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qtads 1.9-1
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1.9 - 2009/06/24
================

  - A bug where HTML character entities would appear in the window title has
    been fixed (for example QTads would display "Lydia’s Heart" instead
    of "Lydia's Heart".)

  - The "Recent Games" list no longer displays games that are no longer
    accessible (due to deletion or file permissions or other factors.)

  - Fixed some visual glitches in the main window and status line.


1.8 - 2009/05/27
================

  - Updated the Tads virtual machine to version 2.5.14/3.0.18.1

  - Fixed Unicode filename problems.  Running games from directories that
    contain Unicode characters as well as saving and loading gamestates in
    such directories should work now.

  - Fixed a compilation problem on BSD systems.

  - Fixed a display problem with Tads 2 games that use non-latin characters
    and don't make use of character mapping files.  The system's local
    character encoding will now be used by default for Tads 2.  Russian games
    for example that are written in the CP1251 character set using the "RTADS"
    libraries will now display correctly if the system's character set is also
    CP1251 ("ru_RU.CP1251" in Linux for example; note that "ru_RU.UTF-8" won't
    work since the character set must match the one of the game.)

    Tads 2 games should really use mapping files though; this is just a
    work-around to allow for those that don't to display correctly.


1.7 - 2008/03/31
================

Wow, over 3 years since the last update :P

  - Updated the Tads virtual machine to version 2.5.10/3.0.15.3

  - The amount of turns the player can UNDO in Tads 3 games has been
    increased.  In previous versions, the player could only UNDO a few
    turns (about 6 or so; it varies by game).  Now you can undo more
    than 100 turns.  Note that there's an upper-limit of turns that the
    player can UNDO (255) imposed by the T3 VM.

  - Fixed some non-working shortcuts in the configuration dialog.

  - QTads is now able to parse the meta-information resource embedded in
    a game (Tads 2 as well as Tads 3).  For this, a new menu entry has
    been added ("Game->Game Information").  HTML code in the meta-info
    tags (if it exists) is supported and displayed correctly.

  - Fixed compilation errors with recent compilers.

  - The interpreter will now correctly restore the window coordinates
    and size of the previous session even when starting in fullscreen
    mode.  Changing from fullscreen to windowed mode will now use the
    geometry that was set in the previous session before entering
    fullscreen mode.

  - The "File Open" dialog will now correctly show both Tads 2 as well
    as Tads 3 games.


1.6c - 2004/12/15
=================

Due do a stupidity-related mistake, version 1.6 wouldn't compile nor run
with versions lower than 3.3 of Qt.  The problem was in the user
interface files (forms/*.ui); they were saved in the new Qt Designer 3.3
format, which is *so* not compatible with prior versions.  This problem
has been fixed in this release.  Another quite important change is the
compile-time detection of the system's endianess (big vs little endian).
QTads should now run almost everywhere (at least I hope it does).

  - Fixed compilation problems with Qt versions lower than 3.3.

  - The system's endianess now shouldn't matter when compiling QTads.

  - Enhanced the way icons are loaded.  In previous versions, they
    didn't use the alpha channel for transparency effects, resulting in
    pixelized and blocky appearance.  This has been fixed.  (You can now
    find the icons in the images/ directory.  They won't get installed,
    but will be embedded into the executable at build time.)


1.6 - 2004/11/21
================

I feel like I'll never implement that darn Tads 3 banner-support!  I
tried it -- really -- but the implementation was chaotic, buggy, didn't
work most of the time, and who knows what else.  All I can say is that
I'm still working on it.  Help is *really* more than welcome, as my Real
World life changed completely in the last few months.  No, it's not
marriage (thank God); not imprisonment; didn't die either.  It's worse:
I'm a student now!  (And probably will remain in this state for the next
five years, give but not take a few.  And if you're curious about what
I'm studying, it's "information and communication systems engineering",
which is kind of a funny coincidence since the impression I had about
software engineers wasn't the most flattering one.)

  - QTads now has text-color support for Tads 3 games (foreground only).
    For example, "I Must Play" (an IF-Comp 2004 entry) is playable in
    color.

