Version 6.0 is here

Again, after around one year of the development, a new stable version of the game is here. From the players point of view, this version brings only refreshed the user interface and some fixes for bugs. No new features or options were added. But due to changes under the hood, the whole size of the game was drastically reduced compared to the previous version. Also, the game now needs less resources like memory and CPU. It is still probably impossible to run it on a toaster. At least I can't :) Of course, that big change brings probably also a lot of new bugs. Many of them were squashed during the development, but I'm afraid there are still some lurking in the shadows. If you find any of them, please report them to me.

From the developers point of view, the previous library used for the user interface, GTK was replaced by Tk. The main reason were constant problems with GTK, from complicated code to sometimes weird handling various GUI elements and lack of real cross-platform abilities. Overall I think it was a very good idea to replace. The whole game code was reduced by around 25-30 percent. Additionally, using the Tk library allows adding even more of the game modification options that was available before. Theoretically, it is now possible to modify the game with any programming language and change literally every aspect of the game, from user interface to the game mechanic. Another change, this time related to the project management. During the work on the next release I discovered a new version control system, Fossil to which I moved the game code from Git.

The plans for the next big release

The plans for the future are to finish work on the game UI and finally starts works again on adding new things to the game. The list of ideas is quite long, thus probably it will take "some" time before I finish it. I don't have any precise plans what exactly will be added to the next big stable version. As Woody Allen said: *If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.* Thus, we will see what exactly will be added to the next version. Of course, I expect that by next a few weeks almost every Sunday will bring a bug fix update to the current stable version :)

At the end, I want to thank everyone for help with maintaining the game: reporting problems, proposing ideas and encouraging to work on it. Also, of course, thank you for reading this and have fun. :)