NEWS-2.4.0-beta2

__NOTOC__
===WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 2.4.0-beta1===
This is mostly a bugfix release, although there are one or two new features. Notably, there have been a number of improvements in AI behavior.
====Server / General====
=====Gameplay=====
* Bug fix: if the server had to retry map generation, no resources would be generated. 
* Bug fix: various trouble with unloading transports if the server had been built without assertions enabled (--disable-debug option to configure). 
* Bug fixes in unit destruction ():
** When a transport unit was lost, loss of nested transports and their cargo was not handled correctly, leading to assertion failures and other misbehavior. 
** A loaded transport lost to causes such as autoattack could cause an assertion failure. 
** Many more cases of unit loss now contribute to the final score, notably including units on board a transport unit when it was lost. 
** The "unit_lost" scripting signal was not emitted for units on board a transport unit when it was lost. (This bug had no effect on the supplied rulesets.) 
** Cases where a unit was killed due to a custom script could have led to crashes/instability. 
* In complicated cases of nested transports, it was possible for non-allied units to occupy the same tile. 
* Bug fix: when a unit was automatically moved to a transporter to save it from drowning or running out of fuel, other players could continue to see the transporter as empty. 
* Nuclear units no longer autoattack. 
* Bug fixes in unit conversion and upgrade ():
** Prevent cases where units could be converted or upgraded to a type only capable of carrying different cargo to the current cargo.
** Prevent conversion of a unit to a type that could not exist on the current tile.
* Units of types the owner cannot build are no longer prevented from upgrade. 
* Bug fix: during long activities, such as a single Engineer unit transforming land to or from ocean, a network value could overflow, causing the client's display of remaining time to become too large. Both client and server must be upgraded for this fix to be effective. 
* Bug fix: quell spurious "No diplomat action possible" message when an ordinary attempt to move a diplomatic unit failed. 
* Bug fix: assertion failure when many autosettlers try to work on the same project. 
* Bug fix: when a border source such as a fortress is occupied by a unit of a nation other than the owner at the time a treaty between the two players breaks, or a ceasefire runs out, ownership now transfers to that of the occupying unit. 
* When acquiring a technology such as Philosophy which gives further techs by an unusual route (such as through a hut), all progress toward the current research target was lost. Now it is preserved (although 'freecost' is applied). 
* It is now possible for bulb count to become negative, due to tech loss. 
* Bug fix: in tech loss situations, future tech would fail to be removed from a player, with an assertion failure. 
* Bug fix: when a city is traded and hence units change ownership, it wasn't checked whether those units provided diplomatic contact to a new nation. 
* Fix assertion failure when city radius changes. 
* Bug fix: the full range of the 'trademindist' setting (1-999) could not be transmitted over the network to the client. This caused a cosmetic problem in the help for the 'civ2civ3' ruleset. 
* Bug fix: assertion failure during map generation when no unit in the ruleset satisfied the first role in 'startunits'. 
* Freeciv now infers that ruleset effects are possible in more cases where incomplete information is available. This is a low-level change whose effects are hard to quantify, but should be more correct; it is most likely to affect client behavior and the AI. 
=====Clerical=====
* Bug fix: if the server was started with one ruleset and then another with a different number of governments was loaded (e.g., 'default' then 'multiplayer'), it could crash. 
* Bug fixes and improvements to the '/delegate' function (), including:
** If a previously detached user used '/delegate take' to temporarily control a player, the server would crash when they relinquished control. 
** Admins can now forcibly '/delegate cancel' an active delegation (previously an attempt would cause a crash).
** A user observing a particular player then using '/delegate take' to take over control of that player now works.
** More documentation.
* Changes to scorelog/ranklog:
** The ranklog format has changed; it now includes individual players' scores, and can be parsed more unambiguously. 
** A ranklog is now generated when the game ends without a victory condition (due to reaching endturn or /endgame, for instance); in this case the player or team with the highest total score is considered to have won. 
