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[blurb]Water focused, new vehicles, events, bug fixes, stability improvements, and more![/blurb] Planned release should be tonight. The original goal of this release was to address a lot of water related issues, things that just looked ugly or needed polish; although still highly water focused, this update has added some new jobs, vehicles, disaster events, pets, and some terrain rework. It also makes the usual attempts to increase server performance and address crashes. New Stuff A new shipping lane system that lets the AI know what safe paths around the main land masses are. The ocean is now populated with cruise ships and cargo ships, these happy fellows just put around the ocean on their way to deliver their people or cargo. The San Casina Police Department shelled out a ton of money and purchased an old destroyer, expect to see this show up if people with a wanted level of 5 are in the area. The ugly old fishing buoys have been replaced with actual fish, birds, and other sea life. A new daycare has moved into San Casina, feel free to visit or call the Quality Learing Center for any childcare related needs! Fishing Boats now show the 5 nearest fishing spots - Also added two new perks for the Fishing Boat, one will make it so you see the 10 nearest spots, the other will make the markers on the radar show up colored (Blue = Normal, Better = Orange, Best = Light Green, Trash = Black). Added 3 new events, one is completely water based, one is mostly water based and one only starts and ends in the water. Enabled an old event from 2020 that was disabled due to how unstable the Pathfind was (it would often crash the server within 5 minutes of starting). Also touched up the effects of this mystery event. Added 3 new sea-based houses (they’re ex-military bases floating on ice bergs). Each house can have a favorite ship and helicopter. These houses also serve as docks for fishing and show up as closest locations when boating about. A new store has moved into San Casina that sells Ogels! Minifigs & Bricks has opened its doors and will pay good money for Ogel sets! Sure there might have been some rumors of them not paying, but everyone the owner knows has got payouts. Added 5 new player controlled boats! Speed Boat 1 (yeah, I don’t have a creative name here) Speed Boat 2 (same as above) Yacht Mark V Special Operations Craft Hamina Class Missile Boat A new city beautification project has been put underway; this project aims to revitalize some parts of town and make it look lusher and greener (and totally wasn’t done to simplify terrain/pathfind to increase stability). Added two new pets - Giant Spider and the Rabbit. Added some more Easter Eggs to the map. Added 23 new high scores for the player to master. Added a new system for the perks system that will notify players if a perk requires more than one use. Perks like Sniper now require at least 2 uses to have any effect, same for Master of Disguise. A system has been added to make holiday events happen automatically. New Years, Valentines, April First, Easter, Fourth Of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas should now automatically trigger without having me to remember to update the server files. Tweaks/Improvements Shrank the size of the circle marker on the radar, it was far too big. Increased the size of the ocean by 1000 meters to the South (And then even more after that, I’m guessing I added 1000 more to the East, forgot to put it in my notes of how much). Fixed some alignment issues with the ocean water. There used to be some visible gaps. Increased the polycount of the ocean so when the fog rolls in the player is no longer trapped in a sea of gray. This also has the benefit of casting slightly better shadows. Nullwave Repeater now carries less ammo and is now more expensive. Several building LODs have had their distance increased to make the pop-in less painfully obvious: Gas Station, Westwood Warehouse, Limmers. Bushes, Ferns, and other plants now have a slightly farther LOD distance, so they don’t pop in all of 5 meters away from the player. Increased the suspension of the Fiat Tipo so it gets hung up on curbs a bit less. A bunch of news updates now come from “SCPR” Made the Message In A Bottle’s LOD less awful to look at. It’s a little harder to spot now but it also doesn’t look like complete ass when you drive 5 meters away from it. Shooting AI Jets down now increases your wanted level even if the cops don’t see you do it, FBI or something. Weapons that have been favorited now will update their price the next time you purchase them if they’ve had increases or decreases over the years. Hovercraft that get EMP’d now fall into the water. This is an old system that I’m 90% sure was working at some point and just got broken. Made a simpler system for cleaning up data at the end of a game. This should help make game over and next map loading be more stable. Empty street sweepers now repair signs, making them less exploitable. The Mutant Takeover perk now unlocks by winning the Mutant Assault instead of losing (harder to unlock this way but doesn’t encourage the team to work against itself). Vehicles from a player’s garage are now only worth 1/10th their price, this is to reduce an exploit where players would sell them for full price instantly on spawn. Improved how exiting water with swimming works. There used to be some code that would block you from flying out of the water if you bounced on the surface, this is now handled by setting you Z velocity to 0. Added some new net code that will allow me to make certain objects only update if they are misaligned by a set amount client side. Bug Fixes A certain door in Renhalo has been fixed to work with the red keycard once more. Removed a delay from the Nullwave Repeater that made it silent for a split second when being fired. The simple fountain mesh now correctly lights with lightgen - no more glowing poles at night. Fixed some misaligned ID’s that caused doors not to open on certain buildings client side. Fixed 4 spots in the ocean where if you were swimming, you’d suddenly just fall. Fixed 4 high scores that have not been recording. The Killed messages would occasionally