04/2009

12/2006

08/2006

11/2005

08/2005

06/2005

12/2004

11/2004

10/2004

03/2004

Game Auto-Reconnect. 1.70 delivers a substantial new capability to robustly resume games in progress, even after either player briefly loses his or her network connection. The current implementation should handle most typical cases of accidental disconnection.

• Disco begin. After either player disconnects (plus a lag time of up to 1 minute): The connected player sees a Wumpus dialog saying “Opponent disconnected!”
• Countdown. The connected player must wait for a countdown duration (currently 30 seconds).
• I Have Returned. If the remote player does reconnect during the countdown, the two game clients synchronize their game states, and the game resumes normally!
• Disco end. Otherwise, the connected player sees an End of Game dialog, and may either keep waiting, or immediately end the game with a result of his or her choice. The “I Win!” button should handle most cases of deliberate disconnection (ahem). The other two buttons are provided for the most honorable of our players.

1.70 currently implements a subset of the complete protocol that NIOGA has devised for Game Auto-Reconnect. We'll continue to improve it in subsequent Service Packs.

Null AI. The Contents page (after Login, before lobby) now features an AI button, which lets you play a solitaire game against the computer. Just like in a 2-player game, you choose the map, and your deck. You also choose the AI's house, and the side that starts with Initiative (or random). Currently, we offer one AI:

• Null AI. This minimalist AI never issues any orders. It never trains recruits, casts spells, nor moves its Horde. It takes a novice player to beat it, and a highly skilled player to lose to it!

As of 1.70, Sanctum requires MSXML 6.0 or higher to be installed on the host PC. The Sanctum installer includes MSXML 6.0.

We can now imprint text onto a bitmap. See the Game Auto-Reconnect buttons above, and numeric mana below.

(0705c) We have substantially optimized group sprite blitting to eliminate redundant blits. You should see smoother graphics with less flicker while dragging groups around.

In the next major release (or sooner), we will further extend this capability to provide a new capability of Verbose In-Game Feedback: the game engine will automatically chat a brief 1-line message to explain every significant event. Possible examples include:

• “Shell of Gold executes on Elf $19”
• “Shell of Gold dispels Elf $19's Rite of Growth”
• “Elf $19 has 7/7 HP!”

Motto: The player shall not wonder why! We anticipate that such feedback could clarify some complex spell interactions, and reduce the number of spurious “bug” reports we receive.

(0909)(1011) Chatter box. The chatter display box, in both lobby and game, now provides these features:

• Auto-append. All new text is always appended at the end-of-text, no matter where you've moved the caret.
• Auto-scroll or Anchor.
  • Auto-scroll. If the caret is already at the end-of-text (bottom), and the end-of-text is visible, then the chatter box auto-scrolls with new text to keep it on the screen.
  • Anchor. To disable auto-scrolling, just make either one of these two conditions to be false, i.e. manually move the caret anywhere else, or manually scroll upward using the scroll bar so that the end-of-text isn't visible. In this mode, the chatter box “drops an anchor”, which means it preserves your current position and selection. Any new text still gets appended at the end, and you'll see your scrollbar increase in height, but it won't interrupt whatever you're doing. Anchor mode lasts until you explicitly restore both of the auto-scroll conditions, e.g. by typing Ctrl-End to jump the caret to the end-of-text. Anchor mode replaces the old Scroll Lock mechanism. The Scroll Lock key is now ignored.

• Arrow keys move the caret around. Standard navigation keys apply:

  Home	start of line	Ctrl-Home	start of text
  End	end of line	Ctrl-End	end of text
  PgUp	scrolls up 1 page	Ctrl-PgUp	top of page
  PgDn	scrolls down 1 page	Ctrl-PgDn	bottom of page

• Left-drag selects any region of text. Shift-Left click widens the selection from the caret to your mouse position.
• Ctrl-C copies the selection to the Clipboard. The chatter box is read-only, so you can't paste into it.

