icedtea-web 1.4 Released!

icedtea-web 1.4 is here! Lots of fixes and enhancements in this release. This release also fixes known regressions that occurred from 1.2->1.3.

Release announcement by Jiri Vanek:

Hi all!

After long and furious development, I'm finally proud to announce release of icedtea-web 1.4.

http://icedtea.wildebeest.org/download/source/icedtea-web-1.4.tar.gz
97c1d5f02f9a4ab19812a216f39e401a  icedtea-web-1.4.tar.gz

How we were dealing and what we plan to do, can be  checked on wiki:

http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/IcedTea-Web#IcedTea-Web_1.4
http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/IcedTea-Web#IcedTea-Web_1.5

New in IcedTea-Web 1.4

* Numerous improvements and enhancements in core and system of classloaders
* Added cs localization
* Added de localization
* Added pl localization
* Splash screen for javaws and plugin
* Better error reporting for plugin via Error-splash-screen
* All IcedTea-Web dialogues are centered to middle of active screen
* Download indicator made compact for more then one jar
* User can select its own JVM via itw-settings and deploy.properties.
* Added extended applets security settings and dialogue
* Security updates
  - CVE-2013-1926, RH916774: Class-loader incorrectly shared for applets with same relative-path.
  - CVE-2013-1927, RH884705: fixed gifar vulnerabilit
  - CVE-2012-3422, RH840592: Potential read from an uninitialized memory location
  - CVE-2012-3423, RH841345: Incorrect handling of not 0-terminated strings
* NetX
  - PR1027: DownloadService is not supported by IcedTea-Web
  - PR725: JNLP applications will prompt for creating desktop shortcuts every time they are run
  - PR1292: Javaws does not resolve versioned jar names with periods correctly
* Plugin
  - PR1106: Buffer overflow in plugin table-
  - PR1166: Embedded JNLP File is not supported in applet tag
  - PR1217: Add command line arguments for plugins
  - PR1189: Icedtea-plugin requires code attribute when using jnlp_href
  - PR1198: JSObject is not passed to javascript correctly
  - PR1260: IcedTea-Web should not rely on GTK
  - PR1157: Applets can hang browser after fatal exception
  - PR580: http://www.horaoficial.cl/ loads improperly
* Common
  - PR1049: Extension jnlp's signed jar with the content of only META-INF/* is considered
  - PR955: regression: SweetHome3D fails to run
  - PR1145: IcedTea-Web can cause ClassCircularityError
  - PR1161: X509VariableTrustManager does not work correctly with OpenJDK7
  - PR822: Applets fail to load if jars have different signers
  - PR1186: System.getProperty("deployment.user.security.trusted.cacerts") is null
  - PR909: The Java applet at http://de.gosupermodel.com/games/wardrobegame.jsp fails
  - PR1299: WebStart doesn't read socket proxy settings from firefox correctly



People who helped with this release (If I forgot somebody, please let me know!):


Deepak Bhole <dbhole@redhat.com>
Danesh Dadachanji <ddadacha@redhat.com>
Adam Domurad <adomurad@redhat.com>
Jana Fabrikova <jfabriko@redhat.co>
Peter Hatina <phatina@redhat.com>
Andrew John Hughes <ahughes@redhat.com>
Matthias Klose <doko@ubuntu.com>
Alexandr Kolouch <skolnag@gmail.com>
Jan Kmetko <jan.kmetko.ml@gmail.com>
Omair Majid <omajid@redhat.com>
Thomas Meyer <thomas@m3y3r.de>
Saad Mohammad <smohammad@redhat.com>
Martin Olsson  <martin@minimum.se>
Pavel Tisnovsky <ptisnov@redhat.com>
Jiri Vanek <jvanek@redhat.com>
Jacob Wisor  <gitne@excite.co.jp>


Special thanks to:

 * Adam Domurad - for deep investigations and  fixes in core, and in numerous classloaders or otherwise complicated bugs
 * Jan Kmetko - for initial design of splashscreen
 * Deepak Bhole and Omair Majid - for ever keeping an watchful eye on patches
 * to community - namely:
   -  Jacob Wisor and Alexandr Kolouch  - who voluntary offered and delivered Pl+De and Cz translation

And not finally to all who tested the pre and final versions for regressions


Best regards
  J.

