Hi everybody!

Six weeks after the last release, I'm proud to announce Thunder&Lightning 070827. Major news for this version:

• New Multi Function Display (MFD) modes (toggle with the TAB key):
• A target view that displays a camera image of and distance to the currently selected target.
  
• A missile view that displays images from the tip of the last recently fired missile. Good for spying and often quite spectacular.
• Decoy flares that distract incoming missiles from their target. Beware, your enemies have them too! This completely changes the rules when engaging enemy aircraft.
• Tanks and the carrier turret fire much more precisely now and have become really dangerous to aircraft.
• Some new graphical sugar, like lens flares for missiles and decoys and new smoke effects
• Performance enhancements in the AI scripts make a greater number of enemies possible
• Your mission has been made slightly more challenging
• Several bug fixes, including one in the pixel shader of the water rendering that caused ugly artefacts on NVidia hardware

You can download the autopackage or install from source. Got a problem: Share it with the world at the forum .

There are some new screenshots of the upcoming release, featuring new MFD modes and (lens/decoy) flares. Have a look at them here .

There's a new release of Thunder&Lightning in preparation. It will feature some MFD enhancements like a missile camera and a target view. Much improvement has been made with regard to AI performance. It is basically all there, I just need to get it all commited to darcs in a sane way (having my notebook bricked didn't help either...)

So, lacking some real news, I thought I'd provide a little bit of background. Thunder&Lightning is inspired by (but not a remake or clone of) a classic home computer game called Carrier Command by Realtime Games. If you haven't heard of it, you might find this video interesting.

There is information about Carrier Command on Wikipedia. It seems to be abandonware and you can download just about every version on The House of Games.

There is a promising game trying to deliver a closer remake of Carrier Command than TnL. Intuitively titled Carrier 2, it has been around since 2003. You might want to nag the author for a demo version as he still hasn't released one (it's been "just around the corner" for ages now). This video looks gorgeous anyway.

Carrier 2 homepage.

For those of you who had problems with a missing libedit dependency, I prepared release 070710. Get it at the download page .

Update: There are now RPMs available for OpenSuse users on PackMan .

A new version of Thunder&Lightning has been released. User-visible changes include:

• An aircraft carrier that serves as take-off and landing platform for the Lightning aircraft, capable of self-defense with a deck turret.
• Water rendering: A GLSL shader renders realistically reflecting waves of machines with hardware shader support.
• A new Lightning cockpit with multi function display (currently only shows a magnifying view).
• Lots of work on AI.Drones can now take off and land on the carrier after performing their mission.
• Reworked missions that make use of the aircraft carrier. Extended tutorial mission.
• Yet again, enhanced flight model.
• Desktop integration: start TnL with a click on an icon.
• A new installation method: Autopackage.
  
• Bugfixes...

I hope you like it. Download Thunder&Lightning in the Download section. You can choose between a self-installing autopackage or a classic tarball as method for installation. Should you encounter problems, then the new Forum is the right place to find help.

 This release has been tagged "070707" in darcs.

The Thunder&Lightning discussion board is back open. I'll be glad to answer questions regarding usage or development in the respective forums.