say killed instead of destroyed, this has been corrected. Fixed a bug with the Jackpot system that would cause the Jackpot to slowly decrease as the player gambled more. (already live on the server). Ambulance Job no longer pays money to the driver if the driver was the one hurting the person being healed. Fixed a bug that was causing trains to sometimes have odd collisions on create that would vanish after the player started moving. One of the basic hunting AI scripts wasn’t wandering around the map if it couldn’t find anything to hunt. Changed how my custom date time code works, broke more than it fixed at first. Pets no longer try to teleport to their owner repeatedly while the owner is swimming. Performance Reduced the number of draw calls on the graveyard Added a preset specifically for collision testing to reduce processing on the server. Added BillBoard textures to 3 of the common trees in San Casina to reduce impact on the client at range, managed to get the pop-in to not be completely horrible. Future Cop vehicles (APC and Enforcers) now have a final LOD that brings their poly count down to around 600. I’m noticing a pretty bad performance impact when the city is full of cops on the highest wanted level. Unfortunately, while this improved it, it didn’t completely fix it. Trains and Parachutes now use different objects to detect collisions; this reduces the number of script zone hits on the server. Simplified what types of objects are used for swimming to reduce the number of script zone thinks are needed. Fishing Schools now only scan the smart game objects list instead of the simple object list, which was resulting in 300 fishing spots checking roughly 5000 objects each 10 times a second, it got bad enough that I could start to “feel” the stutter when hosting locally. The change has made local hosting feel buttery smooth. This same update has been applied to things like EMP, Kezlarbo, chinook, and the vehicle transport. Increased the initial load speed of the game. Crash Fixes Ghost Strike Craft is no longer an instant crash (something caused its scripts to get blanked out). Player Controlled V22 Osprey will no longer crash the server when it’s destroyed. Fixed 10+ pathfind crashes, some in the industrial area, some by the gas station, a couple in parking garages, a few by the little park in the residential area. Original Release Specific Made the executable support up to 4GB of ram, which fixes 99% of the random crashing it was getting previously. Modern Client Specific Fixed some issues that could cause it to crash almost instantly on join. Fixed a bug with the object that created bubbles for people swimming, this was causing network issues with the modern client that would cause crashes, lockups, and disconnects. Massive UFO’s motion is now synchronized on 4.x if the player quits and rejoins. Boring Stuff Much of the code base now runs in VS 2026 (dropped VS 2008 support, a more modern debugger and night mode are godsends) I made the server crash logger a bit more robust, not sure if it'll actually help much with tracking the pathfind crashes but one step at a time.

On August 22nd at 7 PM GMT

[blurb]On February 22nd at 8 PM GMT[/blurb]

[blurb]The PLECOSTOMUS have grown fat on people's internetz for far too long, it’s time for them to go on a diet.[/blurb]This release contains massive stability improvements (for the server), some rework to the crime system and treasure chests, and tons of bug fixes.New Stuff Treasure chest system has been reworked: There are now only 3 treasure chests at the bottom of the ocean instead of 20. Treasure chests are now generated once every 1-3 days after a chest was found. Treasure chest locations are now saved between games, so even if the server restarts/crashes the chests will be in their same spot on the next load. There is now a treasure map that gives hints where the treasure chests are located. Treasure chests are now worth $25,000,000 to $50,000,000. Players will now see security cameras scattered around the map, while in line of site of these cameras any crime committed will go toward the players bounty (previously only 10% of the crime was counted when out of line of site of cops, now 0% is counted but obviously with cameras the chances of being spotted is much higher). There is also now a high score for killing these cameras. The crime system now has indicators below the radar on the HUD: Green (Pathfind Icon) means you’re in a pathfindable zone, you must be in pathfind in order to gain bounty. Yellow (Camera/Eye) means you are in line of sight of a security camera (newly added all over the map) or a police officer/vehicle, this is required to gain crime stats. Red (Hand Cuffs) means you can be arrested/killed to get the bounty, for the most part this requires you being in a path findable areas, and having been in game for a few minutes. Mars Rover can now over heat, running the laser too long will cook the driver (there may or may not be a perk that will extend the time the laser can be run without cooking the driver). There have been some new high scores added related to this as well. I'm shipping the original release with a slimmed down version of scripts, that seems to decrease blackscreen issues (this is just a trial run) in order to host locally you'll need to rename scriptsFull.dll to scripts.dll. Beyond that there has been no new content as previously mentioned. Improvements/Tweaks TONS of pathfinding changes, for the most part the pathfind area is much smaller than it used to be; however, this also will improve stability (basically the issue was if a VEHICLE tried to pathfind out of certain spots, the pathfind network would overflow and choke itself if it couldn’t figure out how to get to the target location). I’m not promising 100% no crashes, but this is a MASSIVE improvement. Notes: Roofs and building interiors are no longer pathfindable. If you wedge yourself into a spot a cop car can't get, chances are it is out of pathfind, and if its not there is a chance that that spot can cause a crash. See Images bleow to get a better idea of how much smaller the pathfind area is now. Increased the resolution of the HUD_Main and made radar markers besides the star smaller (goal here is to make objective markers easier to see when lots of markers are on the radar). The Crime system now has different jail sentence times based on the crime committed, previously it was just randomly generated and the same for all crimes. Bail costs now cost roughly 10x as much as they used to. Special thanks to Seifmagdi, he reverse engineered “Is_In_Pathfind_Sector” previously I was detecting pathfind by testing if a bot moved toward a player which required a ton of extra checks and a lot more time to scan if the bot made the attempt, now the code can check it live. Added 21 more message in a bottle hints and updated several of the old ones. More train blockers now only exist when the train is near by (specifically the ones on the main land). Volorus Cervous now weighs more (this will make it slightly more sluggish to change directions). Being pathfind has been reduced certain events (Ants/Abominations) have to have been repositioned so they spawn in pathfind still. Several spots on the map have had their terrain smoothed out to make pathfinding easier (the ledge by the little park near the housing, the step drop off by the road and fountains, and the super steep hill by the bridge). Removed 309 draw calls from the main map, probably won’t make any difference but you never know, could help lower end machines. Server crash dumps now report players in game as well as their locations, which will help me pin down other pathfind related crashes in the future. Cops will now go to the location of the criminal at higher wanted levels instead of just parking at the end of the block. Cat unlock code is now tied to a different thing (possibly something Mutant Assault related). Pole dancer payout has been reduced from 25 to 10. Renegade weapons now cost 10x what they used to, they were the stock Ren prices which made them horribly disbalanced once favorited. Nerfed the professional racer perk, it only does 2.5% instead of 10%. 911 should now list all players that have a bounty over 50k. General code cleanup of several systems. Reduced how long players are counted for “being seen” (cops used to count a player as being in the line of sight for up to 15 seconds after last being seen, now this has been reduced to 5 seconds). Bug Fixes Fixed a crash with the original release that could cause the game to crash if there were too many human characters on the map at once. Fixed the LOD for the industrial train station and tunnels in A69’s underground popping out too soon. Cops should no longer just forget about people that attacked them if those people don’t have a wanted level currently. Fixed a bug that would cause cops to hate you forever even after you’d died and lost your wanted level. Fixed a bug that would cause damaging cops/vehicles to count for multiple crimes instead of a single offense. Selected perks code will no longer overflow the text buffer if the player has a lot of perks with long names. Possible crash fixes with the high score system, although I don’t think they could ever be hit, so its more of a fix for Visual Studio so its not throwing warnings anymore. Player cat and several other player characters no longer get armor and health they shouldn’t. Phone no longer works while in the sewers, just too far under ground to get a signal. Tutorial house no longer sells for NaN. Fixed some bugs in how ECW’s date calculations worked, in theory they could bug and cause undesired issues. Credit cards can now be charged vastly more, preventing players from being stuck in jail forever if they have large bounties. Fixed a script that was repositioning objects client side… or suppose to at least… to actually do so. Motel shades should now be in their correct positions instead of floating off the walls. Fixed some high scores not showing up on the in game reader boards. Ogel cat now has a high score for being killed. Fixed a bug that would cause multiple treasure chests to spawn in the same spot. Fueling technician perk now unlocks correctly. Fixed a bug with the Gmax Job that would give you tips for the Hazmat job instead. Fixed a script that wasn’t sending the message from the player, which resulted in several high scores not being tracked correctly. Train job now tracks player squishes correctly. Players will no longer be able to pick up their own debt cards after dying. Fixed a bug that would cause cops to be unable to see players driving vehicles. Cops should no longer continue to unload their weapons if a friendly drives into their line of sight. Fixed several weapons being able to be refilled off the PT terminals that say "unavailable."

On December 7th at 8 PM GMT

[blurb]This is just a small update that adds the B-52 Bomber, as well as several fixes and improvements.[/blurb] This is just a small update that adds the B-52 Bomber, as well as several fixes and improvements. New Features B-52 Bomber has been added, enjoy doing bombing runs on unsuspecting targets! Added some new net code to support syncing the B-52’s bombs (yes, they inherit the physics of the plane) Pin System has been reworked a bit to make it more secure: Server now logs players out after 2 minutes if they haven’t successfully entered a pin. Server now logs players out after 5 incorrect pin attempts. Improvements/Bug Fixes Updated taxi paths, taxis will now drop players off at the hospital, closer to the motel, and near the police parking garage instead of dumping them in the middle of the road. Updated the data in the crash dumps file to include a list of players as well as the game running time to assist me in debugging. Civilian cars no longer de-spawn on an empty server (This was originally in place to keep the server from being hammered all day, but the new server is plenty powerful to not suffer from this). Upgraded how serverStatus.txt is updated, during map loading it now is updated to “Loading…” If the server locks up it will now restart within 30 seconds, this originally wasn’t possible as I couldn’t detect when the server was loading, but that feature is now possible with bhs updates. Master of Disguise’s wording no longer implies that the player won’t be detected by home defenses. Code formatting and structure cleanup as usual to help my sanity.

