The Universal World Owner's Manual

Just so y'all have all the details, heres a pretty comprehensive list of fixes and changes in the next version, taken from the cvs reports from the last coupla months. Not a complete list, but it covers most of the stuff thats changed with respect to how individual islands work…

- Changes so the world server can run as an island as well as a world. Also, fixed character settings override the settings for vehicle 1 on all islands.
- Towns now have a 'local construction tax' (percentage of the construction price of any new building is added to the town investement), 'local sales tax' (percentage of every sale is added to the town investment) and 'town type' (to allow towns to be 'industrial only', 'retail only' etc.)
- construction and sales tax (local and island based) all workin. changed the way the tax is taken, so that instead of it being removed as a percentage of the stores profits, its added on to the total price when the player buys stuff. Makes it much easier for the store owner to work out how much he needs to charge, irrespective of tax 
- fix for the triggering of the jetpack animation + animated wheels on the vehicles
- Linked in the triggers for the 'Move start', 'Walk damaged' and 'Run Damaged' animations and fixed the triggering of the run animation
- New Landscape settings : one to allow the use of different landscape renderers, one to control how the sky is drawn.
- Redid all 2d drawing functions to use an orthogonal projection matrix (listen to the sound of eyes glazing over) instead of a pre-transformed directX vertex, as doing the latter seems to create real ugly blocky textures on certain vid cards.
- Changed the way the 3d font (thats used for building nametags etc) is displayed (to stop it occupying quite so much of the screen)
- Model and radio files on the server can be stored in a redirected path
- Moved the while gone screen forward in the connection process, so it is displayed as soon as the landscape generation stuff starts - makes better use of the time while waiting for the map to download.
- Made the wildlife trigger 'move start' and 'run' animations
- Flags show on the island map
- using the DestroyedBuilding setting (set to 2) to allow access to destroyed buildings so they can be repaired. (Based on the 'Building Access' rules)
- Fix for *setallvehicles without arg kicking players.
- changed the heightmap download so that the file does not get downloaded if the client already has the latest version
- changed the way turret rotations are applied, animated propellers are now possible.
- Proper nice friendly fun working realistic flight physics
- some fixes to get STG running again
- .remote command for accessing the model selector via client
- 'Hitch Ride' option to 'attach' to another player
- re-arranged the shadow caster a bit so it can be used without causing *too* much lag
- jpgs, tga's and dds's recognised by the model selector
- removed all harcoded text for things like wood and steel used to restore and construct buildings, so that they're properly over-ridden by the itemnames.txt
- spec mode setting to control whether a player appears in the world when they enter spec mode
- some improvements for the handling of crow position messages to smooth things out a bit
- *specall command
- *speclockall and *speclock <NAME> commands added
- 'Export Webpack' option added to world server to produce delineated data files containing player and building info.. to be used for generating world homepages and stats.
- option on client to not draw the player vehicles when in crow mode (which can help FPS a lot)
- option to make buildings go semi-transparent when they're in the way of the camera.
- space station trade screens working
- extra check to prevent the employee count in a building going to 255
- tweaks to the lighting and behaviour of robocrow particles and plasmas
- removed the weapon mode switch completely. tab + shift/tab are now always used to fire weapons if the vehicle has any. If there are no weapons available, tab will be used as the horn or to trigger a gesture animation, depending on the engine type
- Change to retail and store buildings. Settings -> Economy -> Sales mode 1 acts as previous. Sales mode 0 (the default) means that players can stock retail or store buildings with whatever they want. Think this mode increases the fun & benefit of running a store and simplifies the building dat creation. (By making jus 1 or 2 generic stores needed - with diffierent capacities when thats included in the editor)
- new sales modes 2 and 3 to turn off the ability to stock your own buildings
- mouse lock released when window loses focus
- variable number of "denaris in a sheckle".
- working LOD system in the ATM files
- reduction in bandwidth use of server for by only sending ping responses for 1 in every 10 positions, instead of 1 for 1.
- 'give fuel' fixed
- new setting 'skills mode' replaces 'default skills'. (Default skills are now used whenever theres a file created with em in).
- Skills mode 1 means that a player with a level 1 build farm skill could not build a tech level 2 farm. To increase their skill level, they either need to re-enroll in the skill at a school (if thats possible.. i forget :]), or they must build a tech level 1 farm first. (Everytime they use their skill at the maximum level it increases by 1)
- Added 'Building Process' mode 2 - All buildings of all tech levels require 'wood' to build.
- fix for crash using .racego before starting a race
- fix for being unable to demolish an unconstructed building
- textures used for background models that use a texture containing the phrase "nomip" in their filename do not use mipmapping. (useful for certain textures, like wire fences etc)
- failed graphic initialisation brings up a more useful dialog that gives you access to the vid, graphics and fullscreen/windowed options
- New .profile screen to help find out what causes low FPS on your puter.
- New libs for joystick support
- island scale configurable in settings
- Banks can have employees
- option to enable anisotropic filtering. whatever the feck that is.
- landscape rendering mode 4, which means that instead of water aroudn the island, a copy of the normal map heights is used. (which means you can have worlds that are huge repeating landscapes (tho the populated area has to be within the original map limits))
- "Build Spacing" options so that the spacing between buildings is configurable. 0 means there can be a building on each tile of the map
- exit vehicle button on client returns the player to vehicle 1
- , the value control accelerates the longer u hold page up/dn <!-- s:) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" /><!-- s:) -->
- server sends a message to acknowledge every failed transaction, so the client can know that the screens should be reset. (Fixes bug that meant ya couldnt use the transaction screen until you've relogged if the transaction failed for some reason)
- added option to enable/disable the shift+ctrl moving up thru the menus, which annoys some ppl and pleases others..
- new 'barter' type building that will allow items to be exchanged for other items
- New 'thrust' and 'tetris' arcade games
- world rules -&gt; new player start position now works. 0 spawns new players in random towns. 1 spawns em in a default (team 0) spawnzone. 
- a new field in the player record for the amount of 'fixed rewards' earnt - this is for islands that, for instance, give a one-off reward of 100s for a certain lap time or something. This field stores how much they've had from the rewards, so the game knows when to stop givin em more. The limit for the rewards is set in the subgame settings
- Multiple wildlife types now possible