After 6 years, 0.97.0 is being released with some minor changes & campaign AI difficulty reduction. So far only for Windows: download.

Changes:

• Significantly reduced default quantbot medium in campaign, it now only attacks with 3 units at a time
• Fixed ornithopters to fly properly again, there's still a few bugs to make them work properly
• Fixed buy where sand worms immediately attack at game start
• New reworked campaign scenario maps by Dimitri, provide feedback to dmitrif AT bk.ru
• Other tweaks to quantbot, such as considering max units
• A new campaign AI by Richard
• Cleanup of SDL2 libraries and library references
• in keeping with original game, units only return to original repair locaiton if 'manual carryall drop' is enabled. This is similar to original and also - returning to battle zone is a bit imbalanced - allows for snowballing

After quite a longish development cycle and many new, interesting features being implemented the next version of Dune Legacy is ready for download.

Main changes:

• New AI Smart Bot and Quant Bot
• Port to SDL 2
• Use hardware acceleration for drawing
• HD graphics: Use mask overlays to generate high-res graphics out of the low-res ones of the original game
• Maximum number of units per house (either map dependent or as a new game option “override maximum number of units”)
• Use a smaller logical resolution for high resolution displays, e.g. 960x540 for 1920x1080

Further changes:

• Move to fix-point math for game logic as floating-point operations may differ between platforms and compilers
• Units entering refineries or repair yards are now moving onto the structure tile before disappearing
• ADL music playback replaced: Now combines ScummVM AdlibDriver with Woody OPL chip emulation code from adplug
• Tutorial hints are shown in the campaign to guide the user
• New key bindings: Cycle through construction yards with ‘H’ and factories with ‘F’; capture buildings with ‘C’
• Improve performance of Fog of War
• Units can now be instructed to find the next repair yard on their own
• Save game speed, scroll speed and sound volume as game settings
• In campaign mode, the map choice screen remembers the region of a failed mission (the user has to select a different region)
• New game option “Manual Carryall Drops”
• Mentat’s eyes are following the cursor
• Clicking on mentat’s eyes makes him blink and clicking on mentat’s mouth makes him open it
• Modding: Make it possible to disable a unit or structure
• Save screenshots as PNG
• 64-bit builds for Windows
• Store complete map in save games (and replays) of single player custom games
• 18 new maps by heinrich arkonnen
• 4 new maps by Kuffar
• Bugfix (Bug #32): Repaired units getting removed from control group (Reported by Chan Kun Wa)
• Bugfix (Bug #36): AI non-hostile and inactive (Reported by Chan Kun Wa)
• Bugfix (Bug #40): Bullets from gun turrets hit own building, e.g. other turrets (Reported by Dream Worker)
• Bugfix (Bug #50): Changing the player’s name while playing a mission makes starting the next mission or restarting the current mission crash
• Bugfix (Bug #53): SFX mismatch when playing Harkonnen
• Bugfix (Bug #62): Worms spawn under rock (Reported by heinrich arkonnen)
• Bugfix (Bug #67): Saving a game under Windows with (for filenames) illegal characters results in no save at all (Reported by vangrunz)
• Bugfix (Bug #70): Changing the player name makes replays crash
• Bugfix (Bug #71): Ornithopter animation is too fast (Thanks to Kartones for the patch)
• Bugfix (Bug #72): Texture sizes were too big for older hardware; now textures are smaller than 2048x2048 (Reported by gdm85)
• Bugfix (Bug #73): Shift the level of the voc files so that the last sample is 128 (Reported by Vortaka)
• Bugfix (Bug 3610246): Mentat help used wrong houses (Reported by kuffar)

