Branches for Hoary

Author: Hwei Sheng Teoh
Revision Date: 2003-04-15 18:01:33 UTC

* New upstream release.
* This is the Just Before A Major Overhaul release. There are very few
  cosmetic changes, but a lot of internal improvement especially in
  the AI. The following entries are summarized from the (admittedly
  less readable) TODO file.
* Visible changes:
  - Fixed ncurses interface which fails to render the board background
    properly under some terminals. This is a hack; it is likely a
    libncurses bug related to the mutt bleeding backgrounds bug.
  - AI player now has a real, properly-implemented min-max algorithm
    with alpha/beta pruning. The default difficulty level (-d2) is now
    quite challenging; -d3 and above are now very tough to beat.
  - Some cosmetic improvements in the ncurses interface.
* Internal changes:
  - Fixed some bugs in the event loop
  - Fixed a major event loop sequencing problem. Man these things are
    tricky.
  - Event loop now has timers, although they aren't used by anything
    in this release. (Not anything linked into the game, that is.)
    There are also other significant improvements to the event loop
    code.
  - Added profiling code to help with AI optimization (game trees that
    grow with O(n!) are NOT fun to search at high depths...)
  - Preliminary network gaming code. Sorry, this is currently not in a
    sufficiently advanced stage for you to actually play a network
    game yet. The code is currently not actually linked into the game.
* About version numbers:
  - Hindsight is 20-20, as they say. The first Debian release bore a
    version number of 4-1, which I now realize was a mistake. The
    game's internal version number was 1.1 (as those who played the
    ncurses interface might have noticed); the 4 came from an archive
    number I use to maintain codebases. I refuse to roll the epoch
    just because of this, so to fix this inconsistency, I've bumped
    the internal version number to 4.1 and using 4.1-1 for the Debian
    version. This is an unfortunate unintentional version bloat. :-(
  - Atom-4 will likely reach 4.infinity before 5.0.
* debian/control: grammatical correction