This is just a small hotfix to address some of the bugs noticed in the first weeks of testing, as well as adding a new perk and drop helicopter. The sporadic server crashing is still an issue and I’m investigating what’s going on. Additions• Added a new Fire Fighting Suit perk which gives the player the FlameThrower armor type, requested by KillingYou. • Added a new drop helicopter that was requested by Number1Rival. Improvements• Armored Car now has a horn (new truck horn not previously in game). • Cargo truck now uses the common horn shared between most the trucks. Fixes• Fixed some of the custom player drop helicopters having collisions which caused weird clipping issues client side. • Reduced how often pets update their attack move, which should make them jitter along with their attack and move faster. • Made some slight improvements to pets so they attack empty vehicles that aren’t AI less when they’ve been given the attack AI command. • Rolled back some pathfind changes which were causing AI cars to get stuck far too often. • Civilian cars that get stuck in one spot for a long period of time no longer teleport home and make the attempt to get to their next location again (this was the cause of civilian vehicles randomly drive at 100 MPH across the empty fields) now instead they just remove themselves from the game. • Dancing License PT should no longer be floating off the wall client side. • Generalcamo Perk PT now gives the correct perk. • Shock Collar PT now has the correct name. Optimizations• Night map is now brighter in general. • Optimized some code to reduce checks made when entering and exiting vehicles • Fixed some code that was trying to update fog for AI bots. • Cleaned up some code in general that was overly complex. • Fixed some buffer overflows, I don’t think they were the cause of any crashes but at least it’s not even an option now. Modern Client• Forced MaxStaticLodBudgetOverride in tt.ini to 1 - This fixes the horribly broken LOD in the modern client (all the plants just appearing and disappearing at once as you rotate the camera) and helps peformance quite substantially (I can now run modern client at about 2k view distance and it stays around 30 fps when looking at the city instead of dipping into the 20 fps range; granted, still not as good as original release but better all the same). Known Issues• Right now the game is still crashing far more often when civilian cars are on the map, I have a few plans to attempt to mitigate the issue but in general it’s still under investigation. • Black screen is still an issue in the standalone release, I think it happens a little less often nowadays, but it still is an issue. As such, I recommend anyone encountering it to just use the Modern Client, as that’s far easier to deal with than trying to pin down why standalone won’t work. • Self-hosting is still far less stable than playing on the server (this is because rendering graphics adds additional complexity to the game). [blurb]This is just a small hotfix to address some of the bugs noticed in the first weeks of testing, as well as adding a new perk and drop helicopter. The sporadic server crashing is still an issue and I’m investigating what’s going on.[/blurb]

[blurb]This release focuses on improving stability, also there has been progress made to improve the crime system, slot machines, as well as adding new highscores, perks, pets, and many other features.[/blurb]Note: Currently I'm trying to trace down one final crash (I think I've got it but I'm running the 4hour internal server tests right now to see if its actually fixed, if all goes well I'll have a release by tomorrow. This release features new jobs, crime system updates, slot machine improvements, custom drop helicopters, a plethora of crash fixes, tons of improvements, and a massive code overhaul that fundamentally changes players expectations and initial experiences. In 2023, the main code file was 61,760 lines of code. It is now streamlined to 32,599 lines and has been broken out into only 100 different files. New features Reworked the Private Contractor job into a Bounty Hunter job. You now search town for marks, and these marks either need to be killed or arrested. In addition, the job decides if you need to destroy or evict the marks from their vehicle. Payouts work by giving a small amount for each task completed, and a final payout once the entire contract is completed. The vehicle task makes up 25% of that total payout, and all the individual marks make up the rest of the payout. You can press Y while holding your contract to see what the payouts are. Added 9 high scores related to the new Bounty Hunter job. Vehicles that have had their passengers evicted now serve as a bonus to people driving vehicle carriers. Returning those vehicles to the Pay N’ Sprays will give some payout to the Bounty Hunter as well as the person returning the vehicle. Reworked the slot machines: Made the payouts more fair and common. Added new effects and sounds to make it a more enjoyable experience. Slot machines now have another perk to be unlocked. Added 8 highscores related to the Gmax shipping job. When committing crimes, wanted levels will now appear on the player HUD. As a reminder, a lot of crime needs to happen in front of a police officer. Law enforcement now has new vehicles. The wanted system adapts to the players’ destruction and reacts accordingly. Players can now customize their drop helicopters with 30 options (some of which have to be unlocked) by calling 555-4371. Added a hotkey to select handcuffs (default is U). Added the Shock Collar perk which gives your melee based pets an electric attack. Improvements The train blockers now only exist when the train is closer. This allows players to go over the tracks, and though it’s not a perfect system it’s better than what we had before, and it’s the best I can do with this version of scripts. Cleaned up how the Carryall’s determine what vehicle(s) are being held (thanks