Air Warrior - Atari ST Version

			** Version 1.1a **

1)  The multi-engine starter bug has been fixed.
2)  The gunner mode crash has been fixed.

			** Version 1.1  **

1)  We now have jeeps!  The control system and model is not perfect;
    we will be improving it when we add other vehicles.  The jeep has
    a single .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the back.  You can either
    carry along a gunner OR you can stop the jeep and gun yourself.
    To hop from the driver seat to the gun you must be on-line.  The
    jeep must be stopped.  Use the jump command, i.e. <esc> jg to
    jump to the gun and <esc> jd to get back in the driver's seat.
    If your gunner is shot you can man the gun yourself.  A new
    airsnd.dat file has been created with vehicle tire skids and
    engine sounds.  At the moment the jeep engine sounds ALOT like
    a 2300 Hp Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp aircraft engine :-)
2)  The buffeting effect in high speed dives has been removed.  It
    just never worked properly.
3)  The serial I/O code has been made more robust.  Hopefully this
    will cure the random lockups.

			** Version 1.0c **

1)  Planes are once again outlined in black.
2)  The drawing of planes in the distance has been sped up significantly.
3)  The "out of fuel" message will now only be printed once.
4)  A bug which could cause the guns to fire when you re-enter flight
    AFTER crashing with your guns blazing has been fixed.
5)  The re-try code on EXIT conditions was not working properly.  It
    has been corrected so that it will try 3 times to get the host
    to acknowledge an EXIT command before dumping you into the
    conference mode.
6)  Another major performace improvement.  (thanx dave...)  The table
    below has been updated.

			** Version 1.0b **

1)  MAJOR PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS!!  I wrote my own polygon fill routines
    and replaced all VDI calls with linea calls and reaped major improvements.
    In a nutshell my polygon routines outperform the blitter in almost
    all cases.  For those folks which are into numbers here are some
    benchmarks.  These numbers are loop times in milliseconds.

    Mode |    Old ROMS      |    New ROMS      | New ROMS + blitter
         | old   new  delta | old   new  delta | old   new  delta
    -----+------------------+------------------+----------------------
     1   | 356   197   45%  | 323   191   41%  | 295   187   37%
     2   | 282   150   47%  | 255   145   43%  | 266   141   47% <- bad data?
     3   | 241   136   44%  | 219   121   45%  | 190   117   38% 
     4   | 183    92   50%  | 167    88   47%  | 137    84   39%

2)  The screen will flash when you get hit.
3)  A message is printed when you run out of fuel.
4)  Non-expert mode will no longer allow (well almost) you to roll
    the plane over.
5)  The END and PARACHUTE commands have been worked on a bit to try to
    make them more robust in noisy network conditions.
6)  A bug which caused targets to show up on the radar in practice mode
    has been fixed.
7)  A really strange bug which caused the atari to dump its I/O buffers
    to the serial port when a function (or special) key was pressed
    while in terminal mode has been fixed.

			** Version 1.0a **

1)  The bug which eat the first character on 13 character dial strings 
    has been fixed.
2)  The icon of the plane (if known) that crashed or was shot down will
    be printed in the message.
3)  The N command has been cleaned up a bit.
4)  Several annoying gunner problems have been cleaned up.  The gun sight
    was off target when not near the center of the display.  Atari
    (and Amiga) gunners should be more accurate now.
5)  It is now possible to lock down turrets that use the mouse activated
    traverse control.  The Keypad . key will toggle auto traverse on
    and off.  The default is ON.
6)  A menu option to control the amount of fuel to be loaded on the
    plane has been added.  This feature allows you to specify the
    percentage of a plane's maximum fuel capacity that is to be
    loaded.
7)  The HELP menu entry has been moved far away from the FLY entry
    so that ill-aimed rodents don't summon assistance.
8)  The BIOS serial I/O package has been replaced to get around a bug
    in the Megas which caused stray ESCapes and such to appear when
    the mouse is moved.  (grumble grumble)  The new code is also faster.
9)  The compass heading should no longer go negative.
10) A split screen conference mode has been added.
11) Visible tracers have been added.  These tracers follow the trajectory
    of the shells. (after you see them you will see why we don't
    actually model the guns this way!)  Do NOT use the tracers to aim
    your shots!  F7 will turn them on and off in flight.  The engine
    sound toggle was moved to F8.
12) An error in the down lean right back and down lean left back pictures
    has been corrected.  The views are now symmetric.
13) One source of the terrain data base errors has been found.  I have
    not seen anymore problems a la object ref error etc.  Please
    let us know if it screws up.
14) All you plane artists out there can now customize the gunner's
    dashboard!  The view name is GDSH.  This view is optional; if
    you do not have one it uses the standard version. (Just like the
    normal dashboard.)  I am working on code that will allow to change
    the gauge sizes and locations.
15) Several problems in non-expert flight mode have been cleared up.
16) The odds of oil leaks from damage has been significantly reduced.

			** Version 1.0 **
 ** NOTE: **
    This version is mandatory for on-line use.  The flight equations
    are much more realistic and will require practice.  PLEASE spend
    some off line time flying.  A detailed discussion of these changes
    is available in the data library and in the Air Warrior section of
    the Games RoundTable.