  - A non-bug (long story; don't even ask) caused transcript files to
    be saved in UTF-8 encoded Unicode.  This has been fixed; transcript
    files will now use the system's local character set.  Furthermore,
    the bug where Tads 2 transcripts contained spurious 01 bytes among
    the text has been fixed.

    Mac OS X will still use UTF-8, since, as it happens, that's the
    "native" character set on this system.  Same goes for modern Linux
    systems that use UTF-8 for everything (SuSE 9.1, for example).

  - The clock's state is now preserved between sessions.

  - The TadsVM file I/O safety levels are now supported and can be
    adjusted in the configuration dialog.  There are 5 safety levels:

      0: Safety mechanism disabled; unlimited read/write access.
      1: Read everywhere, write to current (game's) directory only.
      2: Reading/writing is only allowed in the current directory.
      3: Read in current directory only; no writing allowed.
      4: Completely disable file I/O.

    The default level is 2.  This change doesn't affect the saving and
    restoring of games, since safety levels only apply to file I/O
    initiated by the game, not by the VM.

  - In Mac OS X, the interpreter's title bar got hidden behind the menu
    bar on start-up (when QTads was started for the first time).  This
    has been fixed; now the OS decides where to put the window.

  - Fixed another bug where game-text could be modified by the player.
    I really need to replace the default input-handlers offered by Qt,
    since this kind of bug keeps showing up and the work-arounds create
    quite a mess in the sources (yeah, OK, they're already a mess, but
    that's no reason to ignore the problem).

  - The context menu ("right-click menu") now pops up even when the
    click was inside the left/right margin, and the menu and tool bar
    don't have a context menu anymore; the tool bar can be hidden/shown
    using the game-window's context menu ("Show/hide toolbar").
    Furthermore, the items in the context menu now have accelerators;
    F1 to show/hide the menu bar, F2 for the tool bar, and F3 for the
    scroll bar.

  - The most important change: new icons!  They're also smaller than the
    previous ones (16x16 instead of 22x22).

  - Added some German translations that were missing.

  - Updated the Tads virtual machine to version 2.5.9/3.0.8.

  - Other minor fixes and enhancements here and there.


1.5 - 2004/06/04
================

Guess what?  Still no Tads 3 banners.  ("Avalon" anyone?)  At least we
have plenty of bug-fixes and enhancements.  The most important addition
is the timed input-event support; "The Recruit" (an IF Comp 2003 entry
by M. Sousa and R. Sherwin) is now playable and won't crash anymore.

IMPORTANT: The T3 VM is known to crash with some versions of the GNU
Compiler (3.3.x and maybe 3.4.x).  This seems to be either a problem
with GCC's optimizer, or with T3's code.  Probably the former.  When
QTads aborts with a segmentation fault or similar, add the
"-fno-strict-aliasing" option to the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS variables when
building the interpreter (see the INSTALL file for details).

  - QTads now fully supports timed input-events.  It works 100% with
    Tads 2 games; Tads 3 timed *input* (as opposed to timed input
    *events*, which are available now) is still not implemented.  Let's
    hope for one of the next versions.

  - In Mac OS X, the Carbon Preferences mechanism is now used to store
    the settings.  (Linux and other Unices will still use the
    "$HOME/.qt/qtadsrc" file.

  - Soft scrolling can now be disabled.  Default is enabled.

  - Fixed a bug where it was necessary to click on the "Open new game"
    button twice if a game was specified as a command-line argument.

  - Drag&dropping text inside the game window was broken (game text was
    being overriden).  This has been fixed.

  - Fixed a text-redraw bug when the current text-alignment was
    changed.

  - In previous versions, it wasn't possible to scroll the text with
    the PageUp/PageDown keys if the game had stopped running, and it
    was possible to modify game-text when using them.

  - PageUp/PageDown now also works when in a "more" prompt.

  - File-extension recognition didn't work.  The game extension
    (.gam or .t3) can be omitted now.

  - The warning dialog that said "The QTDIR environment variable is not
    set ..." is no more.  If Qt's translation-files can't be found,
    QTads will silently fall-back to the default English versions.

  - The Tads 3 version and copyright information at the start of a game
    won't appear anymore.