seifmagdi). Bots that are melee-only will now properly charge their enemies instead of standing there. Mutant Assault and Deer Hunter maps now show their time remaining at the bottom of the screen. Time remaining countdown is now displayed when a partial vote is completed. MA Island now shows a counter for how many rioters are remaining. General code cleanup, not going to list all the specifics. Revised how the racetrack code works to get some more performance improvements for the server (it now only scans the players instead of all the cars and infantry on the map). Simplified the weapon drop code to improve stability. Hovercraft that end up underwater can now resurface faster. The sea buoy drop helicopter purchase is now more… interesting, to say the least. Fishing boat script zones now only scan for players to further improve the performance of the FDS. The pathfind for AI has been massively extended. Osprey, X7-32, and Leopard Drop Ship have custom crash explosions. Osprey now has a custom crash model where the lights turn off. As usual, I updated the credits file to reference new assets. When infantry cap is reached, newly created infantry will exist for at least 3 seconds before being removed if they’re determined to be the furthest from player sight. Several updates have been made to pets: Pets now follow the player at a further distance (an additional 2.5 meters). Added a pet duck. Added a pet pig. Civilian Car Road System: Cars will now drive in the parking garages of the following: Hospital, Apartment, 8 Green Bottles, skyscraper, Police Station, and Better Stay Motel. Cars will now drive in the downtown parking ramp. Cars will now drive around Mr Limmers. Fixed a problematic railroad crossing by the park that often would result in cars backing up and ending up in the water. Fixed a corner where cars were turning too tight near Fancy Pants. Road system pathfind has been rebuilt and taxis can now drive players from all locations... with minimal stupidity. Fixed a corner where cars were turning too wide near the Christmas shop Crime/Police Improvements: AI cops now know how to actually push the gas pedal down and accelerate. Cleaned up a ton of cop-related code so I don’t have to add the new cop vehicles into 100 spots. All cop cars now have horns (These can be used both by players and AI, middle mouse and right mouse control lights and sirens now). All police and military vehicles are now labeled correctly. Cops should now more consistently use their handcuffs when the player gets tased. The updated road locations above mean that cops can better locate players in those locations, be warned (blame it on security cameras or something). Rebalanced when the different tiers of police weapons, vehicles, aircraft start to show up. Civilian cars and taxis will now try to steer the opposite direction 50% of the time when backing up. This greatly reduces the chances of those cars getting stuck. Phones now support leading zeroes (0) on all numbers (A limitation made by how the system was originally built). PINs can also have leading zeroes as well. Trains, mechs, and dropships don’t use explosions to emulate collisions anymore. This is now all done in the code which saves a ton of network spam and extra code from being run. Cops and drug dealers will now move toward the doors of buildings instead of chilling out in the middle of road intersections blocking traffic. The Ghost Strike Craft now slides more, like a real hovercraft. Fixed an issue with the preset used to generate Pathfind (walkthrough). It was able to climb slops at super steep angles, which made AI think they could also climb those super steep slopes. Bug Fixes Quick fix for the Druggy script that was breaking for players when they road as a passenger. Fixed the E2 Hawkeye showing its passenger outside of the aircraft. Fixed “They see me trawlin’”. It was working in reverse, so now best case it will payout about $300,000 in 9 minutes. Sharks no longer break the trawlin’ perk. Small fix so the shipping job entry questionnaire can’t be spammed. Fixed a bug that spawned AI through the ground a lot when exiting vehicles. If an event is setup to give the player a pet, it no longer gives the max pet count. In addition, it doesn’t charge the player. Cleaned up the announcement text that used to have “Host:“ at the start of the message. Cleaned up how some of the message in the bottle code and bot code works to make it more stable in race conditions. Went through a ton of code that I made when I was 15 and added default constructors to reduce the chance of race conditions hitting uninitialized variables (changed 23 files and who knows how many objects). Basically, more code fixes. Fixed a bug that was causing cops to attack other cops if there was friendly fire. Cops now disengage the second the player is dead. Fixed a bug with 13 systems that were using game objects instead of id’s and thus could lose their references and end up crashing everything. More code stuff that works better for everyone. Fixed a couple of crashes that happened on loading the next map. Fixed a crash with the player pet system (it was using Get_GameObj_By_Player_Name, which is unstable in the version of code the ECW server uses). Fixed base defenses not attacking enemies when attacked. Fixed math behind the Gambler perk. Fixed some crashes (Calling Get_Sex in this version of the code has a stroke if the model is null). No sex for you, sorry. Fixed a bug that could cause destroyed or kicked vehicles not to spawn any civilians. AI exiting vehicles have to exit closer now, which will hopefully reduce the chances of them falling through the ground. Empty hands are no longer considered a beacon which was leaving projectiles scattered around. Improved housing garage and other zones to only scan for the player instead of all objects on the map which once again should help the FDS. Changed several zones from ‘script zone all’ to ‘CnC’ so that those zones will only scan for