New FS1 patch soon

[Taylor Richards]

I'm putting the final touches on a new patch.  I've got a couple of
people testing it at the moment to verify that it fixes their problems. 
With this patch the fs1.vp should now be final and shouldn't change
unless something major comes up.  I think this patch is finally cvs
ready and I'll send it in as such at little later on this week or the
next.  I will split it up between general and FS1 specific patches
before sending it in though unless told otherwise.

Some of the stuff that was done since the last patch:

 - All or at least most of the UI elements should now be done.  I'm
   having trouble finding things that aren't exactly like the original.

 - The brightness slider in hudconfig now works but this required
   another pilot file upgrade.  The upgrade should be automatic and will
   store and read out the hudconfig settings.  This is the last upgrade
   I can foresee.

 - The weapon rendering slider is hooked up now but doesn't actually do
   anything.  The way the game engine is now I don't think it's really
   necessary to try and get this thing functional.  I hooked it up only
   to avoid the "It doesn't work!" e-mails.

 - The techroom is now finished.  The FS1 techroom uses two backgrounds
   instead of one.  Also it will now parse the original credits.tbl so
   the special one has been removed from the fs1.vp.  It's been tested
   successfully with the original table, the SilentThreat table and the
   table from the German version.

 - Controlconfig will now work with German keyboards correctly, ie. not
   showing blank spaces for some characters and having the right
   description for certain keys.  This change is not FS1 specific.

 - In the mve code I changed it so that movies are loaded from
   Data/Movies instead of movies since that's where the FS2 installer
   puts them when installed in Windows.  It will also lower case all
   filenames before playing since I noticed FS1 calling mixed case
   filenames and I bet that FS2 does the same thing.  I also added a bit
   of code (one line) to add a movie that has been played to the
   cutscenes in the techroom.  This change is not FS1 specific.

 - Since it's been a problem a couple of times I added a fps option to
   the ini file so that you don't have to compile with debugging to get
   the counter.  To turn it on add ShowFPS=1 to the [Default] section.
   It defaults to off if there is no setting specified.  This change is
   not FS1 specific.

 - I added checksums for the German ships.tbl and weapons.tbl so that
   what networking works won't complain about hacked tables.

There are probably a few other things fixed that I can't remember but
here are the things that don't work or don't work correctly:

 - Networking code.  Enough changes were made before they switched to
   psnet2 that this is probably going to take a while to work out.  In
   the meantime I changed the version number in psnet2 to not be the
   same for FS1 and FS2 so games from one won't show up in the other.  I
   haven't tested to make sure two games can connect though.

 - Background nebulae.  I don't have enough know-how to get this problem
   situated.  I'm leaving it for someone else to look at.

 - Mission defined suns are still not used.  I think that the default
   sun does for now so I'm not going to go out of my way to fix this.

Networking code can be tested with -DFS1_NET, nebulae with -DFS1_NEBULA,
suns with -DFS1_SUNS.  The only other real problem with the game that I
know of I haven't been able to recreate, no damage to a cargo
container.  I think this may be related to a problem that tigital saw in
the OSX port but I don't know that for sure or if he's figured it out
yet.


Taylor

-- 
Taylor Richards <mtrs at bellsouth.net>