From: kevin@cyber.net (Kevin R. Sanders) Subject: Patch to empire source on sunsite Date: 17 Feb 1993 20:35:31 GMT
Ok, for you folks that have been having problems with your
client/server connections in empire, I found the problem <blush>.
It was actually something that I had patched previously, but
I had disabled the patch before distributing the source :-(.
So I will be uploading to sunsite a new file, emp.src.patch1,
containing a patch for this and a couple of other changes to the
util Makefile). The patch should be there before Friday. Incidentally,
your loopback device needs to be set up as 127.0.0.1, as this is hard-
coded in the game now (I could never get "gethostbyname" to work
properly. I will try the latest libraries and see if that helps, as
I want to clean this up for the next major Chainsaw release).
I am aware of the problem with "file" generating errors, and I know
what's causing it. However I have not had time to figure out a good fix
for it, and it is not a fatal problem. If any of you feel motivated,
the problem is in lib/common/file.c, in the ef_open function. It
uses some algorithm to determine how much memory to malloc() based upon
the size of the structure used in the file. Unfortunately, the structure
used in the "nation" file is larger than 512 bytes, and this causes
the calculation to call malloc() with argument of 0. That's all I know.
An interesting note on empire: there is a new version of Chainsaw in
the works (3.0) with some enhancements to the game. I am currently
porting this to Linux, and will try to get my changes back to the author
in time for Linux to be supported by the standard distribution. If I
don't make it in time, I will issue patches for Chainsaw 3.0 after its
official release.
-- ===================== Kevin Sanders, KN6FQ kevin@cyber.net