See the full ChangeLog in the source for a comprehensive list of all changes.
Download links for the latest release can be found on the download page.
WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 2.6.1
2.6.2 mainly fixes bugs in the clients.
Server / General
Changes affecting players (supplied rulesets)
- Fix Great Library sometimes granting technologies too soon (in rulesets where it grants techs known by other players). If team-pooled research is enabled (the default), and a team of multiple players learned a tech, the Great Library could grant the tech to its owner too soon, due to counting the individual players knowing the technology, rather than counting the teams.
- Fix a possible crash when running out of money in rulesets with recursive transports and gold upkeep.
- Changed how the 'steepness' setting generates mountains -- increasing 'steepness' did not always increase the mountain percentage. The behavior with the default value (30) is unchanged, but with different values map generation will come out differently.
- Players witnessing a non-allied cargo unit loading onto a transport on the same tile were left with a 'ghost' of the cargo unit visible in their client.
- In the 'experimental' ruleset, a Spy bribing a unit that wasn't alone on its tile could give a spurious "not an attack unit" message.
- Some messages about other players gaining techs described the other player as "Team 2" even if their team only had a single member.
- The 'Multicultural' achievement in some rulesets was misdescribed. (It counts citizen nationalities across your whole civilization, not just a single city.)
Changes affecting other rulesets / modders
- Fix various trouble with Lua script signals emitted when a city completed its production. (The precise sequence of events at this time has changed slightly.)
- A unit whose creation disbanded a city didn't emit the 'unit_built' signal.
- Trouble if certain script handlers triggered at this point caused the city to be destroyed.
- The grammar of the string returned by the Lua function (Player):research_name_translation() has changed (from a singular proper noun to a plural common noun), so scripts using this function probably need to adjust their strings. (It is commonly used when granting techs.)
- When a Traderoute_Pct effect was in use, the client's breakdown of trade in the city dialog could become confused, and include a spurious '(unknown)' term. The final trade value was displayed correctly.
- If a ruleset used a custom action name with the '&' or '_' characters, it could have been misdisplayed in clients; now such a name is handled better.
- Fix a crash on loading a ruleset with a particular (unlikely) malformed 'Specialist' requirement.
- Apply an upstream bugfix to our copy of Lua 5.3.5 (bug #4).
Changes affecting server operators
- A new command '/list rulesets' lists all the rulesets known to the server (strictly, all the .serv files that could be /read).
General
- Failure to load a savegame (for instance, due to not having its ruleset installed) is now handled better.
- Various internal changes which should only affect developers.
AI
- When deciding whether to encourage migration, the AI was not considering all the foreign cities from which citizens could migrate to its own. (This affected the 'Migration_Pct' effect, used for instance in the 'experimental' ruleset.)
Clients
- When a new tech allows a new government type, sometimes the menu item to switch to it was not immediately made sensitive, preventing switching to that government.
- When drawing a path, user-set waypoint markers sometimes weren't displayed.
- Nation culture, and culture points gained per turn, are now visible in the civilization popup and city dialog breakdown.
- The client could crash when loading a new tileset any time after a game had started.
- If the tileset was overridden by a ruleset, there could be trouble including invisible borders and assertion failures on the console.
- Fix various bugs with migrating client settings from previous Freeciv or library versions. The most likely manifestation was the full-screen setting being reset on the first or second run of a new client.
- The precise meaning of 'plague risk' (percentage chance of plague per turn) has been clarified in the UI:
- Remove possible duplicate descriptions in city dialog sum breakdowns, and other cosmetic tweaks.
- (Gtk) and (Qt) The city sum popups now use a fixed-width font.
- Fixes to all the Gtk clients:
- The Gtk clients no longer default to arranging widgets for small displays (although Gtk3/3.22 may enable this setting for fresh installations if the screen resolution is small, see below).
- Fix console messages about "out of range for property 'weight'".
- The popups when rulesets ask to override tileset/soundset/musicset choice are now keyboard-accessible.
- Fixes to the Gtk3 and Gtk3.22 clients:
- The vote bar could be displayed in the wrong location, wasting a lot of screen space, in some configurations including the default: if "Arrange widgets for small displays" was set, or if "Messages and Chat reports location" was set to "Merged".
- The overview map, etc, were erroneously displayed on the right if "Arrange widgets for small displays" was set. Now they are on the left, as with other clients/configurations.
- Stop the worklist source task list jumping around annoyingly when adding an item to the worklist.
- These clients now try to adapt layout settings to screen size on the first run; they always intended to, but it should now actually work. (If you have already run a client, your existing settings for that client won't be changed.)
- Fixes specific to the Gtk3.22 client:
- The red highlighting of emergencies on the city dialog was only shown the first time such a dialog was opened.
- Fix detach handles on the main game view being too wide:
- Stop the main view changing size when different size unit stacks were focused (visible mainly with large hex tilesets).
- If migrating straight from the Gtk2 client to Gtk3.22 (skipping Gtk3), client settings were not migrated.
- Fixes to the Qt client:
- Since 2.6.1, the client could sometimes fail to load its theme properly: some parts of the interface would be unthemed, and the main sidebar icons would go white when hovered over.
- The Nations report showed the player's own gold and government as 'unknown'.
- Opening the Nations report as a global observer would crash the client.
- Opening the Policies dialog could display current values wrongly, and cause them to be changed even if you touched nothing.
- The client could crash if, while choosing a rally point, either the original city was destroyed or a target tile off the edge of the map was selected.
- Fix trouble after entering the 'pick nation' dialog.
- The 'Disband' menu item was sometimes available when it wouldn't have worked.
- Rulesets and user input containing '&' characters, or HTML-like markup, could be displayed incorrectly.
- The client could crash if loading a malformed tileset with missing graphics files.
- (SDL/2) Fix assertion failure messages when first opening help browser.
- Fixes to the SDL2 client (regressions from the SDL client):
- Many keyboard shortcuts didn't work.
- Some right/middle-click actions were unavailable.
- Fix a crash when editing global worklists.
- Various other tiny improvements to some or all clients.
Tools
- Fix possible crashes or other trouble in the GUI modpack installers, particularly after a failed download.
- Add a README for the modpack installer tool,
Help / Documentation
- Clarified the civ2civ3 ruleset help for the Statue of Zeus. (All its effects benefit all the owner's cities.)
- Add a description of the new 'worker tasks' feature.
- Units with population cost are documented better, and the relevant city option is better described.
- Miscellaneous other improvements to in-game text and user documentation.
- Miscellaneous changes to developer/install/ruleset docs.
Translations
- Updated translations:
- Complete translations: Catalan, French, Polish, Russian.
- Incomplete translations: Finnish (100% core, 91% nations, 100% ruledit), British English (95.6% core, 100% nations, 100% ruledit).
- The Qt client always displayed nation set descriptions in English.
- Windows installers now don't mangle the language name "Norwegian Bokmål".
Build/portability
- The Windows builds now correctly support https URLs (as well as http) for fetching modpacks, etc. (Both the standard msys1 builds and msys2 builds.)
- New configure option --with-cacert-path, to control where Curl finds the CA certificates for https etc.
- Improve configure-time documentation/diagnostics relating to SDL and SDL_mixer versions.
- Don't attempt to build the tolua executable if --enable-sys-tolua-cmd is specified -- it's unnecessary, and caused trouble on some platforms.
- The configure script could give a spurious message 'unary operator expected' on platforms including Mac OS X.
- The Windows msys1 builds are now based on our gnuwin32-2020-01-02.7z package.
See NEWS for older lists of changes.