1.3a - 2003/09/28
=================

Oops, I did a mistake in the last release; the "Recent Games" menu was
behaving very weird (newly loaded games didn't show up until QTads was
restarted).  This release only fixes this bug; nothing else.



1.3 - 2003/09/26
================

Although this version lacks enough changes to justify a new release, I
nonetheless decided to release it because of the upcoming IF
competition (http://www.ifcomp.org).

  - Added a "Recent Games" menu.  (Was about time this got added.)

  - Fixed a bug where the mouse cursor was staying invisible when it
    shouldn't (when the window was losing keyboard focus, for example).

  - Enhanced the documentation in the sources, since several people
    have found QTads' code quite useful.  (Where "several" is any
    number between 1 and 2.)

  - Updated the Tads virtual machine to version 2.5.8/3.0.6k.



1.2 - 2003/08/10
================

  - QTads now supports italic text.  Previously, the <em> tag was
    rendered in bold, and <i> was ignored; both are now rendered in
    italics (as in HTML TADS).  Furthermore, the <strong> tag is now
    recognized and rendered in bold italics ("strong emphasis").

  - Every pair of ASCII dashes ("--") is now replaced with a
    typographical em-dash in Tads 2 games (Tads 3 games don't need
    this, since they already display em-dashes on their own).  This is
    useful for games that don't make use of the "&mdash;" Multimedia
    Tads character entity, or make the false assumption that character
    entities are not supported in text-only interpreters.  This feature
    can be enabled/disabled in the configuration dialog, and it works
    only in Tads 2 games.  (Tip: Try it with "Worlds Apart.")

  - Fixed two cosmetic bugs in the command history.

      1) When using the up/down key to cycle through the previous
         inputs, they were displayed using the game window's font
         settings, not the user input settings.

      2) The current command is not saved in the history anymore if it
         is the same as the previous one.

  - Fixed the (hopefully) last remaining bugs where it was possible to
    modify game-text.  (Leif Huhn provided this fix.)

  - Added "Help->Version Information" menu.

  - Changed some icons.  I hope you like them.

  - The documentation has been restructured.

  - Updated the Tads virtual machine to version 2.5.8/3.0.6j.



1.1 - 2003/05/28
================

The QTads homepage has moved from Tripod to SourceForge.  The new
location is: http://qtads.sourceforge.net (the old page at
http://members.lycos.co.uk/realnc/qtads still exists, but contains
nothing except a pointer to the new location).  If you had links to the
old site, please update them.

  - QTads now uses Unicode when running Tads 3 games.  This means that
    Multimedia TADS character entities like typographical (``curly'')
    quotes and dashes of different lengths (en- and em-dashes) are
    displayed correctly.  The only limitation is that the font you use
    must support these characters; most fonts out there support them,
    but I saw a few ones that don't.

  - QTads is also able to display typographical quotes and dashes in
    Tads 2 games.  Note that this feature must be supported by the game
    itself; if the game simply prints out a normal (") quote instead of
    a typographical one, QTads can do nothing about it.  See the TIPS
    file for a list of games that use typographical quotes instead of
    normal ones.

  - Support for Tads 2 character mapping files has been added.  QTads
    now provides mapping files for every ISO 8859 (known as ISO Latin)
    character set that Tads 2 is able to use (located in the charmaps/
    subdirectory).  Note that QTads doesn't provide (or need) mapping
    files for Tads 3 games, since it uses Unicode.

  - QTads can display curly apostrophes in every game.  This can be
    disabled in the configuration dialog.

  - The "Curly quotes" setting in the configuration dialog has been
    implemented.



1.0 - 2003/05/05
================

This is the first "stable" version of QTads (not that the previous one
was unstable or something).

  - User input can now be displayed in any combination of bold, italic
    or underline.

  - Added a clock that keeps track of how much time a game is running.

  - Added internationalization support and translated everything to
    German.  (Hmm, no Greek yet.)  This also includes support for
    translations of the Qt library itself (as documented in the INSTALL
    file now).

  - Ctrl+C (Copy), Ctrl+V (Paste) and similar shortcuts are working
    now.  (In earlier versions, the selection got removed as soon as
    Ctrl was pressed.)

  - QTads doesn't eat up CPU cycles when idle now, which means you can
    let it run in the background and it won't slow the system down.
    In earlier versions, QTads was using about 30% of CPU time on my
    system when idle; now it uses only 0.1%.  (Christophe Antoine
    provided this fix.)

  - Fixed the fix of the fix of the statusline.  (It's obvious that I
    can't code.)  It should not word-wrap without need now and not
    resize its height the first time it prints something.

  - Fixed Tads 2 doublespacing problems.  Note that the new T3 VM
    doesn't support doublespacing anymore; it's handled by the game
    file itself.  This means that older games (compiled with earlier
    Tads 3 versions) will never use doublespacing while new ones will
    always use it, no matter how QTads is configured.  This raises a
    problem I don't know how to fix; doublespacing in block-justified
    text doesn't work as it should.  This is a bug in Qt's text
    renderer.

  - Fullscreen-mode is saved when quitting QTads.

  - Millisecond precision is now supported when the VM asks QTads for
    the elapsed time (os_get_sys_clock_ms()).



1.0 beta - 2003/03/21
=====================

This is the first public release of QTads.

  - Theme support added.
    A "theme" is a set of preferences (colors, margins, fonts, etc)
    that can be saved and then activated at runtime.  The themes can be
    edited in the configuration dialog and then activated using the new
    Display->Theme menu.