• Hot URLs. Any text phrase that looks like a URL (i.e. begins with http:// or similar) is displayed as a URL, with underlining. Click on any URL to (open a browser and) navigate to that page.

(1017) Choose Your Deck! The deck selection dialog (before the start of a live or AI game) has two nifty enhancements.

• Build Me a Deck! button. Click to open the Select House dialog (which is exactly the same as in DeckBuilder). Pick a house, and give it a name, and it will generate a random deck in that house, save it as a new .dck file in your current directory, and use it.

• Esc retries twice. If you press Esc instead of choosing a deck, Sanctum shows a message and lets you retry twice. If you press Esc a third time, Sanctum quietly auto-builds a deck for you, and uses it, but does not save it.

(0948)(1005) Game clock options. Sanctum now lets players choose four different game clocks in the Challenge window.

Grace and Chess clocks count the time delta, i.e. the time you spend waiting for the other player. It is normal for neither clock to be running during the player orders phase.

Limit clock counts absolute time. It's essentially the same as a wall clock. It is suitable for tournament play with mandatory time limits for each round.

(0707) Clock corner. The upper-left corner now displays the current game turn, and both players' clocks.

(0705b) Group sprites now float in front of the skybar.

(0972) Menu | Zooms. In the game menu, the Zooms option now lets you auto-close all spell zooms.

• On (default) gives the same behavior as before: Enemy spell zooms stay open until you explicitly click on them.
• Off causes all spell zooms to close automatically, with zero delay.

(0900) Zoom on screen. Modal zoom windows now always appear entirely on your screen, as close as possible to your Sanctum game window (no matter where it is). So you can always see them to close them.

(0903) Zoom on major monitor. If you have multiple monitors, zooms always appear on the monitor that has largest intersection with the game window's rectangle. If you move the game window “mostly” to a 2nd monitor, all your zooms will appear there.

Sanctum mana bars can now display huge mana quantities.

(0686) Tens of mana. All six mana bars automatically rescale their range to the largest multiple of 10 that can completely display your largest mana quantity. A bar with negative mana is displayed with red digits, and grows “backward” (right-to-left).

(0786) Hundreds of mana. Each mana bar can display numeric quantities up to 999, and down to -99, without clipping.

Sanctum and DeckBuilder now reuse more common code for card display.

(0789) Large card radio buttons. In a game, large cards now show the same 4 radio buttons as DeckBuilder, for spell, flavor, monster, and helper text.

(0651) Auto-fit spell names. In a game, small cards in hand, or in a zoom window, now display long spell names using the largest font that fits.

(0884) Potent recheck. During player orders, whenever you train or untrain a recruit in a structure, it now triggers a recheck of all potent spells on all members of that group (only). Potent spells are your own spells in hand that you have targeted earlier in the same turn, which haven't executed yet. All individual and group spells that fail this recheck are automatically uncast, and refund their mana.

So far, this affects only spells that have a group size casting restriction, i.e. Accursed Minion.

Numerous Revolutions spells have new sound files!

• Abomination: Carbuncle, Devouring, Eat and Run, Fiend, Winged Monkeys, Brother Wolf.
• Body: Eagle Spirit, Lion Spirit, Lizard Spirit, Shapeshifter.
• Life: Cadre.
• Making: Juggernaut, Minefield.
• Nature: Back to Nature, Biting Wind, Earthquake, Gale Force, Icecaps.
• War: Flaming Arrows.

(0978) Tools | Options dialog. Persistent user options are now located here, instead of in the menu bar.

(0704) “Use Less Memory”. When checked, DeckBuilder stops caching intermediate card graphics, and empties its current cache. This reduces DeckBuilder's memory footprint by up to 2/3, at the cost of slightly slower scrolling in your coll bar.

Tools | Show Unowned Cards. This menu command makes all cards in the game visible in your coll bar, even those for which your owned quantity is 0. This turns DeckBuilder into a complete card browser!

