Alpha 6.13 - Totally Converted

6.00 to 6.09 patch (132,068 KB)

6.09 to 6.10 patch (66,237 KB)

6.10 to 6.11 patch (11,789 KB)

6.11 to 6.12 patch (37,463 KB)

6.12 to 6.13 patch (11,415 KB)

To use these patches you must first install Beta 6.0, copy the Sourcemods/ex folder to Sourcemods/ex_alpha (if you already have an ex_alpha folder delete it). Once that is done, delete sourcemods/ex_alpha/sound/ui/*.mp3. Then extract patches 6.09, 6.10, 6.11, 6.12 and 6.13 to your Sourcemods folder in that order. After restarting steam you should see Exterminatus Alpha 6,13 appear in your games list.

What's in this patch?
All the changes from 6.0 to 6.08 plus...

Features

Looking at a capture point or breakable objective show's it's name
Objectives should now be sorted into the order you need to capture them in the Tactical Overview
Capture points now light up in the color of the team that owns them
ex_lycantium (the city map) has been converted to use the new objective entities

Tweaks

Tweaked ex_thunderhawk to have more mission updates for the marine team
Re-compiled all the maps in final mode, with HDR lighting and cube-mapping
Re-worked the mission system code, so you shouldn't get out of date or additional mission notifications
Re-visited the capture objective model and it's textures.

Bug Fixes

Found and fixed the server crash that occurred during last week's testing
Added code to prevent living players spawning spurious ragdolls on the clients during lag (I suspect these were causing some of the client crashes).
Fixed impact effects being doubled up

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6.09 didn't work as well as I had hoped, so here's 6.10 to resolve those issues:

Bug Fixes

Missions not showing up. Tweaked the new mission networking code, this needs testing.
The team colored glow on the objectives was appearing at the model's origin, rather then over the lamp. A new version of the model fixes this.
The new logging system was causing CPU/disk lag. So I re-wrote it to be hybrid of the new and old systems. Needs testing.
The Tyranid HUD was not updating health correctly. This should be corrected now.

Work in Progress

Cameras for the Objectives were not working. Investigation so far has revealed that the camera entity must be actively networked to act as a camera. I've patched the maps hive, digsite and ichar IV to use prop_dynamic type entities as cameras for their breakable objectives. I'm still trying to find a way to make it worth with any entity or at least one that is less obvious to the players.
The server hang during a change from Digsite to Orbital has been investigated, but I haven't been able to spot the faulty code yet. If it happens again I need to know all the details. (hence the work on the log)
The client crash after a lag spike is still there. It is deep in the closed source physics code, where I cannot get to it, but I think it's ragdoll related. I may have to design an elaborate test with faked lag and ragdolls for all the player classes...

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6.10 wasn't as done as I had hoped, heres hoping 6.11 will improve on it:

Features

New map ex_city_conflict by Dark Marine (FYI city conflict was the first EX map ever be started)

Bug Fixes

The Tyranid HUD was not updating health correctly. This really should be corrected now.
Veteran marines should get their combo weapon again (typo while hunting for the server crash bug).
Attempted to fix the server side infinite loop that causes the server to stop responding. This needs multi-player testing.
Attempted to fix the client side physics crash by re-rigging the Lictor player model.
Fixed a bug when zooming the view model appears to be flipped to the top-left (this was most obvious with the knife)

If this all works correctly then I'll start on the class overviews for the class selection menu next.
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[edit]
6.12 continues the gradual improvement process and one again tries to fix the server hang bug ( no, I really think I got it this time... )

Features

New class preview that shows up in the class selection screen when you hover your mouse over a class portrait. Most of the class text can be edited in the resources/ex_classes.txt file. So if you can do a better job of the writing than I have done please feel free to that file and post the changes.
All ex_capture_objectives now use the console variable ex_capture_time to determine how long they must be used to capture them. The default is 5 seconds and can be changed only by the server operator.

Tweaks

New revision of ex_city_conflict by Dark Marine, still v1, but now it uses the new objective entities.
Added in some missing missions to ex_orbital
Tweaked the Tactical and Specialst aim animations, so they no longer appear to be aiming down by default
Adjusted the speed of the Lictor run animations
Included widescreen and regular aspect ratio backgrounds for the menu

Bug Fixes

Fixed the server side infinite loop that causes the server to stop responding. This needs multi-player testing, but I think this will do the trick

If this goes OK i'll package it up as the new Beta for next week. The help for the new objective entities needs writing and the rest of the help needs going over to make sure it's all up to date and ready to be publicized,

It feels very strange anticipating the final completion of Exterminatus after so many years in the creation.
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[edit]
The class preview in 6.12 was fine thankfully, but we still has a crash bug, so no new beta this week. Last week's crash was reproducible and we've managed to fix that. So Alpha 6.13 is basically just the fix for that bug.

Bug Fixes

New revision of ex_city_conflict by Dark Marine, still v1, but now with drop zones for the mid-point objectives. This should fix the server crash bug that occurred with last week's build.
Made some adjustments to the player spawning code to handle cases where players are trying to spawn at an objective with no dropzones (should write a warning to the console and fall back to their previous objective).

Now we have to check these fixes haven't broken anything else. ^^
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