From: Roger Burton West <roger@f...>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 20:16:52 +0100
Subject: shiptool v0.17 has been released
It's been a while since the last release of shiptool; 0.16 seems to have been doing what people wanted. However, development has not ceased, and 0.17 is now available. There are quite a few changes this time: In the ship designer, a persistent salvo missile display bug has been fixed. The automatic mass chooser (to find the smallest hull which will fit a given load of systems) has been improved so that it no longer falls over when presented with large ships; there's now also an auto-classification button, which will give its best guess at a ship's type based on hull mass. In the fleet manager, I've changed the missile-loading interface to be more reliable and convenient; there's now a counter for total hull boxes visible while the fleet is being built; ship selection has been entirely redone, so that you can view all ships or select by nationality or classification. There's also now a summary display of the ship available before it's added to the fleet (in case you can't remember exactly which variant has which loadout). I've also added sensors and ECM throughout the system, as well as the new ship2xml and xml2ship packages which will allow conversion between shiptools' ship files and Jon Davis' FTJava XML ship files. (These are in a pretty early state, but they seem to work.) The suite is written in Perl/Tk (easily available on most Unix systems; downloadable from ActiveState for Windows) and includes full documentation.