Project: Starfighter - News: Project: Starfighter 1.7 Released

Project: Starfighter 1.7 Released

Item posted by Layla Marchant <onpon4> on Sat 04 Mar 2017 01:12:30 PM UTC.

Project: Starfighter 1.7 is now available for download. You can find it on the Download page, as usual.

This release is a very significant milestone. All of the basic code cleanup has finally been finished, and the handmade Makefile has been replaced with an Autotools build system. This release also adds (rudimentary) Windows support, and a Windows build (compiled with MinGW) has been added.

This release also marks compatibility with resolutions as low as 640x480 by setting the SF_SCREEN_WIDTH and SF_SCREEN_HEIGHT environment variables at compile time. This means that, for example, the game would be able to run on the OpenPandora with no modifications. I was actually originally going to produce an OpenPandora build, but decided against it when I realized that SDL2 is unavailable on the default system and the way its community works around that is to use Code::Blocks, meaning I would have to set up an entirely custom build system. I don't think that's particularly worth it.

Other changes in this release include the following:

• The intro text has been removed. The game now goes straight to the title screen when you start it up.
• Chris now has messages he broadcasts when killing (most) enemies, similar to Phoebe and Ursula.
• Phoebe and Ursula's kill messages and friendly fire messages have been personalized.
• Fixed a flaw in saving that would sometimes cause the stationed planet to not be recorded properly (resulting in "Corrupt Data" being seen as the slot's name).
• Added a "Credits" option to the main menu.
• Removed auto-selling of rocket capacity in Classic difficulty.
• Made it so that the cost of a temporary plasma upgrade is never added to the cost of a permanent plasma upgrade in Classic difficulty (re-introducing a quirk in the original that can be exploited to save $3500 by buying the permanent upgrades first).
• Restored Kline's original health for Classic difficulty.
• Fixed Classic difficulty allowing temporary plasma upgrades to be sold down to 1; you can now only sell them down to 2 in Classic mode.
• Collectibles dropped by killed enemies now have a limit to how high their values can be. The effect of this is for bosses to always generate larger numbers of smaller-value collectibles, which prevents situations where you get hundreds of plasma ammo you can't use, for example.
• It is now possible to compile Starfighter without sound support. The Autotools build system will do this automatically if SDL_Mixer is unavailable.
• The music no longer briefly resumes when you do "pause, escape" to quit the mission.
• Fixed a failure to properly delete save files when requested.
• Added a tweak to the Options menu to prevent an unintended flickering effect which sometimes happened.
• Changed the game to use true fullscreen again rather than "windowed fullscreen".