** Player deletion was logged incorrectly in scorelog, causing warnings when resuming the game from a save file. 
** When a new user took over a player from another user, the old username could persist in the ranklog file. 
** Taking over a dead AI player no longer changes their username in the ranklog. 
** Bug fix: enabling scorelog twice (for instance by loading a game with it enabled to a restarted server) caused an assertion failure. 
* Bugfixes and improvements to map image support ('/mapimg'):
** Automatically generated images are now saved to the savegame directory, rather than the current working directory. 
** Bug fix: attempting to save a map image before the map has been generated no longer crashes the server. 
** Better error reporting. 
* An internal 64kbyte limit on string length has been removed. Among other things, this allows longer Lua scripts in scenarios. 
* When a new nation is created in the editor, city style and leader sex are now set appropriately (previously they were always European and male). 
* Bug fixes to the maxplayers setting:
** When near the limit of 128 total players, there could be trouble at the point of needing to create a new civil war or barbarian player. 
** The /create command in mid-game did not honour the maxplayers setting. 
** maxplayers could be set incorrectly when loading a saved game, leading to errors later. 
* Bug fix: assertion failure when loading a pre-2.3 savegame with a unit on an allied transport. 
* When a scenario is saved, scenario information is included earlier in the file, to speed up the 'Start Scenario Game' dialog. 
* Give an error when the --auth (-a) option is given without also specifying --Database (-D), since it will do nothing useful. 
* Stop an internal counter in savefiles increasing needlessly for sentried units. This should have no functional effect. 
* More robustness against malformed network packets. 
* Fix some minor memory leaks. 
* General robustness improvements not known to be related to specific symptoms. 
* Various internal changes which should only affect developers. 
====Clients====
* The client could crash when your name was mentioned in chat but you had set the 'highlight your player/user name' setting to no color. This could also prevent any connection to a server with the event cache enabled if your player name had been mentioned in the past. 
** Older clients can work around this bug by setting a highlight color in their local options (you may need to start a local game in order to access the configuration dialog).
* Fixes to the notification of new Freeciv versions:
** The client could crash when checking the latest version on the metaserver (shortly after clicking "Connect to Network Game"). This is likely to start manifesting in existing 2.4.0-beta1 clients now that 2.4.0-beta2 has been released. 
** 2.4.0-beta1 would erroneously consider itself to be newer than 2.4.0, when that is released. 2.4.0-beta2 and later will get this right. 
** The latest version from the metaserver is always logged if verbose logs are enabled. 
* The Gtk clients could fail to wait for their internal game server to start fully after front page buttons like 'Load Saved Game' were pressed, leading to symptoms such as '/load: Name "./citizens.sav.gz" disallowed for security reasons.' 
* Fix a couple of issues with units with a zero move rate (no such units exist in the supplied rulesets):
** The 'exhausted' icon was always shown for such units; now it is never shown. 
** Such units are now not skipped when focusing on the next unit. 
* The client could fail to keep track of transported units correctly, leading to issues such as a unit still appearing to be on a boat when in fact it was not. 
* Fix a possible assertion failure when an enemy unit occupied one of your cities. 
* Pathfinding (goto) now tends to take a more direct route for the last step of a path when it doesn't matter how many move points are left (e.g., an attack). Previously it could prioritise movement points and leave the attacker in a vulnerable position. The previous behavior can be forced using waypoints, if desired. 
* Add a client option to automatically accept a tileset suggestion for the current ruleset. 
* Bug fix: after loading a new tileset, viewing the map with terrain disabled would not display correctly and cause numerous assertion failures. 
* Bug fix: on new installations, the client could fail to pick the highest-priority tileset; for instance, if both 'amplio' and 'amplio2' were installed, it could pick 'amplio' instead of 'amplio2' despite the latter's higher priority. 
* Bug fix: for tilesets which specify both orientation-specific and "icon" sprites for units, the orientation-specific ones were ignored. 
