See the full ChangeLog in the source for a comprehensive list of all changes.
Download links for older releases can be found in the download archive.
WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 2.4.0[]
2.4.1 is mostly a bug-fix release; it includes fixes for server and client crashes, and some AI improvements.
Server / general[]
Changes affecting players (supplied rulesets)[]
- If the 'revealmap' server setting was set to show the initial state of the map to players on game start, loading a savegame of that game would freshly reveal the current state of the map to all players. GNA#21172
- Fix some bugs in Freeciv's inferences about ruleset effects in the absence of complete information. These are low-level changes whose effects are hard to quantify, but should be more correct; they are most likely to affect client behavior and the AI. The bugs affected:
- Autosettlers could erroneously believe that by building irrigation or a mine, specials of the other kind would be removed. This is true of the supplied rulesets, but may not be true of other rulesets. GNA#21192
- In rulesets such as civ1 where chains of adjacent cities can create 'channels' allowing sea units inland, if a city is lost (cutting off the channel), any units now landlocked are correctly destroyed. GNA#21219
- Quell some warnings when loading the civ1 ruleset. GNA#20770
- Bug fix: random connection loss could occur due to disagreement between client and server about the interpretation of certain compressed network packets. This only affects a very few exact packet sizes, so you'd have to be quite unlucky to run into it; it is most likely to manifest when the client first connects to the server, in which case only the server needs upgrading to avoid the issue. GNA#21300
- The server sent incorrect information to the client about wonders which have been built by players and then lost. This is not known to have any adverse effects. GNA#21096
Changes affecting other rulesets / modders[]
- Consider bases when automatically determining a unit's Move_Type when not explicitly specified by the ruleset author. GNA#21022
- Do not emit errors for rulesets with no nation groups defined. GNAPATCH#4300
- If a ruleset defined too many nation groups/sets, this error was not reported clearly. GNAPATCH#4299
Changes affecting server operators[]
- The server could crash if '/remove' was used in the pre-game. GNA#21202
- Fail more gracefully if a map is generated with no land for players to start on. GNA#21068
- In the case where the game cannot start due to there being insufficient nations for all players, ensure everyone is notified. GNA#21207
- '/mapimg colortest' caused assertion failures and a possible server crash. GNA#21159
- Fix a harmless warning in the verbose log 'unused entry: savefile.specials_size' when loading a savefile. GNA#19836
- Fix some recent regressions in the 'freeciv-manual' utility. (Note, however, that it still has large gaps and is of limited use outside the development team.)
- Bring the included Lua 5.1 up to date with the latest patch (patch 2). GNAPATCH#4068
- Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNA#21015 GNA#21206 GNA#21232 GNA#21238
AI[]
- Fix bugs in the AI's 'ferry' system (for handling boats and similar transports):
- A bug which could possibly lead to AI boats left in an unusable state, and overproduction of boats. GNA#20978
- General contradiction within the code about which units use the ferry system, which could cause trouble with unusual transports, such as non-seagoing ones (Triremes in the experimental ruleset, which can navigate rivers) and transports which cannot carry non-land units (such as Carriers). GNA#21154
- Fix bugs in AI's evaluation of which attacker units to build:
- The logic for determining whether they would be built as veteran was wrong in many ways, including treating veterancy-granting buildings in a city as a downside rather than upside, and not handling veterancy-granting wonders. GNAPATCH#4014
- When planning to attack a city, units which could occupy cities only had that ability taken into account, not any ability to destroy enemy units; now both are taken into account. As a result, the AI may now prefer building land units rather than ships. GNAPATCH#4015
- The AI's logic for deciding when to try bribing units was flawed. It would give up if the enemy's cities were unbribable, and would not take into account whether the unit (or all the enemy's units) were unbribable. GNA#21064 GNA#21136
- Ensure that AI never considers a ruleset effect with zero value as a reason to build an improvement. (Should not affect most rulesets, but may sometimes occur when testing a new ruleset.) GNAPATCH#4289
- Fix AI behavior in the presence of negative Size_Unlimit effects in the ruleset. It could consider buildings with such effects a bonus rather than a liability, and if a city ended up with a net negative value for this effect, the AI would never go for buildings which could increase the city size limit. GNA#21240
- For AI developers: the 'unit_got' callback could be called with the wrong owner when a unit's home city changed. (This does not affect the default AI, as it does not use this callback.) GNA#21200
Clients[]
- National borders would disappear from the map when the local settings dialog was opened for the first time. (Unit background colors would also be wrongly displayed, if enabled.) GNA#21116 GNA#21151
- The client could crash if the user accepted a tileset suggestion made by the ruleset. GNA#21231
- In the Nations report, show a status even for disconnected players (including whether they are blocking turn change). GNA#21023
- Fix minor bugs in the handling of CMA settings. Unlikely to have a functional effect on most platforms (beyond slightly smaller savefiles). GNA#21295
- (Gtk) Fix a possible crash when pressing the Tab key in the chatline, and some other issues with non-ASCII characters and tab completion. GNA#21293
- (Gtk) Stop the 'Number of Players (including AI)' control's state for single-player games from getting out of sync with the spawned server. GNA#21179
- (Gtk2, Windows) If additional Gtk themes are installed, the Freeciv theme no longer leaks through in places. As a side effect, the modpack installer is no longer themed. GNA#21163
- (Gtk3) Activating (double-clicking) a row in the city report would sometimes randomly fail to pop up the city dialog. GNAPATCH#4294
- (Gtk3) Fix selling buildings from the city dialog. GNA#20984
- (Gtk3) The end-game score list and the citizen nationality list were both drawn too small. GNA#21108
- (Xaw) Client now identifies itself as 'gui-xaw' on its startup screen. GNAPATCH#4064
Tilesets / Art[]
- New nuclear explosion graphics for the Amplio2 and Trident rulesets. GNAPATCH#4003
Help / Documentation[]
- Minor improvements to user documentation and in-game text. GNAPATCH#4092 GNAPATCH#19452
- Miscellaneous improvements to developer/ruleset docs. GNAPATCH#4187 GNAPATCH#4267 GNAPATCH#4275 GNA#20872
- Invisible changes to assist translation. GNAPATCH#4290
Translations[]
- The language code 'no' is no longer listed in the Windows installer, since it was just a copy of the language 'nb' (Norwegian Bokmål). GNAPATCH#4134
- The Windows installer now lists languages by name rather than obscure language code. GNA#21060
- Updated translations:
- Complete translations: Catalan, Polish, British English.
- Incomplete translations: French (>99.9%).
Build/portability[]
- Fix a build failure when building from scratch in the presence of automake 1.8, and document the minimum requirement of automake 1.9. (This did not affect normal building from the distributed tarballs.) GNA#21216
- Install documentation as part of 'make install'. GNAPATCH#4072
- A Windows installer can now be built for the Gtk3 client as well as the Gtk2 client. GNATASK#7681
- If just the Gtk3 client was installed, it was accompanied by a non-working .desktop file. Fix this, and add a .desktop file for the SDL client too. GNA#21243
- Fix potential trouble when building for BeOS. GNA#21153
- Fix trouble building a distribution without localization. GNA#21139
- Fix a compiler warning on builds without --enable-debug. GNA#21237
- Build is now warning-clean on GCC 4.8 -O3. GNAPATCH#4255
See NEWS for older lists of changes.