1) The flight statistics and picture outlines of many of the
   planes have been adjusted.
2) The concept of propeller drag has been introduced.  The planes
   (except the Me262!) will slow down very quickly when you reduce the
   throttle.  When you shut off the engine(s) the program will
   automatically feather the prop.
3) View names DBLR and DBLL were reversed.
4) A bug in the radar which gave incorrect ranges has been fixed.
5) A new command <ESC> n (for nationalities) has been added.  This
   command will display the icon colors and state which countrys
   are the enemy.
6) The World War I theater has been added to the terrain.dat file.

			** Version 0.1g **

1) A problem in operating system's menu handler caused the plane
   menu to blow up on systems with the OLD ROMs.  I took out the
   cute spacers and the problem went away.   GEM statically
   allocates the buffer that the menus use to save the screen
   underneath.  If you make a menu too big... splatt.  yuk!

2) The default artwork for the WWII planes has been updated.

			** Version 0.1f **

1) A memory allocation bug which caused the machine to run out of
   memory if you had *rejected* artwork has been fixed.
2) A long standing problem with gun turrets has been cleared up.
3) The stick response has been changed such that it is less sensitive
   towards the center position.
4) Several bugs in the flight code have been corrected.

			** Version 0.1e **

1) Several memory management errors have been found and corrected.  These
   problem caused out of memory errors when the view cache is in use.
2) Plane artwork is now checked to make sure that it obscures 80% of
   the computer generated art.  All of you folks with Wonder Woman style
   transparent planes will have to hanger them.
3) The out of ammo message will no longer be printed 10 to 20 times
   when you try to fire.
4) The Mega ST Blitter is now better supported,  If you have trouble with
   flying with the blitter on, let me know.  In addition it has been
   verified that the new ROMs are much faster than the old ones.
   I urge all of you to up-grade.
5) The GEM pallette is saved and restored.
6) Several strange problems with quiting while NOT looking forward
   have been fixed.
7) Good news: We now support digitized sound (a la ST Replay).  A
              sound data file has been included in this ARC for your
              enjoyment.  As soon as all the problems are ironed out
              I will post the instructions on how to make sound files.
   Bad news:  Digital sound requires at least 130K additional
              memory and gobbles up to 50% of the CPU.  Your best bet
              is to use the F7 key to toggle the sound off when
              speed is of the essence.  In addition there is still
              a problem in the code which might cause a system
              error...(sniff) most likely if you switch from internal sound to
              ST-Replay cartridge sound.
8) View names DLFT and DRGT have been swap to the correct positions.
9) The program will now indicate the course of planes that are between
   350 and 1300 yards away by drawing plane shapes instead of a horizontal
   line.  Most of the shapes are obvious:
    *                                  *****
    ****    plane heading right          *     plane flying same course as you

       *                                 *
    ****    plane heading left         *****   plane heading toward you

10)The dial string has been expanded to about 55 characters for those
   folks who use long distance services.
11)The maximum number of views that can be cached has been increased
   to 22. (For those folks with lotsa memory)
12)Selecting the bombsight mode will put the plane into "autopilot"
   mode.  The old value (i.e. expert) will be restored when you
   exit bombsight mode.
13)You can now have the Airspeed Indicator display Indicated Airspeed
   instead of True Airspeed.
14)The new flight equations are in... big differences! Go read the
   discussions in the Games RoundTable.
15)The F4U Corsair has been added to the plane roster.
16)The throttle has been taken off of the mouse and made a keyboard
   command:
      C - 100% throttle
      c - add 10% throttle
      V - 0% throttle
      v - subtract 10% throttle
   Why was this done you ask?  In order to make the plane easier to
   control in a turn we added the concept of a roll-lock.  Basically
   what it does is that when you press the LEFT mouse button the
   stick will return to the vertical axis and only allow you to adjust
   the planes attitude.  (it also compensates for the plane's
   tendency to flatten out a bank)
17)People have reported that the plane sometimes vears off the runway
   on take off.  After some study the conclusion is that the problem
   is due to the mouse moving slightly after you have double-clicked.
   All it takes is 1 or 2 mouse ticks to do this.  The Mac and Amiga
   versions will do the same things.  In order to address this issue
   I have done several things.  First you can now change the mouse
   sensitivity via the OPTIONS menu entry.  The initial values
   will give you the same setting as in the previous versions.  When
   you are operating as a gunner the Left-Right sensitivity is also
   used for the Forward-Backward value.  Secondly, a small blue
   dot is displayed in the center of the stick when it is EXACTLY
   centered.

          ** Interesting notes from versions past **

-  The radar mode has been reworked to be more readable.  The
   small planes are fighters the larger ones are bombers and
   the X is you.  The small black boxes at the top of
   each sector represent the number of enemy planes (all types)
   in that sector; the diamonds are friends.

-  A snapshot camera has been added to make constructing artwork files
   easier and to preserve pictures of kills.  Pressing Control Clr Home
   will dump the screen in Degas uncompressed format to the file
   awpic?.pi2 where the ? is a sequence number.  The first pic in
   a flight will be awpic0.pi2 the second awpic1.pi2 etc.
   I have the code to dump a compressed picture also but I have
   not had a chance to glue it in.  This might be faster for
   floppy based systems.

** Known Problems **
-- The dialog boxes will eventually have cute little drawings instead
   of the fuji.
-- The High res B&W version is several months away.

                            Happy Hunting,
                            John