players to help with the performance and FDS more. The ocean entry of the Gas Station now is properly sloped instead of making people run over a curb. Reduced flickering in the desert. Police Charger headlights no longer have a red flash which would confuse the front of the vehicle irl. Fixed the police helicopter spotlight (pulled the version form Bear Island Redux) so it doesn’t artifact all over the screen. Curbs on the bridge are lower so AI can easily get up off the roadway (makes AI less exploitable). Fixed some aggregates that were being duplicated due to my sloppy work over the years. Sewer swimming zones now only check for players, the chances of AI ever getting down there is low so no reason to make the server scan all objects. Food Items and other beacon class items should no longer randomly cause the sky to reset or slowly fade red. Fixed several potential infinite loops, although rare for the server to just lock up. I did have it happen several times while testing crime so I’d like to imagine I’ve fixed all of them. Fixed a potential crash with the Jail system caused by an undersized array. Fixed a bug with the mech shutdown text being initialized wrong which could reduce game stability. Fixed a few memory leaks with how strings were being handled. Fixed an overflow with how death messages were being generated, which made the Chronovirus event less stable. Fixed a bug with how the server loaded certain config files. Potential fixes in the phone code (I say potential because I never saw it cause an issue to begin with). Fixed a bug with the Delivery Job that wasn’t formatting the payout correctly. Fixed a possible crash caused when the AI go to “hang out” with their friends. Fixed a crash with the wild deer if they didn’t load a place to go hang out with first. Fixed a potential infinite loop with the nuclear power plant is in meltdown mode (don’t think this was possible to have happen but fixed all the same). Changed how the code handles strings and made things a bit safter. Some minor fixes in Death Match. Some minor fixes on MA Front Lines. Cleaned up the formatting of numbers and fixed a bug on the Delivery Job code. Fixed a possible crash with the Deer AI on the main map. Fixed a lockup that could be caused by the nuclear power plant, although I think its unlikely that could have ever happened. Fixed an edge case that could cause the tutorial to crash the game if you managed to have no weapons and hit the drop key. Player Jail times should now be properly recorded. Added a fix for Mech voice lines. Previously, Mechs could potentially crash the game if you had enough voice files queued up. Added a fix for the Chronovirus event that was causing the game to crash (The death message said “The Chronovirus” but the algorithm used to detect gender was only expecting 2 letters like A or An at most. Fixed an out of bounds array in loading shaders. Fixed a bug that would allow certain housing objects to have more health and armor than their max. Fixed a bug in how PINs were hashed which could cause the hashes to not match on next game load. Fixed a bug with how phone numbers are transmitted to the client. The number should no longer do weird rounding as it gets really long. Fixed a bug with phone pound numbers (#) that could cause an array overflow and crash the game. Fixed a crash that has been in the game since the military base first started firing ICBMs. If the ICBM exploded on its way up the game would crash. Cleaned up some poorly formatted perk text. Pet cat attack now works properly. Fixed MA Front Line (oh shit I think it's been broken for like 2 years). Full Release Improvements Fixed bluehell thanks to jonwil for supplying some legacy code so I could rebuild some of the older files used by the server and standalone release! Restored stock printscreen code, this means that screenshots will work in Windows 10/11; however, they will be in .tga format. 4.x Client Improvements Now supports controllers, make sure to have the controller plugged in and turned on before starting the game. Fixed water now having shadows on it. Fixed a bug causing some vehicles to fire when they shouldn’t be. Task Manager will now correctly list the game as Expansive Civilian Warfare Updated game icon to be the ECW icon. Updated some text strings that used to refer to “Renegade” Instead of Expansive Civilian Warfare. Updated the config.exe and added the option to center the window, if not selected it will use the top left corner of the screen like stock. Known Issues Although I put countless hours into fixing crashes and lockups there definitely still is one or two floating around in the code that can cause the game to sometimes crash minutes into the game, other times hours. It doesn’t seem to be directly caused by killing and destroying units but it's always hard to say how things are interacting. Black screen is still an issue in the stand alone release, I think it happens a little less often nowadays but it definitely still is an issue. As such, I recommend anyone encountering it to just use the Modern Client, as that’s far easier to deal with than trying to pin down why standalone won’t work. Although tons of work was done to improve systems and add more stability, some of the changes I made can have the end result of truncated strings (instead of overflowing into memory). If you see any strings that are garbled nonsense or truncated please report them. Although tons of things have been improved, I still recomend playing on the server as hosting the standalone relase is less stable than the server due all these "futuristic" graphics pushing things to hard sometimes. Special Thanks To the creators of CppCheck which helped me make my final code cleanup pass days before release. To Jonwil for saving me tons of time. He was able to identify which crashes were related which helped keep me from thinking things hadn’t been fixed when they had. And as always W3DHub and their support along all these long years.