Happy hacking,
-Adam

icedtea-web 1.2.3, 1.3.2 Released!

Newest incremental releases in 1.2.x & 1.3.x series for icedtea-web were released! Stay tuned for the much-improved icedtea-web 1.4, in about a month.

From the release announcement by Jiri Vanek (http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/distro-pkg-dev/2013-April/022790.html)

The changes well... are as they are. Not much, but at least something - as development was strongly 
focused to HEAD.
 From this point of view, I strongly encourage every user to move to 1.4 as smoothly and quickly as 
possible (will be based on future head anyway).
Also please note that 1.2 is getting close to end of its life.

http://icedtea.wildebeest.org/download/source/icedtea-web-1.3.2.tar.gz
http://icedtea.wildebeest.org/download/source/icedtea-web-1.2.3.tar.gz

md5sums:
ab56d94251975a9bb5359ea85136ea79  icedtea-web-1.2.3.tar.gz
94ce02c42c1e4d1411357fb3c1014f67  icedtea-web-1.3.2.tar.gz

New in release 1.3.2 (2013-04-17):
* Security Updates
   - CVE-2013-1927, RH884705: fixed gifar vulnerability
   - CVE-2013-1926, RH916774: Class-loader incorrectly shared for applets with same relative-path.
* Common
   - Added new option in itw-settings which allows users to set JVM arguments when plugin is 
initialized.
* NetX
   - PR580: http://www.horaoficial.cl/ loads improperly
* Plugin
    PR1260: IcedTea-Web should not rely on GTK
    PR1157: Applets can hang browser after fatal exception

For details you can see changesets:
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.3/rev/2d76719a5e4d
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.3/rev/88fb945c9397
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.3/rev/25dd7c7ac39c
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.3/rev/25dd7c7ac39c
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.3/rev/19f5282f53e8
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.3/rev/ca8b00cca4c3
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.3/rev/f63bdf513e9d
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.3/rev/b619cda99360

New in release 1.2.3 (2013-04-17):
* Security Updates
   - CVE-2013-1927, RH884705: fixed gifar vulnerability
   - CVE-2013-1926, RH916774: Class-loader incorrectly shared for applets with same relative-path.
* Common
   - PR1161: X509VariableTrustManager does not work correctly with OpenJDK7
* Plugin
   - PR1157: Applets can hang browser after fatal exception

For details you can see changesets:
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.2/rev/34b6f60ae586
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.2/rev/cb58b31c450e
   * http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.2/rev/cd4a9f25808e

Please consider for next few hours HEAD as frozen (until you see similar commits;)

Thanks to everyone who helped with this releases:
   Deepak Bhole
   Adam Domurad
   Jana Fabrikova
   Tomas Hoger
   Omair Majid
   Jiri Vanek

Direct all bug reports to:
  http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/
Direct all inquiries/comments/patches to the distro-pkg-dev mailing list:
  http://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo/distro-pkg-dev

Happy hacking.

Lanarts Goals

So I decided to write up a post about my hopes for when I finally release 'Lanarts 1.0'. I hope outlining where the game is going encourages people to contribute.

The design philosophy:
To create a fun, dangerous, procedurally generated, co-op RPG which allows for continual character advancement without repetitive elements. The game will be very light on plot, and feature critical decisions, such as choosing between different challenges. The game will be best played end-to-end with a team of around 4-6 friends. The game will be designed with a loss-condition in mind, but one that can be made more lenient to players' liking.
 
Guiding points:
Any tedious aspects should be as streamlined and automated as possible.