  These changes don't affect functionality:

  - In Mac OS X, the application is now called "QTads" instead of
    "qtads", since capitalization of program names seems to be
    considered a Good Thing (ugh!)

  - Added a manual page (qtads.6.gz).  This won't get installed or
    anything; it's mainly for the Debian package (maintained by Daniel
    Schepler), since Debian considers the lack of a man page to be a
    "bug".


1.4 - 2004/05/13
================

(This version was never officially released, mainly due to lack of
time; at the time the release could be made, v1.5 was already waiting
to be tarballed and sourceforged.)

The good news is that this version introduces support for Mac OS X.  A
big "thank you" to Matt Herberg, who also is the maintainer of the Mac
OS X distribution and co-developer, and Curt Siffert.  Thanks guys!

The bad news is that we still don't have Tads 3 banner support.  I hope
we'll have it in the next version.

  - Added Mac OS X support.

  - Fixed a bug where files requested by the game could not be accessed
    if the interpreter was not started from the game's directory.  For
    example, you can now put the registration key-file of "Losing Your
    Grip" (regkey.txt) in the same directory as the game itself, and
    the game will find it.

  - Prompting for a game to run at startup is now optional; it can be
    enabled/disabled in the configuration dialog.

  - The directory where the documentation is installed no longer has a
    version number attached.  Every time you install a new version of
    the interpreter, the new documentation will simply replace the
    older files.  Opinions differ if this is better or worse, but I
    think it's somewhat awkward to having to delete the old directory
    manually after installing a new version.

  - Updated the Tads virtual machine to version 2.5.8/3.0.6p.


1.3a - 2003/09/28
=================

Oops, I did a mistake in the last release; the "Recent Games" menu was
behaving very weird (newly loaded games didn't show up until QTads was
restarted).  This release only fixes this bug; nothing else.


1.3 - 2003/09/26
================

Although this version lacks enough changes to justify a new release, I
nonetheless decided to release it because of the upcoming IF
competition (http://www.ifcomp.org).

  - Added a "Recent Games" menu.  (Was about time this got added.)

  - Fixed a bug where the mouse cursor was staying invisible when it
    shouldn't (when the window was losing keyboard focus, for example).

  - Enhanced the documentation in the sources, since several people
    have found QTads' code quite useful.  (Where "several" is any
    number between 1 and 2.)

  - Updated the Tads virtual machine to version 2.5.8/3.0.6k.


1.2 - 2003/08/10
================

  - QTads now supports italic text.  Previously, the <em> tag was
    rendered in bold, and <i> was ignored; both are now rendered in
    italics (as in HTML TADS).  Furthermore, the <strong> tag is now
    recognized and rendered in bold italics ("strong emphasis").

  - Every pair of ASCII dashes ("--") is now replaced with a
    typographical em-dash in Tads 2 games (Tads 3 games don't need
    this, since they already display em-dashes on their own).  This is
    useful for games that don't make use of the "&mdash;" Multimedia
    Tads character entity, or make the false assumption that character
    entities are not supported in text-only interpreters.  This feature
    can be enabled/disabled in the configuration dialog, and it works
    only in Tads 2 games.  (Tip: Try it with "Worlds Apart.")

  - Fixed two cosmetic bugs in the command history.

      1) When using the up/down key to cycle through the previous
         inputs, they were displayed using the game window's font
         settings, not the user input settings.

      2) The current command is not saved in the history anymore if it
         is the same as the previous one.

  - Fixed the (hopefully) last remaining bugs where it was possible to
    modify game-text.  (Leif Huhn provided this fix.)

  - Added "Help->Version Information" menu.

  - Changed some icons.  I hope you like them.

  - The documentation has been restructured.

  - Updated the Tads virtual machine to version 2.5.8/3.0.6j.


1.1 - 2003/05/28
================

The QTads homepage has moved from Tripod to SourceForge.  The new
location is: http://qtads.sourceforge.net (the old page at
http://members.lycos.co.uk/realnc/qtads still exists, but contains
nothing except a pointer to the new location).  If you had links to the
old site, please update them.

  - QTads now uses Unicode when running Tads 3 games.  This means that
    Multimedia TADS character entities like typographical (``curly'')
    quotes and dashes of different lengths (en- and em-dashes) are
    displayed correctly.  The only limitation is that the font you use
    must support these characters; most fonts out there support them,
    but I saw a few ones that don't.