On August 24th at 7PM GMT

[blurb]On June 15th at 7PM GMT[/blurb]

A couple of months ago, I was inspired to add scrolling marquees to ECW. While digging through the code, I was angered by how poorly so much of it was written, which spooled into a massive refactor and cleanup effort, which in turn spooled into adding some new content. Thus, I give you... Expansive Civilian Warfare - version 1.2.2.8/1.0.0.7! New Features: A new boat - the Russian Komar-class missile boat has been sighted in the waters around San Casina! This small but fast boat is armed with 2 KT-67 missile launchers and a 25mm gun. Players can now see all their high scores in game on five scrolling marquees placed around the city. In addition to announcing any disasters currently happening, these will also display the current temperature, as well as any special events that building might currently be having. Housing: Housing Security has been completely redone with the addition of new security camera models, as well as a new security option that upgrades your cameras from the base model to something more powerful. All houses (including apartments) now have security cameras. The apartments now have one free camera that respawns roughly 5 minutes after death. The Mars and Forest houses will keep their 3 free cameras to balance not having a garage. All homes now have a fridge and a weapons safe, which means all homes can now store a combination of 3-5 weapons/items. Housing security zones will now trigger from AI entering them as well. The score for intruding in a house now requires the house to have a security package that detects intruders. “House for sale” signs will now correctly re-appear instantly when the house goes back up for sale. The automatic payment system for security has been reworked; You can no longer pay it a day in advance as before, so be sure to enable auto-pay if you want to keep your security more than 5 days. If the player is in game when their housing and security is renewed, they will now get a message about it. Pets are finally smart enough to use house doors, and will no longer fight with the house defenses. The CZ-75 has been added along with a drum mag that holds 50 rounds. There are three new disasters, two of which you may have already seen some info about. They are very meme-ey, very creative and relatively complex. Fireworks have been added! (These are the same fireworks that were seen in the recent Renegade Event). The portable igloo has been added! This item acts as mini tank trap, but slowly melts when the weather is above 32F. Added 10 new civilian vehicles: Skoda Superb Chevy Volt Volkswagen Golf Subaru Legacy Dodge Viper Chevy Tahoe Honda Pilot Mustang GT Gmax Shipping Truck The M978 Tanker Truck has been added! It can be driven down to the gas station, filled with fuel, and then used as a pseudo bomb truck (mix it with the suicide bomb for extra effect). Roughly 10 new easter eggs have been added! I would expect new players to find these first, as a lot of the easter eggs are in reference to things that already existed but did nothing previously. A total of 4 new perks have been added! Two of them are related to housing. 15 new high scores have been added, mostly related to the new events! Improvements/Changes: Cop AI will now attempt to dodge vehicles as well as move to stay out of their target’s line of fire. The Church bell system has been reworked completely. In the 7 years the bell has been in game I have only heard it ring once, maybe twice, and this was due to multiple issues. One was that a player had to be within 300 meters to see the animation (sound was tied to the animation), and the other was that it only went off twice a day – once at noon and once again at midnight. Now the bell rings on the hour, every hour, one ring per count of the hour (up to 12, then it starts over). The church has been changed into a church for the Cult of Deer, and as such, any prayer/event text has been realigned accordingly. Pepper A Salt gun has been nerfed greatly and will no longer get one shot kills on humans. However, it is now ten times as effective against mutants. The player login streak system now grants the player an extra perk slot if they hold a streak for 10 days or more. However, daily payouts have now been reduced, and each day gives 25k, stacking up to 250k at the 10-day mark. The turrets in the military base now have indicator lights so players know when they have power, or a lack thereof. This is useful for when players cut power to the military base via the wind turbines. In addition, the BWP maintenance boat has had its respawn time increased from roughly 20 minutes up to 1 hour and 30 minutes. The Littlebird has had its exit positions tightened up. This will make it easier to use when trying to get out on top of a small object. Added another pump jack. Hint: It is in a cold area. Large planes like the Boeing 747 and C130 now have collision detection on the wings, so be cautious when flying between buildings. Additionally, they will now have a bit of tilt when they move vertically. The sun is no longer a sad, small, dim spot. I have reverted it to an upscaled version of the stock Renegade sun. There is something about trees here in my notes… not sure what changed, looks pretty much the same to me. The nuclear power plant now has an additional stack of barrels for the Cargo job. The barrels at the nuclear power plant also respawn faster, giving the player more reason to revisit it. Civilian cars now drive more aggressively. I’ve tweaked the way the road point system works so they don’t try to brake instantly when getting to the last point. This will result in more vehicles getting into wrecks, but I think the faster traffic is a massive improvement. Modern clients will now start with extras enabled by default. No more having to type “extras” at the game start to access the second page of the PT menus. The price of the following vehicles has been increased: Abrams AC130 A10 Apache APC Chinook DPV, Harrier Paladin, Hydra Nuclear ICBM Launcher Ion Cannon Satellite Leopard Dropship Mammoth Hovercraft MRLS V22 Osprey Railgun Hover Tank Scud Launcher Urban Defense Vehicle IFV War Train. *The Pirate Ship had its price decreased. Using the redial system on the phone now displays the number pulled up in HUD text like the rest of the dialing system. Made Dusk a bit brighter, also made morning brighter and use more warm colors. Many cars now have different engine torque curves to make them feel more distinct, which results in what often feels like a hesitant transmission. Bug Fixes: The Van now has a proper Multi PT option, allowing you to switch between the white and black version and no longer spawns the broken old yellow model. Vehicle drop cinematics have been tweaked so that they no longer stall during the last second of their animation. Police Littlebird was missing a death explosion when it hit the ground - this has been fixed. The mysterious Tower’s collision has been improved. Fixed a bug with the map voting system that allowed players to change the map after a vote had been completed. The forever ash bug should now hopefully be fixed. It was caused by any