8.5 (stable) 04/20/2010

- A new stable release, at long last.

- Major highlights of this release, compared to the last stable
release (8.4.1 09/13/2008):

- General:

- MAC OSX (Darwin) support. Full sound and hardware accelerated
OpenGL is supported. Note, you will probably need to get SDL
and SDL_mixer, as well as libogg and lib vorbis in order to
build.

- Native Windows XP/Windows 7 support for the OpenGL client
(conquestgl) using the MinGW cross-compiler enviroment. Full
sound and hardware accelerated OpenGL is supported. A zip
file will be available on sourceforge containing a
pre-compiled conquestgl binary, and support files. See
README.Windows (or Conquest\INSTALL.TXT in the ZIP file) for
more information on installtion and use.

- a re-work of packet handling. The original goal was to
eventually support non-blocking socket IO, however some
significant (and incompatible) protocol changes will be
required to do this properly. Next major release will tackle
this.

- rework of texture and color representation internally.

- remove telnet (-t) support from the clients. Nobody runs
telnet conquest games anymore.

- switched to Mercurial (hg) for source code control.

I will 'hg tag' each devel release. For stable releases (like
this one), a branch name will be created instead of a tag.

Current development will always happen at the tip, in the
'default' branch, and may therefore be unstable.

Bug fixes and enhancements made to 8.5 will occur in the
conquest-8.5 branch.

A command like (all on one line):

hg clone -u conquest-8.5 \
http://conq.hg.sourceforge.net/hgroot/conq/conq conquest

can be used to check out the stable branch for version 8.5.
Omit the '-u conquest-8.5' if you want the current state of
development.

- Server fixes:

- fix server bug that would cause vacant ships, when destroyed,
to fail to explode properly, leaving some stationary torps
behind.

- correct a server problem with UDP keepalive packets. During
certain operations (like beaming, bombing, self destruct, etc)
these packets could improperly terminate these activities on
the server, leaving the client to believe these activities
were still in progress, causing great angst in the land.

- Client fixes (primarily the OpenGL client, conquestgl):

- New Orion ship textures (thanks to blender and the fine
contributors at ShareGC.com). See the CREDITS file.

- some changes to work better with wide-screen display formats

- new ship shield textures, both for the icon-ship display and
the main viewer.

- in conquestgl, torps are no longer colored according to their
'danger' level. It's up to you, as the ship's Captain, to
know when a torp may kill you. When in doubt, raise
shields and run like the coward you are. :)

- rework of the icon-ship display:

- now use a luminance variant of the main ship texture as the
ico-ship rather than a seperate texture.

- implement 'lamps' rather than the text (cloaking, repair,
shields, etc)

- make the ico-ship drawing area square to avoid stretching
issues

- use ship's torp texture for the torp-pips

- use ship's phaser texture for the phaser recharge indicator

- fix bug that could cause the use of undefined mouse macros to
improperly terminate certain operations (beaming, bombing,
etc).