  - QTads is also able to display typographical quotes and dashes in
    Tads 2 games.  Note that this feature must be supported by the game
    itself; if the game simply prints out a normal (") quote instead of
    a typographical one, QTads can do nothing about it.  See the TIPS
    file for a list of games that use typographical quotes instead of
    normal ones.

  - Support for Tads 2 character mapping files has been added.  QTads
    now provides mapping files for every ISO 8859 (known as ISO Latin)
    character set that Tads 2 is able to use (located in the charmaps/
    subdirectory).  Note that QTads doesn't provide (or need) mapping
    files for Tads 3 games, since it uses Unicode.

  - QTads can display curly apostrophes in every game.  This can be
    disabled in the configuration dialog.

  - The "Curly quotes" setting in the configuration dialog has been
    implemented.


1.0 - 2003/05/05
================

This is the first "stable" version of QTads (not that the previous one
was unstable or something).

  - User input can now be displayed in any combination of bold, italic
    or underline.

  - Added a clock that keeps track of how much time a game is running.

  - Added internationalization support and translated everything to
    German.  (Hmm, no Greek yet.)  This also includes support for
    translations of the Qt library itself (as documented in the INSTALL
    file now).

  - Ctrl+C (Copy), Ctrl+V (Paste) and similar shortcuts are working
    now.  (In earlier versions, the selection got removed as soon as
    Ctrl was pressed.)

  - QTads doesn't eat up CPU cycles when idle now, which means you can
    let it run in the background and it won't slow the system down.
    In earlier versions, QTads was using about 30% of CPU time on my
    system when idle; now it uses only 0.1%.  (Christophe Antoine
    provided this fix.)

  - Fixed the fix of the fix of the statusline.  (It's obvious that I
    can't code.)  It should not word-wrap without need now and not
    resize its height the first time it prints something.

  - Fixed Tads 2 doublespacing problems.  Note that the new T3 VM
    doesn't support doublespacing anymore; it's handled by the game
    file itself.  This means that older games (compiled with earlier
    Tads 3 versions) will never use doublespacing while new ones will
    always use it, no matter how QTads is configured.  This raises a
    problem I don't know how to fix; doublespacing in block-justified
    text doesn't work as it should.  This is a bug in Qt's text
    renderer.

  - Fullscreen-mode is saved when quitting QTads.

  - Millisecond precision is now supported when the VM asks QTads for
    the elapsed time (os_get_sys_clock_ms()).


1.0 beta - 2003/03/21
=====================

This is the first public release of QTads.

  - Theme support added.
    A "theme" is a set of preferences (colors, margins, fonts, etc)
    that can be saved and then activated at runtime.  The themes can be
    edited in the configuration dialog and then activated using the new
    Display->Theme menu.

  - Fixed a bug where QTads was trying to restore a saved game when
    loading Tads 3 games and failed with a message saying that "this
    interpreter can't restore [...]"

  - Tads 3 text rendering is more "smooth" now.  This fixes the
    "scrolling in steps" problem.

  - Changed the frame around the game window.  This fixes some visual
    bugs related to margins.

  - Fixed a bug in the statusline where both parts of it (text and
    score) were equally wide, no matter how much text they contained.

  - Further reduced the statusline's height.

  - The makefile's "dist" target should now be able to create a working
    source archive of QTads.

  - Improved dependency tracking in the project file.  All files should
    correctly be recompiled, no matter how deep the dependency-nesting
    is in each case.  This eliminates the problem where a
    "touch tads2/os.h" (or similar) was required in order to achieve a
    recompilation.

  - The PageUp and PageDown keys can now be used to scroll up or down.

  - Added a few more keyboard shortcuts (like restoring, restarting,
    saving, scrolling, etc) and documented them in a new dialog
    (Help->Shortcuts).


1.0 alpha 3 - 2003/03/17
========================

This version was a private beta-testing release.