* Fix possible instability when loading some tilesets. 
* Bug fix: when the 'native tiles' map view option was selected, the forbidden tiles for the selected unit would be shown on the city map, which was confusing. 
* In the Gtk clients, when using a tileset with rotatable unit sprites such as Cimpletoon, the worklist would show units with a random orientation, changing on mouse-over. Now a fixed orientation is displayed. 
* In the editor, the player vision control in the tile edit dialog has been disabled. It had never worked, and caused numerous assertion failures while using the editor in 2.4.0-beta1. 
* Bug fix: if for some reason the client couldn't gain full control of its locally started server, it would fail to shut that server down. 
* The client now performs stricter validation of filenames received from the server. 
* Sources for the old win32 client (which has not built for years) are no longer included in the distribution. 
* Various fixes to the new Gtk3 client:
** Font styles were not being applied in several places; for instance the city dialog did not correctly use a fixed-width font when configured to. 
** The initial state of the chatline toolbar is set correctly. 
** The origin of the unit popup menu in the city dialog has been moved to not cover the unit icon. 
** A batch of changes to use more modern features of the Gtk3 toolkit and remove deprecation warnings when compiling. These mostly do not affect functionality, although the appearance of some parts of the client has changed since beta1. 
====Tilesets / Art====
* The Cimpletoon tileset now has sprites for Elephants and Crusaders, making a complete set of sprites for units in the supplied rulesets. 
* The 'native tiles' map view option now has a new graphic in all supplied tilesets. 
* Some internal SVG format fixes in some of the supplied flags to allow their use in web browsers; this has no effect on Freeciv itself. Note that not all flags have been fixed in this release. 
====Gameplay / Rules Changes====
=====Supplied rulesets=====
* The supplied "Earth (classic/small)" (earth-80x50-v3) scenario could not be loaded at all in a release build. 
* In the 'multiplayer' ruleset, the ability to build buoys has been removed, as they do not work well with national borders disabled (the default for this ruleset). It is expected that they'll be re-enabled in a future major release. 
* The default map topology for new games has been changed to isometric, to match the default Amplio2 tileset. 
* Bug fix: in the 'multiplayer' ruleset, players could gain free techs multiple times by rebuilding Darwin's Voyage (fixed by ).
* Quell some warnings when loading the civ2 ruleset. 
* Various fixes to leader titles. 
=====Other rulesets=====
* Bug fix: the tech upkeep with tech_cost_style 2 or 4 was much lower than intended; it only took into account a single tech rather than all preceding techs. As a result, tech upkeep in such rulesets will greatly increase. 
** The downloadable 'civ2civ3' modpack has thus been updated to disable tech upkeep (as of version 2.4-3). If you had downloaded this modpack previously, you should probably fetch the new version when upgrading to 2.4.0-beta2 or later.
* The give_technology() Lua script function now returns 'nil' if the player already has the technology, as documented; previously it returned the Tech_Type 'None'. 
* Remove impediments to rulesets having a start year other than -4000 :
** The MinYear requirement can now be a year before -4000.
** A hardcoded start year of is no longer sent to the metaserver in pregame.
* Some previously accepted badly-formatted ruleset constructs now cause hard errors, to make typos and other errors in rulesets more obvious to ruleset authors:
** Unknown effect requirement types (previously these were silently interpreted as "None"). 
** Errors in requirements lists. 
** Unknown unit type/class and improvement flags. 
====AI====
* The city governor logic has been reworked, fixing various issues such as unexpected tax collectors in cities with many buildings, and a need to set minimal gold surplus to a lower target than expected. 
* The AI's workers/settlers, and human players' autosettlers, will now automatically stop what they are doing and go elsewhere if threatened by an enemy unit and there is no defender on their tile. (Currently only threats from land units are considered.) 
* Improvements to AI settler management:
** The AI now considers worker units' food consumption (e.g. Settlers) to be less of a factor when deciding whether to build such units, to encourage it to do so. 
