Project: Starfighter 2.4

I was going to say that this was another small bugfix, but it ended up being a bit bigger than we expected, so we're bumping the version number of this up to 2.4. This came about from us fixing a massive bug that caused music to not be installed properly (oops!), but then snowballed as we found more and more improvements we wanted to make, mostly to the simulation of Project: Starfighter version 1.1 via Classic difficulty. In fact it's so close to version 1.1 now that we were able to outline all the noteworthy differences in a dedicated page on the website, Old Bugs and Behaviors.

The notable changes include:

• Added a Dutch translation contributed by Heimen Stoffels.
• Made it so that the player starts at the same part of the screen in Classic difficulty as in version 1.1 (which is in the top-left quadrant rather than in the center).
• Made it so that critical shield (that is, when you have only 1 shield left) causes more smoke particles to be generated.
• Fixed a bug where Kline could continue circling while running away, causing him to flee diagonally at a rather slow speed (and also allowing you to kill him pretty easily).
• Fixed a bug which caused music to not get installed properly (it was being installed in the sound directory instead of the music directory).
• Made the Venus mission start in the same way as version 1.1 in Classic difficulty (albeit with a shorter delay, since the dialog is shorter than it was in version 1.1).
• Made it so that the game doesn't go unresponsive to the OS when dying or after winning the Venus mission (meaning you don't have to wait for the game to proceed to the Game Over / Credits screen before you can quit the game normally, and also preventing weird bugs if you resize the window during that time).
• Made it so that resizing the window in the credits screen repositions the credits text to the new center.
• Simulated the smaller Kline health bars of version 1.1 in Classic difficulty. While Kline's health bar is still the larger size, its display is broken up into sections so that it now perfectly simulates version 1.1's Kline health bar behavior (a previous release already caused the portions of the health bar to be reduced in "steps", so they already behaved as if they were multiple health bars in Classic difficulty).
• Made it possible to switch to concentrate mode even with the Super Charge in Classic difficulty, as was the case in the original.
• Caused star position to be recalculated when you resize the window. This prevents weird gaps in the starfield when you make the window bigger in the middle of a mission, for instance.
• Added an option to compile a binary that will attempt to use the original music. We won't be distributing that music because that is a violation of copyright, but for those who have the music and want to mod it into the game (no pun intended), it is now possible to do this without changing the source code. Simply pass SF_OLD_MUSIC=1 as an option to the configure script and it will attempt to load the original music file names and use them exactly as version 1.1 did.
• Corrected the damage of micro rockets and triple-spread plasma bullets for Classic difficulty. These were both doubled at some point for balancing, so Classic difficulty now lowers the damage they inflict to their original values.

Project: Starfighter 2.3.3

Another small bugfix! This one only has a couple of small changes:

• Removed some ableism from the dialog.
• Replaced the SF_NOWARN variable with the SF_WARN variable, meaning that compilation will work as expected on GCC versions older than 8 without requiring a special argument.
• Removed use of wildcards in the Autotools stuff, which Autotools doesn't properly support.

Project: Starfighter 2.3.2

This new release was prompted by contributors. So to those who have contributed, thank you! This is a bugfix release, so nothing too too exciting, it's not insignificant. Of note, this release features the following fixes compared to version 2.3.1:

• Fixed some spelling errors.
• Replaced use of AUDIO_S16 with the correct AUDIO_S16SYS; the effect of this is that the old definition could potentially cause sound distortions depending on the platform which shouldn't happen anymore.
• Replaced use of "stupid" in some dialog with "foolish", since we've been trying to avoid careless sanist rhetoric in projects we manage recently. "Foolish" is a more neutral term that doesn't carry any negative connotations toward mentally disabled people.
• Updated the starfighter.desktop file to be more complete.
• Fixed leftover links to the old website.
• Added a manfile, based on one written by a Debian contributor.

Project: Starfighter 2.3.1

Time for another release!

A few things prompted this, but the start of it was when we wanted to include a Japanese translation by maruhiro-ver0 (#8), as well as to improve gamepad usage and support (#7). So, yeah, this version includes said Japanese translation and improved gamepad support!

Along the way, we also made the following changes:

• Adjusted in-mission dialogs to match the dialogs' timing (with one exception, the first Kline encounter, so as not to mess with music cues there).
• Made it so that, during the Kline fight in Classic difficulty, Kline's health goes to the health levels of respective stages when stage changes. This is done to simulate the behavior of the original, where Kline actually had four separate health bars that didn't bleed into each other.
• Fixed a bug in rendering of Unicode text which allowed multi-byte Unicode characters to be split into multiple parts. (#9)

Project: Starfighter 2.3

When someone I'm very close to played Project: Starfighter recently, we noticed a major bugs in Project: Starfighter pertaining to gamepad control. Then I noticed another bug with gamepad control. Whoops! So this release set out to fix those bugs (one which caused the level end sequence to be messed up by use of a joystick, and one which caused dpad-based movement to be at rocket speed) as well as a typo that said person I'm close to noticed as well.

They also had a request for an accessibility feature allowing slower text speed, and I thought, you know what? That's an excellent idea! So I added in an option to the Options menu which adjust text speed between five options: Normal (same as before), Fast, Instant, Slow, and Sloth. As I implemented these I also noted that it would probably be a good idea to allow the player to press a button to advance certain dialog boxes, so I added that as well: pressing the fire buttons now advances to the next dialog box instantly rather than skipping the entire cutscene as it did before (Escape still skips the entire cutscene). This should be helpful for those who wish to use Slow or Sloth speed but not have to wait inordinate periods of time through the cutscenes.