The character advancement should introduce more interesting and nuanced features rather than just stat-gain. Character races and other game bonuses should be versatile enough to provide benefit to a large number of play-styles.

The game should be as data-driven as possible, allowing for easy content creation. The game should lend easily to hosting modified game content. Modified game content will happily be considered for integration into the base game.

The V1.0 goals:

• Stable Lua API that allows for developing/customizing the game as much as possible. V1.0 will introduce a (loose) API freeze and best-effort backwards compatibility measures.
• Well-performing game-play with at least 4 players (more is ideal).
• A lobby server for easy match-making.
• A flexible stat system based on character traits and abilities. This includes items with interesting effects, and a variety of 'tech-tree' style advancement options.
• An overworld with towns, thematic dungeons, and a final boss.

What aren't my goals:

• I'm not sure if V1.0 will have original graphics. While nice, I do not consider this a version-number assignable goal (primarily because I do not have the talent to decide when it happens.
• I don't intend to make Lanarts a generic RPG engine. I will move towards this as much as possible, but only where it enables smooth growth of the game.

7Day Roguelike Challenge Complete!

OK time to release.
Download: http://7drl.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bughack.zip

I'm a bit exhausted from working on it so I'll just paste the README.

Welcome to BUGHACK.

The idea for the game was to include roguelike mechanics based on how ants find food through scents.

You are a leader ant who must lead worker ants to delicious harvest. Every sector you must gather a certain amount of harvest. Keep your ants safe, or you'll take damage! You must call ants out of an ant hole and then lead them to to fruit.

Press C in-game to see controls.

THE GAME IS TOO SMALL:
To fullscreen, hit F in game.
Alternatively, replace the occurrence tiles12x12_gs_ro.png in bughack.py with tiles18x18_gs_ro.png

Dependencies:
Python 2.X (32 bit is needed on windows)
SDL (included in Windows, needed on Linux)

RUNNING:
python main.py
(Or on windows, right click main.py and run with python 2)

Created by:
 Programming by ludamad (Adam Domurad), art by REZ (Clay Bullard)

7DayRL Competition!

OK, this will look silly in case I don't complete, but I will be joining the 7day roguelike competition!

I will be teaming up with putterson (who does occasional work on lanarts with me) and REZ (who I previously did a Halloween competition with, resulting in Carny Death Peddlers). The hope is to have a tiles-mode with ASCII.

I'll say at this point to save myself from potential foolishness that any potential failing of the competition will be due to being too ambitious with too little free time, and not because of lack of interest!

Anyway, cautiously optimistic.

I'd discuss the game idea but they're going to change a buttload -- and we'll find out soon enough, ain't it ?

So plans are to use libtcod & Python. It won't be my first game in Python but it'll be my first graphical one. So far just learning libtcod and going through the tutorials, but I find it straight-forward. It's funny how well suited libtcod is for this competition.

Lanarts Update March 4th, 2013

New release, ready for download!

It is recommended you move with WASD, melee with H, fire spells with YUIOP, mouse controls for everything else. Mouse controls for spells are fairly suboptimal at the moment.

Additionally, 1 to 9 for inventory slots 1 through 9.
Right click is needed to drop items, however.

So it's been 2 months since I felt like compiling this thing on Windows ... damn. About time for another lanarts release !
I hope sincerely to go back to a biweekly release schedule.

Major changes:

• Enemies now do not regen health a bit after hit. This makes enemy packs a lot less annoying. [Credit for idea goes to serprex]
• Floating point strictness flags turned out to help a lot with the remaining syncing issues.
• Saving the game is much more streamlined -- now you simply need to exit (via shift+escape) and the game will automatically save. Reload the game and hit Continue (or enter), and your game is loaded. I feel comfortable having this the default now since I haven't run into any save-file bugs in a good amount of time.
• Victory screen added, you can win the game now !
• Scoreboard added, with stats for your previous characters, whether you won, etc. Navigate it with arrow keys/pageup&down if you have a lot of entries.