In this screenshot, Pixie doesn't own any Albatross or Altar of Blood, but she can still see their art and read their texts.

(0914) Sort by artist. The Sort Editor now lets you sort and filter by artist name.

Most of these artists have contributed new card art for the upcoming Allies & Traitors expansion set.

(0994) Player-contributed filterbar image sets. Right-click on any filterbar to show a popup menu that lists multiple image sets for that bar's buttons. Pick whichever set you prefer. Switch as often as you like!

F11 to hot-reload. DeckBuilder dynamically reads your filterbar image sets from a disk folder. Whenever we release new sets, just put them into the right place, and press F11 in an already-running copy of DeckBuilder, and it will instantly load them!

The User filterbar provides pre-defined filter buttons for tournament deck restrictions. The “B” button implements the Type B tournament filter.

(0979) Autofit grid. Each deck grid now automatically resizes to fit its window frame, using your current tiling direction.

(0980) Status bar tiles. The stat tiles for the active deck now appear in the status bar (bottom edge of the main frame window).

(0989) Autoscroll. Whenever you add a card to a deck, or edit a card's quantity, the deck view scrolls automatically to make that card visible.

• Tools | Is Preconstructed Deck toggles the current deck's mode between owned and precon.
• A precon deck window has a dark gold background color.
• The tile with a red border is the selected tile. Use the arrow keys, Home, End, PgUp, or PgDn to move the selection, or middle click or right click on any tile to select it.
• Each tile in a Precon shows two separate quantities, used and max. Use < > keys, or left-click, to set the used quantity (between 0 and the max only).
• Use 01234 to set the max quantity, or + – to change max by ±1. NIOGA reserves the right to restrict this capability to ranked accounts only, or other criteria.
• You may use any cards when building a precon, even cards you don't own!

• Precon decks shall be free for all players (even unregistered!) at all times.
• Precon decks are separate from your collection. You do not need to own their cards. They are never added to your collection. You cannot add your own cards to a precon. You cannot combine multiple precons. Each precon stands alone.
• All players (even unregistered!) can freely trim a precon by editing its used card quantities from 0 to each card's max quantity. This creates a proper subset of the precon. All players can save as many different proper subsets of a precon as they wish, and use any of them in a game.

Precon support will evolve steadily throughout the 1.70 branch.

(0679) She Cut Off Their Tails! Wide monsters (Doppelganger), or monsters with tails (dragons, Questing Beast), that protrude into a lower corner or side horizon, now properly erase their tails as they move. [1.40.29]

(0705a) Tall art in horizons. The horizons (left, right, and top areas outside the playable squares) now preserve all tall terrain art (e.g. treetops) in all adjacent squares, regardless of nearby group movements.

(1016) Tall art above squares. Terrain animations now automatically refresh their “final” image onto the board at the end of their animations. This eliminates leftover pixels in the “tall” region above their own squares. Affects: Volcano's plume, and Ghost Town changing town to colony.

(0921) Exeunt selection. When a minion is currently selected in any* minion sidebar during turn execution, and it leaves its group (by death or any other effect), it now loses the selection (which erases its spells from the spell listbox). [1.25.46]

* In practice, this means the left sidebar only, since the Choose Minion sidebar is never visible during turn execution, and the battle sidebar never selects any minion.

(0878) Battle sidebar gaps. Shrank the battle sidebar to fix pixel gaps along each edge. [Legacy]

(0877) During player orders, if you uncast a square or structure spell, and then retarget it onto the same square, it now properly adds its name to the spell listbox. [1.30.21]

(0898) During player orders, if the spell listbox is showing exactly 1 structure, square, or globe spell in parentheses (indicating a spell you are targeting this turn), and you uncast that spell, the spell listbox properly repaints itself to empty. [1.60.14]

(0936) Squander junk.Squandered friendly spells now always erase their own targeting markers from minion tiles, group sprites, squares, and structure. [Legacy]

(0814)