Dune 2 has, due to its age, graphics with very low resolution, e.g. a map tile in the DOS version is only 16x16 pixels. For those of you who like this pixelated look&feel of the original game, Dune Legacy offers the option to use the original graphics. But Dune Legacy also allows to use the pixel-art scaler Scale2x that tries to reduce the pixelated appearance of the original graphics. Sometimes this leads to corners being rounded off, resulting in a cartoonish look. Two years ago sourceforge user Assembler Bot contacted me with a solution to this problem: "I have almost all bitmaps from old Dune2 up-scaled 3x and carefully pixel-by-pixel smoothed to resemble original bitmaps as close as possible." Some graphics were still missing which I created in the course of the last months. Arranging those high-res graphics to be useful for Dune Legacy also took some time. Due to copyright issue it wasn't possible to include the graphics directly, but a masking technique was developed: The mask is applied to the original low-res image to create an high-res version. The next version of Dune Legacy will contain (the option) to use those graphics. Screenshots bellow allow you to compare both versions for yourself via the sliders:

Newer versions of Mac OS X seem to have various things changed in a way that it broke backwards compatibility with SDL-based games. Jeffrey Carpenter looked into the issues and finally provided a patch to resolve the problem. The next release of Dune Legacy hopefully will run out of the box on current Mac OS X versions but in the meantime take a look at the install instructions provided by Jeffrey in Bug #51.

Main changes:

• Full-featured map editor with support of Dune2-compatible maps as well as the extended map format
• Integration of OpenSuperDune (a replacement to the original SuperDune)
• Unit/Structure stats and the techtree is read from a config file
• Used scaler (Nearest Neighbor or Scale2x) is configurable (default = Scale2x)
• Game completely localizable (except helping menu)
• Harvesters now have a return command
• Trying to place a structure on a tile which is already occupied by (your own) units orders them to move away
• Add support for multiple different AI implementations
• Improved AI: Base is now built up faster and more compact
• New single and multiplayer maps

Further changes:

• Determine username automatically upon first start up
• Pressing an assigned number twice centers the screen on the selected units
• Destroyed units might spawn a soldier (Probability depends on the type of unit)
• Quad, Trike and Infantry units have a bumpy moving style when moving over rocks, mountains and thick spice
• Idling units randomly turn around
• Bullets now have an explosion animation when hitting
• Spice blooms have now their own animation
• Full Harvesters move 40% slower than empty ones
• Units are defined badly damaged (smoke, only one weapon) if < 50% max. health (instead of 30%)
• Sardaukar Troopers and Fremen Troopers are no unit types on its own anymore (just normal Troopers)
• Deviation chance is now house specific
• Starport prices are now normal distributed (instead of uniform)
• Limiting number of palaces to one is now optional (default = off)
• As in Dune II killed sandworms no longer respawn; old behavior is now an option (default = off)
• New game option: Sandworms drop spice when killed (default = off)
• Changes to game speed: Globally configurable; saved to and loaded from savegame; configurable before start of a multiplayer game
• Update enet to version 1.3.6
• Code was refactored in order to have a more consistent style
• Bugfix: Sand damage was using the wrong graphics
• Bugfix: Make it possible to order any type of unit from the starport if specified in the CHOAM section
• Bugfix: Build with SDL 1.2.14 on Mac OS X for Lion compatibility
• Bugfix: Allow special units to be delivered by reinforcements
• Bugfix: Correct order of houses is Harkonnen, Atreides, Ordos, Fremen, Sardaukar, Mercenary as in the color palette
• Bugfix: Minimap was not updated correctly when playing with fog-of-war enabled
• Bugfix: Stopping a unit that was awaiting pickup could “freeze” the carryall
• Bugfix: It was possible to exceed the spice storage limit (it’s still possible to circumvent the limit but it’s more complex)
• Bugfix: Harvester returns after the last tile of spice on the map is cleared
• Bugfix: Playing xmi music on Windows was broken
• Bugfix: Various fixes to the correct handling of music and sfx volume changes

Known issues:

• Multiplayer games still have a rare chance of getting out of sync

• Add LAN multiplayer mode
• Internet multiplayer mode with metaserver (Beta!)
• Use scale2x for scaling
• Make game scalable ingame (Zoomlevel x1, Zoomlevel x2 and Zoomlevel x3)
• Add mentat help
• Scroll build list with mouse wheel
• Loading maps is more fault tolerant and shows only warnings in most cases
• Loading maps now checks for non-standard features (see Section “Features” in the Dune II Format Specification)
• Confirm window for game restart and game exit
• Added 13 maps by Rippsblack
• New options “Structures Degrade On Concrete”, “Start with Explored Map” and “Instant Build”
• Earthquake (“Window shaking”) on large explosions (e.g. death hand explosion)
• French translation (incomplete and only a machine translation)
• Bugfix: Loading SCENH008.INI of Dune II V1.0 failed
• Bugfix: Dune Legacy.log was not used on Windows
• Bugfix: Support non-ascii characters in paths and filenames on Windows
• Bugfix: Infantry units could not trigger spice blooms
• Bugfix: When playing as the Sardaukar, the announcer still says “Harkonnen”, e.g. “Harkonnen harvester deployed”
• Bugfix: Sardaukar Reinforcements did not work
• Refactoring: Drop Visual Studio 6.0 support completely and start using C++0x features

Our new wiki is based upon the Hosted Apps Service provided by SourceForge.net. This eases website management as we do not have to upgrade the wiki software on our own in the future but can rely on SourceForge. While moving the wiki pages we cleaned up and removed outdated/obsolete entries. Furthermore we added some additional pages like a Manual and revamped the Development section.

Unfortunately the wiki accounts could not be transferred because the Hosted Apps on SourceForge are connected to SourceForge accounts. Thus you will need to get an SourceForge account in order to edit our new wiki.

The old wiki is still accessible at http://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/wiki/.

• Custom maps implemented (see Dune II Format Specification for details on the map format)
• AI fixed (but still dumb)
• Play with AI in one team
• Fremen, Sardaukar and Mercenary playable (but needs better testing)
• Only one palace per house possible
• Colors of ingame GUI elements customized for each house
• New option screen
• I18N support (only English and German atm)
• Savegames are sorted by date
• Wall-Bug fixed: Walls not drawn correctly after loading a game
• Linux: Save configuration files to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/dunelegacy if set; otherwise ~/.config/dunelegacy is used
• Mac OS X: Save configuration files to ~/Library/Application Support/Dune Legacy instead of ~/.config/dunelegacy
• Calculate md5sum of all PAK-Files at startup and write them to the log file (should ease debugging)
• Various smaller bugfixes

• Cutscenes are now integrated
• Score at the end of each mission
• Decoding music on the fly
• Capturing buildings is now possible again
• Fixes for gcc 4 (Thanks to David Geier)
• Structures are degrading
• Fix: Carryalls bring badly damaged units to the repair yard
• Packaging deb-files (Ubuntu/Debian)
• spec-files for packaging rpms (Fedora, Mandriva, SuSE)
• NSIS Installer Script (Windows)
• Prepared dmg (Mac OS X)
• Check for missing PAK-files
• Begin of chating system

This branch was forked from dunelegacy-0.93 IIRC. It’s main goal is to restructure the game to increase it’s code quality. This task is not finishd yet but there where several modifications. The biggest changes are:

• All Game Data is now loaded out of the original Dune II PAK-Files (+ one additional LEGACY.PAK File). There is no longer a need to extract the data with an external program.
• The Menu-Code has been rewritten.
• The GUI-Code has been rewritten and extended.
• The music is converted from the original Dune II *.ADL or *.XMI Files. These files are converted to WAV-Files. It is still possible to use other files as background music (Download high-quality mp3-files here)
• The configuration is loaded from “Dune Legacy.ini”
• The interface for the Structures and Units had been redesigned to seperate functionality of a Unit/Structure and it’s interface
• The SFX is loaded from PAK-Files and upsampled
• The save games are now saved platform independent (endian-safe and 64-bit safe)
• Save as many savegames as you like
• The campaign works like in the original Dune II
• Changed the unit/structure data to be like in the original
• Unit/Structure data is loaded from a file
• The whole game is now based on a single random number generator and thus reproducable
• Replays are now possible
• A lot of small graphical effects (Explosions, tracks on sand, dead infantry) where added
• The game is very stable now
• Many smaller bugfixes