Ares 1.2.0b6 & Hera 1.0.0b6 semi-public beta

For those of you who participated in testing Ares 1.2.0 and Hera (a mission editor for Ares), I'd like to thank you for your help and enthusiasm. Thanks to you, we found and fixed a few of problems in Ares 1.2.0 and Hera -- kudos for catching them and helping us make Ares 1.2.0 and Hera clean, stable releases. Moving ahead, we now have Ares 1.2.0b6 and Hera 1.0.0b6 available (please see below for details).

For those of you who are new to this, we have been working on Ares 1.2.0 and Hera, which adds a significant number of changes to the game that are of direct interest to scenario developers, and includes a scenario editor (Hera). We think that it's ready to go, but we'd like to do a semi-public beta test of it first. Thus, the reason I am posting this message here.

I'm assuming that if you are reading the Ares Engineering Dept. web board, you have an interest in developing Scenarios for Ares -- we'd like you to try out what we think will be the release version of Ares 1.2.0 and Hera, before we release it to the public. We'd also like you to be able to take some of the new scenario capabilities out for a test drive. Perhaps it'll inspire you to add features to the Ares scenarios, or to make a new one.

If you find any spelling errors, and grammatical mistakes, any bugs, any features that don't work as you'd expect (please do NOT ask for new features) -- please mail them (do not *just* post them to this web board) to:

aresbugs@AmbrosiaSW.com

...so we can take care of them before the game is released to the general public. Also please note that you probably shouldn't pass this info along to general Ares players; they will be better off waiting for the official release from us (which will be happening shortly).

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Ares1.2.0b6 is now available in the /beta directory of our anonymous ftp site as:

Ares1.2.0b6.sea.bin

So the complete URL is:

[url="http://"ftp://ftp.AmbrosiaSW.com/beta/Ares1.2.0b6.sea.bin"]ftp://ftp.AmbrosiaSW...1.2.0b6.sea.bin[/url]

This file is a MacBinary II encoded self-extracting archive, encrypted with the password:

geephor

Please grab this file as soon as possible, and begin testing it. Here are the release notes from Nathan:

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What's new in Ares 1.2.0B6

- fixed bug in Hera which could cause illegal data to be inserted into scenario file if an action was removed from an object; Ares would crash or complain that there were too many sprites and sounds; to fix a scenario file which suffers from this bug, open it with this new version of Hera, make any minor change, and save it.

- fixed omision of fields in Hera's Action Editor for the "Create Object Inherit Dest" action

- fixed bug in Hera which could cause it to be confused if more than one Scenario file was open at a time; it could fail to find resources and make them available, or fail to save them if changed

- fixed a bug in Hera which caused the Object Editor to put an object's offense value in the maximum velocity field

- fixed a bugs in Hera which could cause the Action Editor, Initial Editor, and Briefing Editor to forget currently entered values when the Add button was clicked (the duplicated data would be correct, but the original data would fail to be updated)

- changed Ares to allow a song of resource ID 4001 in an external scenario file to be played on startup, overriding the default Ares' Theme

- fixed a bug in Ares which could cause it to crash, or exhibit strange behavior, if a level was loaded with no legal song id

- changed text of -2021 message in Ares

- changed Ares to allow for health values to exceed an object's max

- changed Ares to prevent it from saving an illegal starting level number

What’s new in Ares 1.2.0B5

- New assignable hotkeys; short-cuts to selecting particular ships
- Fixed long-range beam attack bug
- Feedback when you’ve created too many ships
- Open button in network setup screen for playing external net scenario files
- Drag & drop single player scenarios onto Ares to play them

About the Ares Preference Template

This is provided only to allow you to change the starting level of the factory scenarios, in the event that you lost your starting level number from the previous beta. It requires that you understand how to use ResEdit and resource templates.

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The purpose of this beta is only to find and correct bugs. We are only looking for show-stopping bugs in Hera and bugs of any size of in Ares. We are not looking for interface suggestions or feature requests.

This beta does not contain the movies; they will not play.

If you believe you have found a bug, please email it to:

aresbugs@ambrosiasw.com

Please be as specific as possible. Describe the steps you took to encounter the bug. Try to repeat those steps. Don't assume the reader will know what you are talking about.

Don't be shy; we'd rather see the same bug reported a thousand times than not at all.

Thanks,
Nathan

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Andrew Welch / el Presidente / Ambrosia Software, Inc.

[This message has been edited by andrew (edited 09-01-2000).]

Ambrosia Software Web Board: Ares 1.2.0b6 & Hera 1.0.0b6 semi-public beta - Ambrosia Software Web Board