item that could be placed, as well as a few things people probably didn’t realize were items (handcuffs). Fixed a bug with the recon plane job that caused its objectives to appear outside the bounds of the map. Players shall no longer witness AI planes flying backwards. The code that caused it has been fixed and we are now free from that blight. AI planes now have proper forward collision detection. Fixed some weapons PT holders disappearing too early due to LOD. Added some way paths that might help the AI navigate odd parts of the map. Renamed all text that had “debit cards” being called “credit cards”. Some minor phone bugs which could leave the call going on until the player hits the clear key have been fixed. Fixed a bug with the disaster system that was not always resetting how much damage the player had done, resulting in players who did not do any damage getting payouts. Fixed a major bug with the military base defenses that would cause them to not fire at targets. This issue turns out to have been caused by the drop-in animation. The drop technically creates them way up in the air, so the defense AI would look at where they were created and then scan from that location, which caused the issue. Changed the turrets and Anti-Missile System in A69 to be of type tank instead of turret, because it turns out that the fly-in was causing their actual position to be desynced client side, which is why sometimes players could not see them shooting when in reality, they were. As a result, for the first time in what feels like 10 years, you will see the Anti-Missile Systems shooting once again! Wii score record is now tracked for the Wiis that can be destroyed. Reduced the default draw distance of the modern client to 1000, as a lot of players struggled to run at 2k with the modern client at a decent frame rate. Improved overall game stability - I doubt I fixed all the issues that caused it to crash on the next map load, but it should be better now. MA_Island should be stable now as well - The map has been re-saved and re-exported, which should fix the issues from script(s) that had missing parameters. The War Train no longer counts as a job, being it is a war vehicle. Made some additional stability fixes to the server; I am not sure if these are actually going to improve anything, but time will tell. A larger patch was planned originally, but a surprise ECW event was created one day before my birthday, so I figured we might as well make the event as big as possible with what is ready. Enjoy! [blurb][/blurb]

[blurb]This release adds new pets, an item, redesigns the weather/temperature screen fade system, adds discord integration to the modern client, and more![/blurb]This release adds new pets, an item, redesigns the weather/temperature screen fade system, adds discord integration to the modern client, and more! New Features Food and drinks now modify your body temperature! If your body temperature is up by a degree it takes about a minute to get back to normal. Consumable Degrees Pizza +2.0 Water Bottle -5.0 Burger +2.0 Burgershot Meal +4.0 Cluckn Bell Meal +4.0 Coffee +10.0 Fries +1.0 Popcorn +1.0 Soda Cup -10.0 Soda Can -5.0 Completely redid the weather and heat screen fading system, it is now better tied in with the damage, heat, and other systems that used to fade the screen. Now eating too much hot or cold food will fade the screen as your body temperature gets to high or low, in addition placed fires will also fade the screen visibly. Also while improving this system I came across the bug that causes your screen to throb when your injured sometimes, I’ve always liked the affect so instead it is now properly coded into the system and will happen reliably. A new item, the coffee cup has been added, it has the same attributes as the soda cup except it gives heat instead of takes it. Added two new pets to the pet system; one is the turkey, a weak but cheap pet. The other is a mystery and is definitely not totally overpowered in anyway. Modern Client Update 1.4 Discord integration has been added thanks to Unstoppable's work! VSync is no longer needed in the modern client, it will frame cap at 300 and also uses proper refresh rates (Thanks to Dblaney1). Other tweaks and fixes may apply that were in the last 4.7.2 Renegade update (and technically it has everything that was in the latest 4.7.3 release too). Tweaks/Improvements Pop can price has been reduced from $75 to $25 Pets are now smart enough to switch to a secondary weapon… not that there are any pets that have one… The old energy shield script has been improved to be able to use more than 100 shield… not that there are any units that have more than 100. Taxis are now much more forgiving if the player jumps out and resummons it right away again, they’ll let the player do this roughly 3 times before getting tired of them and just leaving. Taxis no longer try to use the map’s pathfind grid to get to their first road point, this was causing them to drive all over the place before following the road… I suspect I originally did this because there is a rare opportunity for the AI to be moved by another unit or miss their first point, in which case it would spend a bunch of time stuck before getting back on path. However, the way it was working pretty much always made it drive like a complete nut until getting to the first point. Bug Fixes Weapons crate now tells you the weapon is full instead of giving you some abstract “No ammo for this weapon” message. When drinking too much of something it used to say something along the lines of “I can’t take anymore” now it says “I can’t drink anymore.” Lighting effects in the night club now better respect damage and heat effects (it's far from perfect). Server Patches (Updated 5/17/2022) The following are issues I found post push to the server and will be rolled out for all people hosting in the next patch. Fixed a bug causing the Multi PT's arrows to be mis-positioned on the 4.x client (not sure if this was a recent bug added by 4.x updates or if I had been missing it all along). Fixed an issue causing one of the pet PT's to be invisible (id collision). More improvements to the pet AI: Pets are now on the Renegade Team. Pets now actually use line of sight to do attacks. Pets will no longer attack the vehicle the player is in. Pets can now fight other pets and ignore other pets you own. Fixed an issue with the new pet perks causing them not to load. And that's all for this release, have fun!

[blurb]We've added a new weapon and cupid deer model for Valentines day![/blurb]Early happy Valentine’s Day! For any players that end up bored tomorrow, ECW is happy to bring you the Cupid Deer celebration! Players joining tomorrow will play as the cupid deer (Special thanks to @ Romanov ). In addition, players will as be granted the Cupid bow! A weapon that heals 25% of a soldier’s health each hit, but if the soldier is full health the bow will be an instant kill. The event will start the 14th at midnight CST and go on until midnight of the 15th CST. As a side note the launcher has been fixed so the play now button allows you to launch the modern or original client correctly! Have a good cupid day!