  - Fixed a bug where QTads was trying to restore a saved game when
    loading Tads 3 games and failed with a message saying that "this
    interpreter can't restore [...]"

  - Tads 3 text rendering is more "smooth" now.  This fixes the
    "scrolling in steps" problem.

  - Changed the frame around the game window.  This fixes some visual
    bugs related to margins.

  - Fixed a bug in the statusline where both parts of it (text and
    score) were equally wide, no matter how much text they contained.

  - Further reduced the statusline's height.

  - The makefile's "dist" target should now be able to create a working
    source archive of QTads.

  - Improved dependency tracking in the project file.  All files should
    correctly be recompiled, no matter how deep the dependency-nesting
    is in each case.  This eliminates the problem where a
    "touch tads2/os.h" (or similar) was required in order to achieve a
    recompilation.

  - The PageUp and PageDown keys can now be used to scroll up or down.

  - Added a few more keyboard shortcuts (like restoring, restarting,
    saving, scrolling, etc) and documented them in a new dialog
    (Help->Shortcuts).



1.0 alpha 3 - 2003/03/17
========================

This version was a private beta-testing release.

The main change in this version is the included T3 VM.  It's a bit
difficult to test QTads with Tads 3 games, since only a few have been
released.  The games I tested with are:

  * The Tads 3 Library Sample Game (Mike Roberts)
  * Forever Always (Iain Merrick)
  * Eric's Gift (Joao Mendes)
  * The Demon's Eye, 2003/03/01 (Guilherme De Sousa, not released yet)
  * Lost In Somewhere (my own WIP, not released yet)

QTads lacks banner-support, so the library sample game is
semi-functional in QTads.  I hope to add banners in the next version.
Note that Tads 3 doesn't use HTML for banners.  It uses an API, so
banners can be implemented even in non-HTML interpreters.

As far as I know, at the time of this writing QTads is the only X11
non-KDE interpreter with Tads 3 support!  Wheee... :)

Overview of changes:

  - Basic support for Tads 3 games.

  - Restructured source directory layout.
    QTads is now built from and in the distribution's root directory,
    not tads2/qt.



1.0 alpha 2 - 2003/03/14
========================

This version was a private beta-testing release.

QTads has got a homepage: http://members.lycos.co.uk/realnc/qtads/
This is now the main distribution point for new versions.

Thanks to the betatesters (listed in the interpreter's "About" dialog),
this version has many improvements over the previous one.  The list
below includes the most visible and/or useful changes.

  - Now compiles with GCC 2.95.x.
    Tested with 2.95.3.

  - Fixed a bug in the random-number generator.
    Games that make heavy use of random numbers should now behave as in
    most other interpreters.

  - Fixed a few bugs that allowed the user to modify game text.

  - The game window no longer performs a top-to-bottom scroll when
    exiting the configuration dialog.

  - The "Doublespace" option in the configuration dialog is now saved
    when quitting QTads.

  - "About" dialog.
    "No program should be without one! [sic]"

  - More menus as well as a toolbar have been added.
    QTads is now almost useable! ;)

  - Fixed a compilation problem in src/missing.cc.
    Some systems were unable to compile QTads because a system-header
    #include was missing.

  - Window position and size are now preserved between QTads sessions.
    If this doesn't work as expected, please report it (some window
    managers are broken, but I can include special code for them; if I
    know how they behave, that is).

  - Text rendering is now less noticeable.
    This eliminates the delay when switching to bold text and back.

  - The "Top" and "Bottom" margins are no more.
    Most people found them annoying.  The rest (including me)
    considered them useless toys.

  - The DEBUG variable has been removed from the project file.
    To compile the debug version of QTads, the BUILD variable must be
    used.  Like this:

        qmake BUILD=debug

    The default is "BUILD=release".

  - QTads now builds successfully on systems that lack the
    single-threaded Qt library.
    The project file now uses the threaded library by default, since
    that's the one KDE is using.  If the threaded lib cannot be found,
    the single-threaded lib will be used.

  - The game window's context menu (also known as "right-click menu")
    has been removed completely.
    It didn't work anyway.  I hope to fix this in the next version.
    Suggestions as what the menu should contain (or not) are welcome.

  - Improved configuration dialog design (more compact).
    This includes a fix that prevents the preview from growing too
    large when selecting huge font sizes.

  - Command editing (including history) optimized to the speed of
    light.
    This should lower QTads' system requirements a bit; try it on a P60
    or similar.

  - QTads now prompts for a game when none has been specified in the
    command line.

  - A nicely formatted message is now shown when the current game ends.

  - It is no longer possible to close the application without the game
    being notified.
    Previously, it was possible that the TADS VM was still executing
    although the window has been closed, requiring the user to do a
    Ctrl+C or send a kill-signal.

  - It is no longer possible to choose a unit for the margin values.
    Values are now always in pixels.  Being able to choose between
    "characters" and "pixels" was, more or less, a useless feature.

  - Command-line options have been removed.
    Since the default command-line options of the TADS VM were a bit
    wacky to handle, they have been removed completely.  I'll implement
    native options in the next version.  The only option still
    recognized is the game's filename.

  - Statusline: decreased the height, disabled text-selection, and
    changed appearance (a bit more flat).

  - Typing text while the mouse cursor is inside the game's text will
    hide the mouse cursor.  Just move it to make it visible again.

  - Lots of other things not worth mentioning here.



1.0 alpha - 2003/02/01
======================

This version was a private beta-testing release.