And that's it for this release! It's really a pretty simple one, but I decided to make it version 2.3 instead of 2.2.2 because it adds features. Enjoy!

Project: Starfighter 2.2.1

The analog edition!

Project: Starfighter used to only have rudimentary support for analog controls, treating as if they were digital. Well, this release fixes that! Full, proper analog control has been implemented both for moving the cursor and for moving your ship. This release also fixes a problem where controllers with analog triggers wouldn't work correctly.

Project: Starfighter 2.2

I recently took a trip down memory lane by playing version 1.1 of Project: Starfighter (which, to be clear, I don't recommend doing). In doing so I noticed a couple important things Classic mode was getting wrong and decided to correct those. I didn't want to release a new version just with a couple of corrections again, though, so I decided to also add something I had been thinking of adding for a while: a super-easy mode!

Full list of notable changes compared to version 2.1.1:

• Added Super-Easy mode, which makes enemies weaker, allies stronger, and does various other things to make the game much easier.
• Changed the default difficulty mode from 'Normal" to "Easy". Beginners should play Easy mode before Normal mode in my opinion, and it's easier to go forward one than back one.
• Fixed the way spread works in Classic difficulty. It previously was handled in a special manner because version 1.2 does it that way, but it turns out that that was a change introduced by version 1.2, and version 1.1 actually had spread just like in every other difficulty mode.
• "Fixed" the way damage is done with the charge cannon in Classic difficulty. It's absolutely ridiculous, but the result is so staggeringly different I decided it isn't really a genuine classic experience without it. Version 1.1's charge cannon was so overpowered that some minibosses could be one-shotted with a full blast, due to a quirk in how they dissipate. This release restores that behavior in Classic difficulty only.
• Added a difficulty indicator to the titles of save slots.
• Did some code cleanup.

Project: Starfighter 2.1.1

I found out by sheer chance that version 2.1 introduced a weird bug where after pressing Esc to flee the level early, it would delay doing that until all collectables disappeared, an unintended consequence of the feature that waits to begin the level end sequence until collectables are grabbed. This release fixes this bug, and also updates the copyright dates. Other than that, it's the same as version 2.1.

Project: Starfighter 2.1

It's been awhile since we've had a release! Time for an update. 🙂 Version 2.1 is a less significant release compared to version 2.0, but has some noteworthy improvements.

Changes compared to version 2.0 include:

• Added support for Haiku's config directory. Thanks to Crestwave for this improvement.
• Improved colorblind accessibility by making friendly bolts brighter than enemy bolts and by making the HUD's display of powered-up status use brighter colors and textured coloring. This change also makes it possible to see all information through a heavily red-shifted display.
• Made it so that the Firefly's exhaust is still displayed when low on shield, and halved the amount of explosions shown at that time. Prior to this change, the explosions (indicating low health) replaced the exhaust entirely, which I thought was a bit odd.
• Except in Classic and Nightmare difficulties, the game now waits to start the jump-out sequence until all worthwhile powerups have been collected. This in particular ensures that you always have a chance to collect all the money that bosses drop; it was previously very easy to miss large amounts of it.
• Except in Classic difficulty, powerups now move outward from their ships at only half the speed they used to. This is meant to stop them from spreading out incredibly far from the source.
• Fixed MacOS support. Thanks to Ian Gilham for this improvement.
• Various fixes and improvements, including improvements to Gettext translation support.

Project: Starfighter 2.0

This is an exciting release. Not only is it the first release to be published on GitHub, it marks substantial advancements compared to the previous release made on Savannah, version 1.7. As such, the major version number has been incremented for the first time; this is Project: Starfighter 2.0.

This release has a lot of major changes, so let's go through them one by one.

• Full conversion from C++ to C. This has been a long time coming, and now it's finally completed.
• Full support for Unicode and gettext translations. I was inspired to add this because for a while now there's been a Japanese version of the game floating around that converts everything in its own specialized way which, so far as I can tell, must have been quite involved. Now, anyone familiar with gettext can use it to fully translate the game into almost any language (right-to-left support still hasn't been implemented; contributions on that front would be welcome).
• Nearly perfected emulation of the original game experience. I went to a lot of effort, looking back at the version 1.2 release to make comparisons as well as perusing the release notes, to weed out every single difference from version 1.1 that I could. I even rediscovered quirks in the original design I had forgotten about, like the ship collision behavior. The experience is still not exactly 1:1 identical, but it's about as close as it possibly can be.
• Implemented full window resizing support. Now, not only can you define the default screen size with compile flags, you can also resize the window at will during the game. Aspect ratio is automatically adjusted so that you always get use of the full window size without needing to distort the image.

And those are just the major changes! Several more minor changes have also occurred, far too many to list, like further improvements to code quality, bugfixes, and tweaks to dialog. Needless to say, this is a major milestone, and I think you will not be dissapointed.

UPDATE (July 7, 2019): It turns out that a couple issues went under my radar which resulted in the build system not working for installation (make install). This has now been corrected. I apologize for the inconvenience. Binaries have not been changed as the bug did not affect run-in-place builds.

UPDATE (July 20, 2019): Another source-only update, there was a problem with the "make dist" command that led to the source code downloads not including the icon or launcher. Source code downloads have been updated to correct this. Binary versions have once again not been changed as this problem was caused by a previous source-only fix that was made after the binary releases, and thus the binary releases are once again not affected.

UPDATE (July 23, 2019): I'm really sorry about this, but this is yet another fix to the distribution of source code files. This time, gettext (translation) files weren't being installed properly. Source code files have been updated to correct this problem. Once again, it does not affect the binary distribution, so those files are unchanged.