Coloring guild chat better

Smurf had a comment in a rivan thread I decided to have a look at. Sometimes it is hard to separate guild chatter from the din of local or other channels you are on. So I made a patch to put guild chat headers in light blue.

Edit 20071231 (12:23am): I added a picture showing all the available colors on a light and dark background. I have also managed to get the whole line to be in the same color finally. All four blocks are the same text on different backgrounds. If there is a color that you think is better than the rest, go ahead and post a comment of which one. They are in groups of four: Red 1-4, Orange 1-4, Yellow 1-4, Green 1-4, Blue 1-4, Purple 1-4, and Grey 1-4. Of note, Grey1 is the normal white text color. Grey 4 is Black (shown improperly on the third block)

A New Client for Windows: Passed the Stick

First off, thank you Awn for all your hard work. Your additions to the client make EL even more fun!

Ryddler was kind enough to send me all the source code for the new client with Awn's patches applied. I compiled it for Windows using Dev-Cpp, with one minor adjustment: The "Load" information in the Inventory window was overlapping the "Store All" button, so I moved it down a little.

Here is a link to the latest custom client for Windows: http://www.apmagnan.net/bin/elriva20071203.exe

This is an uncompressed copy of the exe file, so you won't need any fancy skillz to get it. :-) Simply download it into your EL folder (default install location is "c:\Program Files\Eternal Lands") and run it from there.

edit: the related patch file is here

New contributors

I would like to welcome and thank Ryddler and Hex for picking up where I left off on the client. My sabbatical was a good rest and I hope to start adding more fun stuff soon, with their help.

Name in Lights Again

Looks like 0ctane and I get our names in lights again. We are mentioned in the 1.5.0 Client Update list for our "hard work and dedication".

Back and a Reset bug

Yes, amazingly I have showed up in game again. That you all my friends for your warm welcome. Just another idea to post here. Since I just reset for the first time in Awn's career, I noticed how all the bars go wacko. That is a bug. I should make a patch for it. Similarly the "Session" shows my Overall Experience Gain at -43milion.

Addictions and Tech Trees

I just uninstalled Crack-Attack from my machine. I was playing it a little too often. Also some of you will notice that I have not been on EL all that much lately. I just installed a new harddrive in my laptop and had to port things over and recompile. For some reason the EL client plays fine but my Awnage one dies on loading. Not sure. At any rate, I am busy and have things to do. Plus a new official client is supposed to come out in November, possibly with archery and tailoring support.

I was browsing The Linux Game Tome and came across FreeOrion which is a turn-based space game. One of the screen shots for it had a tech tree. Dang what a sweet interface! I remember a while ago that some brave person made a knowledge tree for all the books in EL. Not that I have the time, but it would be so sweet to have a graphical knowledge browser in the EL client as opposed to the current list. I was working for a little bit on making the existing list sortable, but got bored.

PSA On Questions

This is a Public Service Announcement.

Let's say that someone starts bugging you about using this client. Please tell them to contact me. Do not attempt to answer their questions. Why? Because (even though it sounds very snotty) I am the authority on this client. I am the most capable of answering the questions.

There have been situations in the past where people have made egregious claims as to what this client can do in an attempt to sew discord among the EL community. Why? I have no clue. Maybe they do not like a Rivan.

At any rate, I reiterate once again, the features for this client are either in CVS, have been submitted to the dev team, or are a concept design. All have been explicitly approved by Entropy.