The main change in this version is the included T3 VM.  It's a bit
difficult to test QTads with Tads 3 games, since only a few have been
released.  The games I tested with are:

  * The Tads 3 Library Sample Game (Mike Roberts)
  * Forever Always (Iain Merrick)
  * Eric's Gift (Joao Mendes)
  * The Demon's Eye, 2003/03/01 (Guilherme De Sousa, not released yet)
  * Lost In Somewhere (my own WIP, not released yet)

QTads lacks banner-support, so the library sample game is
semi-functional in QTads.  I hope to add banners in the next version.
Note that Tads 3 doesn't use HTML for banners.  It uses an API, so
banners can be implemented even in non-HTML interpreters.

As far as I know, at the time of this writing QTads is the only X11
non-KDE interpreter with Tads 3 support!  Wheee... :)

Overview of changes:

  - Basic support for Tads 3 games.

  - Restructured source directory layout.
    QTads is now built from and in the distribution's root directory,
    not tads2/qt.


1.0 alpha 2 - 2003/03/14
========================

This version was a private beta-testing release.

QTads has got a homepage: http://members.lycos.co.uk/realnc/qtads/
This is now the main distribution point for new versions.

Thanks to the betatesters (listed in the interpreter's "About" dialog),
this version has many improvements over the previous one.  The list
below includes the most visible and/or useful changes.

  - Now compiles with GCC 2.95.x.
    Tested with 2.95.3.

  - Fixed a bug in the random-number generator.
    Games that make heavy use of random numbers should now behave as in
    most other interpreters.

  - Fixed a few bugs that allowed the user to modify game text.

  - The game window no longer performs a top-to-bottom scroll when
    exiting the configuration dialog.

  - The "Doublespace" option in the configuration dialog is now saved
    when quitting QTads.

  - "About" dialog.
    "No program should be without one! [sic]"

  - More menus as well as a toolbar have been added.
    QTads is now almost useable! ;)

  - Fixed a compilation problem in src/missing.cc.
    Some systems were unable to compile QTads because a system-header
    #include was missing.

  - Window position and size are now preserved between QTads sessions.
    If this doesn't work as expected, please report it (some window
    managers are broken, but I can include special code for them; if I
    know how they behave, that is).

  - Text rendering is now less noticeable.
    This eliminates the delay when switching to bold text and back.

  - The "Top" and "Bottom" margins are no more.
    Most people found them annoying.  The rest (including me)
    considered them useless toys.

  - The DEBUG variable has been removed from the project file.
    To compile the debug version of QTads, the BUILD variable must be
    used.  Like this:

        qmake BUILD=debug

    The default is "BUILD=release".

  - QTads now builds successfully on systems that lack the
    single-threaded Qt library.
    The project file now uses the threaded library by default, since
    that's the one KDE is using.  If the threaded lib cannot be found,
    the single-threaded lib will be used.

  - The game window's context menu (also known as "right-click menu")
    has been removed completely.
    It didn't work anyway.  I hope to fix this in the next version.
    Suggestions as what the menu should contain (or not) are welcome.

  - Improved configuration dialog design (more compact).
    This includes a fix that prevents the preview from growing too
    large when selecting huge font sizes.

  - Command editing (including history) optimized to the speed of
    light.
    This should lower QTads' system requirements a bit; try it on a P60
    or similar.

  - QTads now prompts for a game when none has been specified in the
    command line.

  - A nicely formatted message is now shown when the current game ends.

  - It is no longer possible to close the application without the game
    being notified.
    Previously, it was possible that the TADS VM was still executing
    although the window has been closed, requiring the user to do a
    Ctrl+C or send a kill-signal.

  - It is no longer possible to choose a unit for the margin values.
    Values are now always in pixels.  Being able to choose between
    "characters" and "pixels" was, more or less, a useless feature.

  - Command-line options have been removed.
    Since the default command-line options of the TADS VM were a bit
    wacky to handle, they have been removed completely.  I'll implement
    native options in the next version.  The only option still
    recognized is the game's filename.

  - Statusline: decreased the height, disabled text-selection, and
    changed appearance (a bit more flat).

  - Typing text while the mouse cursor is inside the game's text will
    hide the mouse cursor.  Just move it to make it visible again.

  - Lots of other things not worth mentioning here.


1.0 alpha - 2003/02/01
======================

This version was a private beta-testing release.