[eC] EnEsCe Corp

A lot of people are wondering whats going on with Soldat 1.5.0, which was announced to be in development 11 months ago…

The current plan is to have a official full release available before April. I personally wanted to have it out before the end of February, but it was later determined one more public beta version is required. Main reasons are to get people to translate the new language file, to get some online playtesting, and catch any remaining major bugs…  I will be releasing Dedicated Server 2.6.4 with 1.5.0d. Hopefully there aren’t any major issues left. Some of you would be wondering if there is going to be any difference between 1.5.0c and 1.5.0d… and the answer is: no. Internally in the game source code, there are ALOT of changes; but ofcourse you wont be able to see that. I have attempted my best to fix as many bugs as possible that have been reported via the Soldat Forums and the bug tracker, but I still may have missed some.

The actual status of the 1.5.0 Client: Ready to be packed. The new map list has been finalized, the new weapon mod settings have been finalized. When I say “Ready to be packed”, I mean waiting on MM to pack Soldat.exe with the Player Registration program (3rd party tools, sigh), and waiting for him to also create the Installer. I have not been given these tools, otherwise 1.5.0 would be out already.

Random people keep emailing me asking why its taking so long… What they don’t seem to understand is the fact that I am the only programmer working on Soldat now, I am only one person and I don’t get any money from hundreds of hours of my spare time I have put into Soldat… I have alot of bills to pay, so obviously things that can generate revenue get priority over Soldat. Ehhh, I wont turn this into a rant.
So just keep checking back for the Soldat 1.5.0d Public Beta, it will most likely be posted here and then at Soldat Forums.

Oh, I made a fairly neat little change I made to the Dedicated Server 2.6.4 yesterday… I recoded the Soldat.ini loading function, so that from now on if your config is missing something it will just load a default value for it and display a warning in the console. A lot of you might think this isn’t very useful, but for a server host such as myself this is undoubtedly one of the most useful features in the entire update. This change will save alot of time on upgrading players servers, won’t have to manually go through every client and update their config for the new entries, and will make debugging invalid configurations much easier. Heres an example of the console output when using a config with some missing values: (1.4.2 config on 1.5.0 server)
SOLDAT.INI: "Radio" not found. Using default: Radio=1
SOLDAT.INI: "Advanced_Spectate" not found. Using default: Advanced_Spectate=1

Bam, easy. And yes I have fixed all the current widely used server crash exploits and floods. I actually had them fixed long before they were even known, but am unable to release a fixed dedicated server because the current source code is too heavily modified for 1.5.0 to be reverted. Even though we use Subversion to manage code commits, there was a server move which wiped the version history so that wasn’t an option.

That’s all for today, please leave a comment!