazi, and pro taliban comments on that post and goes on and on several pages bashing americans, this post was offense, obcene, and disgusting to many people includeing myself . If all that does not make you sick to your stomache or dislike unixmad yet, i am far from done, then Unixmad proceeds to illegally DDOS webservers of mafukie and make threats to him over the phone, and has phone assaulted me over 40 times a day between midnight and 5am, and has made threats to sue dozens of people, kill there families, and shut down innocent websites and servers, while hosting illegal stuff and doing illegal things himself with the use of his own wanadoo.fr servers, stuff which includes child porn, bestiality porn, DVD Piracy, DDOS Attacks, theft of copyrighted materials from gameing companies such as nintendo, Credit Card fraud, theft, spamming, phone harrassment, useage of illegal pirated corperate softwares, all this just to start the list of what Unixmad, Stefan, and they're servers are doing 24/7 for nearly 4 years now , anyone that likes unixmad or thinks he is a good person even after all this is clearly a fool, everything in this document is the truth and why i hate unixmad so much, if you like unixmad after all these sickening things he does, then you are no better than a KKK or Neo Nazi member and should go kill yourselfs, i do not tolerate facists, racists, or nazis, they are all bad people, and unixmad is one of the worst of the worst, and no person with any morales could tolerate or support such a person like Stephane Portha or Stefan Knorr. The people that spin, lie and bend the truth in support of unixmad will always exist, but i will always reveal the truth about unixmad, and EVERYTHING said in this document is true, despite what any assclowns try and say about this, and this supriseingly enough is only 1% of the bad things Unixmad has done, how some people even tolerate, none the less support such a bad person is beyond me... I fight against bad people like unixmad, why? Because unlike many others in this world i actually care about other people, and i will do everything in my power to stop unixmad from hurting graal or its innocent players, many say i want to destroy and kill graal, this is NOT true, i used to love graal, i only wish to stop unixmad's evil sadistic illegal actions and restore graal to the great game it used to be when it was "for the players, by the players" , but if i have to destroy GraalOnline in exchange to stop unixmad's tyranny, it will be regreteable, but sometimes some sacrifices have to be made for the greater good, lets just hope that unixmad drops dead and that sacrifice never has to be made... I love graal and lots of its players, and i wish to someday restore it to the grandness it once had, but bad people like unixmad must be gotten rid of if that is to be achieved...'''
+Graal v2.3 brings several huge improvements.
+The most important are:
+* Editor and online client are separated exes now; this increases the security and makes it possible to update them more often
+* Filename cache: To avoid slow NTFS-operations, Graal is now able to cache the file names and times, so that it doesn't need to scan the subfolders at each startup
+* New Timer: Graal doesn't take 99% cpu time anymore, the timer has been chanced to be as precise before but not using  the cpu as much as before anymore
+* Fast NPC Lookup: Using new BTree-technology, Graal can detect the visibility and blocking behaviour of objects more efficiently, good for servers with gmaps
+* Classic Clientside-mode removed: Classic has been switched to use NPC-Server, so the client doesn't need insecure script commands like "toweapons" anymore
+* ATI 32 bit mode fixed
+An almost complete list of improvements and bug fixes:
+* Editor and online client are separated now: You will find a Graal.exe and a GraalEditor.exe in the Graal folder. To easily start the editor there is a button in the starting window which automatically starts the GraalEditor.exe, but you can of course also start it directly with Windows Explorer or add a file association. The button "Offline Test" also starts the editor, but with option "-play". The editor is more or less the same than before. The online client is more secure now because it doesn't have any functions for loading levels or npcs anymore.
+* Filename cache: Previous Graal versions sometimes took a long time to start because Graal scans each subfolder at startup, to easily find the files when needed do display objects. The default Windows file system NTFS is very slow for that though. To make Graal also start fast on NTFS, it is now caching the file names, their location and modification time. It is saving all information into FILENAMECACHE.txt, and reading that at the next startup.
+** Disadvantages:
+*** While the startup is much faster, the login to servers might take slightly more time
+*** When you copy files into the Graal folder then Graal will not see that delete FILENAMECACHE.txt in that case, or disable the filename cache in the Graal options
+* New Timer: Graal doesn't take 99% cpu time anymore, the timer has been chanced to be as precise before but not using  the cpu as much as before anymore
+* Fast NPC Lookup: Using new BTree-technology, Graal can detect the visibility and blocking behaviour of objects more efficiently, good for servers with gmaps; On some servers (especially Zone) some areas are 10 times faster now (or 10 times less laggy). It speeds up all areas that have many npcs. Together with the lookup some other small bugs with drawing objects have been removed too.
+** Things that are affected by the new npc lookup:
+*** Script functions "onwall" and "tiletype" are much faster
+*** Objects using huge ganis (e.g. houses) are drawn  correctly and not disappering when half of them are still on the screen
+* New script functions onwall2(x,y,width,height) and onwater2(x,y,width,height), these functions have been added because of the new npc lookup which is made for checking rectangles, not just points; with them you can check if a rectangle area is blocking or under water
+* Script function testplayer(x,y) has been fixed for gmaps
+* When moving on other parts of the gmaps then the focus is not reset anymore (script command setfocus(x,y))
+* ATI 32 bit mode has been fixed
+* Problems with the 32bit color resolution where some images were not drawn with correct transparency were fixed
+* Profiles are correctly displayed even if the option "Save PMs/Profiles" is disabled
+* New Server Tab: Graal3D - When clicking on a Graal3D server in the serverlist then Graal3D is automatically started and connecting to the selected server; if you often play Graal3D server or want to play Graal with better speed you can also start Graal3.exe directly
+* When typing in a server name in the text field below the serverlist then the correct server is chosen; perfect matches are preferred, instead of taking the first name on the list
+* Graal is automatically registering the browser protocol "graal://" and "graal3://", so if you type in "graal://Servername/options" in a webbrowser then it is automatically starting Graal, connecting to the right server, and sending a "serverstartparams" trigger to the Control-NPC of that server with the specified parameters. This is made for making it possible that people can directly join an event or similiar on a server by just clicking a link on a website. If this doesn't work, then please start Graal one time as administrator (for registering a protocol you need administrator rights, although good webbrowsers like Firefox are asking you can again if you really want to start the executable).
+* The editor doesn't delete levels anymore when it is crashing while saving levels it is first making a copy and renaming the new level when succeeding
+* "clientside" triggers by the server are always working now
+* triggers on gmaps sent by the server or other clients have been fixed to always work
+* entering gmaps has been improved to not crash or display trash
+* Support for sending and receiving player positions in full precision has been added, also npc positions and moves can be received in full precision now, this will be enabled once all clients are switched to the new version
+* Scripting variable timevar2 has been added which is giving the time since the start of the machine, but with milliseconds resolution (is not identical to timevar2 on the server, for synchronization of time events use "timevar")
+* String variable #v(floating point) has been improved to display also integers with more than 6 decimals correctly, which makes it possible to fix the item sorting on Graal Kingdoms
+* when the player is hurt then the showimgs of the weapons are not removed anymore
+* When the background image or time of Windows is changed on desktops using comma as decimal separator then Graal is automatically switching back to dot as decimal separator, so not messing up scripts or level warps anymore
+* Several improvements of the hacking checks
+* Script variable downloadsize is correctly giving the size of the file that is currently downloaded works together with downloadpos and #D