Quadra 1.3.0 Released!

Fifteen years (and a few months) after Quadra 1.0.0 was released, and almost 220,000 downloads of the open source version, there's a new version of Quadra!

We're pretty terrifyingly bad maintainers, the last release having been released just over five years ago, but despite that, the fans just won't give up on it, and there's been almost 20,000 downloads of 1.2.0 in those five years! That averages to about 10 downloads per day, in all that time...

You can get the new release, Quadra 1.3.0 (both in source form, and the Mac OS X package), from our releases page.

One thing that you might note is the lack of a Windows version (for now)... I've decided to not try for perfection, and instead hope to fix things up in (quicker, hopefully) follow-up releases, rather than wait for everything to be perfect. This way, at least, some users can get the benefit of the new release, and maybe a member of the community will be able to provide the missing Windows version, for example, better than we could.

What's new? The biggest change is that it is now built on top of the SDL2 library, which should fix many subtle problems in the graphics, and gets us better portability between different platforms. Notably, Mac OS X now uses the native graphics system, and is provided as a ready-to-play package.

This was made possible through the contribution of some people outside the core team (the following list from the NEWS file, let me know if anyone is missing!):

• Arthur Azevedo de Amorim
• Jérôme Brenier
• Pedro Scarapicchia Junior

Now, have fun!

P.S.: By the way, this is a cross-post from the Quadra news blog, which you can add to your favourite feed reader: http://quadragame.blogspot.com/

Quadra 1.2.0 Released!

Ten years after Quadra 1.0.0 was released, and more than 200,000 downloads of the open source version, there is finally a new stable release of Quadra!

We're been rather bad maintainers, the last release having been released almost eight years ago (in October 2001), and not really working all that hard on Quadra, but the fans (that's you!) just kept downloading and playing the game, amazingly! The numbers are just insane: no less than five years after the last release, downloads exceeded thirty thousands (in 2006), and in the last year, are still clipping along at around a thousand downloads per month!

But now you can get the new release, Quadra 1.2.0 (both in source form, and the Windows installer), from our download page.

What's new? Well, on the surface, it's still rather similar to the 1.1.8 version, but things changed underneath, keeping it up to date with the more modern technologies, fixed many crashes, made it more friendly to use in some subtle ways, and more robust regarding to the Internet playing. In more details:

• Added a notification of new versions in the title screen.
• Automatically updates the public game server address if it moves.
• Now requires Internet Explorer 5 on Windows.
• Stores high score recordings and configuration files in a user-specific application directory, so that non-administrators can play on Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista.
• Added a full screen mode to the X11 driver, which is now the default (use the "-nofullscreen" option if it gives you problems, or switch on the fly with Alt-Enter).
• Removed support for Svgalib
• Added a "-boringrules" option to disable the reduction in attack strength normally applied to crowded games (this should remove any need to run older versions of Quadra for rule purposes).
• Fixed compilation on Darwin/Mac OS X (using X11, without sound or CD music, and having incorrect keyboard mappings, this is only for the truly daring!).
• Added a "-connectfile" option to read from a specified file a server address to connect to.
• Refresh the list of Internet games when returning from creating or joining a game.
• Fixed the crash on level changes (also known as the "sound crash") on X11.
• Fixed the "trails" on X11.
• Added a "-nocd" option to avoid using the CD music.
• Fixed a bug where exiting Quadra with the "No Music" option selected would stop the CD player if it was running (Linux only).
• Fixed the bad appicon behaviour with Window Maker.
• Fixed the high CPU usage on recent Linux systems.
• Added a User-Agent to the HTTP client code.
• Fixed many compilation problems with modern GCC versions.
  
• Fixed some compilation problems related to "basename".
• Fixed many bugs related to the SPARC port.
• Fixed Valgrind warnings.

This was made possible through the contribution of some people outside the core team (the following list from the NEWS file, let me know if anyone is missing!):

• Damian M Gryski
• Hunor "Kacsa" Csordás
• Simon Pantzare

Now, have fun!