In desperate need of new hardware (my development notebook had broken for the second time in a month) I went to the stores and did something I always wanted to: I bought a Mac. It's a beautiful 20" iMac.

I didn't yet succeed in compiling TnL for it though. CEGUI, the game's user interface library, has been causing problems. Any help is appreciated.

Just to be clear: I will continue to release first-class Linux releases, including Autopackages. I will also try to prepare a Mac release. I could use help with Windows though, as I currently don't own a development PC with the MSVC suite.

Following the recent release of 071031, this bugfix release is meant to solve the dependency problems many users had. Additionally, performance has been significally enhanced by implementing scripting functionality in C++.

Update: If the game crashes on startup, uninstall with:

package remove tnl cegui

Then reinstall the autopackage. 

Read more for the full list of changes.

Important update: For help and dicussion about installation of the autopackage, please go here.

I'm proud to present to you the release of Thunder&Lightning 071031 "Halloween Is Not Over Yet".

This release includes a graphical user interface (CEGUI), marking the end of having to relaunch the game every time the mission is over. It also means that basic settings and control mappings are now configurable from inside TnL. This was a very big step that needed a lot of development effort. Additionally, a nice and shiny new radar screen provides tactical information. I hope you like it!

To download, go to the download area. Screenshots are provided here. As always you will find help with any problems in the forum.

Update: Toni Graffy has kindly provided RPMs for OpenSuSE .

Click "read more" to see the full list of new features...

Something that has always limited TnL's tactical depth is the simplistic implementation of radar. No, I'm not talking about a flashy radar screen (well, not yet) but those little marker boxes displayed around other units. Yes, they're supposed to come from a radar in your Lightning. But whether you see an enemy unit's marker box or not wasn't handled intelligently: Every unit within a certain distance to the player was shown.

With the recent updates to Thunder&Lightning's radar system, this is no longer the case. Instead, enemy units only appear on the radar when there is an unobscured line of sight to the target. Friendly units however always appear, whether they're obscured by terrain or not. Additionally, units of the same faction communicate their radar contacts to each other, forming a radar network. This means that now every unit can see what every other unit of the same team is seeing, giving numerous possibilities for reconnaisance missions.

And now,let's get back to the flashy radar screen I promised! Here it is, and it's looking gorgeous in action:

Work on the next release of Thunder&Lightning is progressing smoothly. A new configuration dialog has been inplemented, allowing joystick axes to be assigned to game controls. This completes the milestone of having 100% GUI controlled input configuration!

During the work on the input subsystem, TnL also got a visual controls indicator that already served in identifying a serious bug. As the game supports many different ways to actuate a specific control, i.e. joystick, mouse, keyboard, it has to decide between these channels for every control, which is accomplished with a thresholding method. It turns out that the threshold was applied in a wrong way. This is what caused gentle joystick motion to be ignored. Joystick users who found the Lightning aircraft hard to control will find the next release much more pleasing.

As they say, release early, release often. This one goes out to the brave! Although work on the Thunder&Lightning GUI hasn't been completed yet, I have decided to commit the current work to the darcs source control. Read "How to download current sources and data" on how to get the latest version. You'll need CEGUI installed, complete with headers.

In other news, it appears that Thunder&Lightning has been accepted into Fedora Extras 7! See this announcement for details. Yay!