Minor changes:

• Made it easier to distinguish walls and floor in the brick&hive tileset
• A lot more code was brought to the lua side, including the menu implementation. The scripting is becoming quite mature, and the game much more engine-like. Documentation to come !
• Unit tests moved fully to use UnitTest++
• Network debug mode was fixed, logging was made more verbose. Diff'ing logs proved to be very effective rooting out syncing issues.
• Game pausing and the steps_per_draw setting work again.
• Minor balancing to spells
• Added key display overlay for spells, and FPS counter in corner
• Moved the wide-open and difficult floor 4 layout to floor 7
• More options for hosting games, and the server's options now override client options (whereas before they could be weirdly out of sync)

Special thanks to putterson for all the online & LAN testing.

Windows:
Download!

Linux:
I do not yet provide linux packages, please do kick me if they'd be useful for you.

git clone http://github.com/ludamad/lanarts --depth 1
./run.sh

If you are missing dependencies on Linux (probably the case) please run either fedora-deps.sh for Fedora, or debian-deps.sh for Debian or Ubuntu.

Feedback

Please direct any bugs and inqueries either as a github issue, a comment on this blog, a post on the #lanarts freenode channel, or an email to domuradical@gmail.com. Feedback very welcome !

Fedora 18+Cinnamon

So, I had told myself I'd get use to Linux prior to coming to Red Hat, but truthfully that wasn't much needed. You learn fast when you're thrown in, and its sink or swim.

So, Fedora 16 was my first Linux distribution. I liked it a lot. I liked GNOME 3 a lot. With Fedora 16's end-of-life approaching (today, in fact) it was time to jump ship. GNOME 3 was nice enough, but I decided to put some of the noise about it in perspective and try something else.

Installing

Noticeably worse - a bit sad because obviously a lot of work was put into it. The new layout shows you all your options at once, but I think stepping you through them was more user-friendly.  Partitioning was confusing but in the end, it all worked well. Once I figured out I had to click on my F16 install, and hit a 'minus sign', everything went smoothly.

GNOME 3.6 Visuals, Graphical boot loader, etc

This probably impressed me more than it should have, but everything looked really tight to me. The fedora boot loader has a graphical back-drop, the login screen looks really nice, as were the various GNOME3 visual improvements. All of it fit together really nicely. Of course, at the end of the day, I would happily turn off any of these things for a better workflow. It sure is nice when people ask 'Whats this Linux thing?', and you have something shiny to show them.

Bugs

So once I tried to get some real work, I was unhappy to find a lot of small Eclipse issues. While F18 can only be blamed for bugs in Eclipse to a limited extent, it is one of those 'too big to fail' applications these days, so its worth mentioning. Without going into detail, these included issues with Java perspective not showing up after installing Eclipse Java Tools, and various graphical glitches using Eclipse C++ Tools. A more fundamental bug occurred when I tried to turn on desktop icons in GNOME 3.6 - instant crash, and crashing whenever I logged in.

Cinnamon!
The best thing about failing to get icons working on GNOME (admittedly I didn't try hard) was the decision to try out if they worked with Cinnamon. First off, I was very impressed with how well Cinnamon integrated with the whole Fedora user experience. Not only did a single yum command and a 'cinnamon --replace' have me trying it out in seconds flat, it was very simple to make my default desktop environment (toggle on log-in).

For someone like me that found GNOME 3's visually appealing, Cinnamon was perfect. Very soon I got rid of that 'hot corner' that GNOME 3 is so centered on, and set up some settings to my liking. Overall I find it more featureful, perhaps more Windows-like, but I'm not complaining.

Some things I do miss though is the nice way of dragging windows into workspaces with GNOME 3, and the 'application-centric' alt-tab that groups windows based on application.

Anyway, that's it for now. Overall I really like it, but then again I would have just been happy to get up to date packages again. YMMV.