** Fix poor handling of rulesets containing boats which can only carry a single unit. Previously, the AI would generate settlers with the intention of sending them out on such boats, but then refuse to do so due to lack of room for a bodyguard, regardless of whether one was needed, often hurting expansion and leaving useless settlers. Now it only insists on room for a bodyguard if one is actually needed. 
* Improvements to AI city defense:
** Reduced the tendency of AI city defenders to be lured out of their city by nearby targets even in the presence of threats. 
** Cities in grave danger of invasion with no defending units were tending to build City Walls, uselessly. They will now prioritise acquiring a defender. 
* Improvements to AI caravan management:
** Caravans in transit are now taken into account when a city is deciding whether to build more caravans. Previously, a city could end up building endless caravans if existing ones did not complete their trade route. 
* Fix bugs with evaluation of units' defense ability:
** The additional defense bonus of CanFortify units (e.g. land units in the default ruleset) over other units was not considered when evaluating units as city defenders. 
** All units were assumed to get a defense bonus from terrain, rather than just units with the TerrainDefense flag. 
* Fix some incorrect inferences about the ability of transported units or units in cities to defend; these are most likely to affect unusual rulesets (e.g., those with ocean cities). 
* Fixes for some server crashes:
** In rulesets with tech upkeep, division by zero could occur when evaluating the value of 'Tech_Parasite' effects (e.g., Great Library), players who are losing bulbs are no longer considered. 
** Division by zero could occur when evaluating poor city locations. 
** The server could crash if a caravan became homeless. Such caravans now look for a new home city before they do anything else. 
** The server could crash when a barbarian leader died. 
* Fixes for some assertion failures:
** In rulesets with paratroopers and ocean cities. 
** When the server 'phasemode' setting was set to an alternating-move mode. 
* Value logic was considering effects with negative value as enabling boolean effects when choosing between governments. 
* AI behavior is likely to change as a result of . For instance, it might be more likely to research a tech to allow it to build a kind of building without being certain that that building's other prerequisites will ever be fulfilled.
====Help / Documentation====
* The online help for each terrain type now shows which types of units can traverse it. 
* A new file doc/README.AI_modules describes how to configure and use the new AI modules feature. 
* A new file NEWS-2.4 in the distribution lists differences between minor revisions. 
* A manual page is now included for the 'freeciv-manual' utility. 
* Other minor improvements to user documentation and in-game text. 
* Miscellaneous improvements to developer/ruleset docs. 
* Invisible changes to assist translation. 
====Translations====
* New translation: Traditional Chinese (40%) ()
* Updated translations:
** Complete translations: Polish, Catalan, French, British English.
** Incomplete translations: Spanish (99.2%), Scottish Gaelic (93%), German (79%).
* In the Finnish localisation, sentences now start with capital letters in more cases. 
====Build/portability====
* Use intptr_t, fixing an issue on LLP64 platforms such as Windows native 64-bit builds. 
* The configure script could fail to detect SDL_mixer, for instance on Fedora with hardened build options set. 
* The embedded Lua build now respects the --without-readline configure option, fixing a possible failure to build on systems without readline. 
* No longer unconditionally try to use pthread; this was causing './configure' to fail on MinGW. 
* Include correct header for basename(). 
* Fix some possible SQLite configuration errors. 
* Fix a PostgresQL build failure. 
* Fix a Lua-related build failure on Mac OS X. 
* Fix failure when cross-compiling with MagickWand support. 
* Fix a warning leading to build failure when compiling with MySQL and --enable-debug=yes, seen on OpenSUSE 12.3. 
* Future-proof against automake versions which ignore ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS. 
* Some fixes to the supplied Debian packaging material. 
* Fix various compiler warnings. It's now possible to build Freeciv with GCC 4.7 optimisation level -O3 without any warnings. 
* Miscellaneous autoconf build system / portability fixes. 
See NEWS for older lists of changes.
Category:NEWS