Information on the v.81 Patch

[Oleo]

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that we won't be using Oleo's nice new UI cards in the v.81 Patch. The good news is that one of our talented artists ponied up a full set of them at the last minute (and they are already part of the current build).

Thats not bad news!

[ElectricEel]

It'll be nice to be able to play the next release, now that I am on holiday.

[khelvan]

I honestly don't know the release date target, but as all development is frozen and we are building the installer now, I can't imagine it will be too far off...

[Dooz]

Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap. The installer is being built! That means the patch is ready and as soon as the installer is as well, we'll have 0.81 in our hands! Now, I don't know how building an installer works or anything, but I can't imagine it taking more than a few days. I will assume this weekend is going to be an EB weekend.

[abou]

Probably a massive compile time though. Remember that 0.8 was over 1 GB and I imagine 0.81 is bigger; although the patch should be much smaller. So who knows?

[Kull]

Probably a massive compile time though. Remember that 0.8 was over 1 GB and I imagine 0.81 is bigger; although the patch should be much smaller. So who knows?

We're actually testing out some preliminary installers right now. As to size, therother did a great job and turned a 200MB rar into a 70MB exe. We have a file or two to add and a bit more testing before we feel certain its ready. Testing is absolutely necessary, btw, as TA proved by finding an awful gaffe in the install file. But yes, we are definitely in the pre-release mode right now.

[Tyfus]

Goody, goody axe handles!!!

[F for Fragging]

The new city graphics, which didn't make it to 0.80, will they be included in 0.81?

Besides that question, thanks a lot for the great work, EB team!

[Djurre]

Seems to me like the mod is closer to 0.89 if not 0.90 - not everything is finished and not every bug is fixed, but it is close enough to concentrate on the small things and not worrying about larger things like recruiting.

well they don't want to run out of digits, now do they.

[d'Arthez]

Well you can always do enormous amounts of digits - based on some kind of mathematical constant; eg. half the square root of three.

[Ludens]

The new city graphics, which didn't make it to 0.80, will they be included in 0.81?

Besides that question, thanks a lot for the great work, EB team!

They actually are included in 0.8, they just were installed in the wrong folder. If you want to see them in 0.8, follow the instructions in this post.

[DeathEmperor]

And to think I just bought RTW and BI Gold yesterday and .81 is coming out soon.

God has been very generous to me lately.

[abou]

God? You mean Iuppiter, right?

[DeathEmperor]

Of course! Great Jupiter on high 'dominus et deus'

[Boyar Son]

Nah pretty sure he meant our lord God.

Sry for ruining it...

[Kull]

Just so you guys know, the EB Team is not intentionally torturing our fans. We honestly hate the thought of people propped over keyboards hitting the "Refresh" button in desperate hope that the EB V.81 Release Announcement will appear at any moment. So.

As you may have surmised from some of the related threads around here, we've bumped into a few technical issues that remain unsolved. Nothing serious, but given the time of night, we've lost most of the European Team, and about half the Americans. So there will be a bit of a delay. That said, the Team has every expectation that we will be able to release the Patch sometime tomorrow (or today in most of the world).

And why do we think that? Because the public announcements are written and ready to go and we have the installer and it works great. In fact, several team members have already installed and tested the Final V.81 Patch. And soon, so will you.

[khelvan]

Now would be a great time for one of my "Very bad news about the release of..." posts. Unfortunately it wouldn't have the desired effect because it would actually be bringing bad news.

Heh...

[therother]

Probably a massive compile time though. Remember that 0.8 was over 1 GB and I imagine 0.81 is bigger; although the patch should be much smaller. So who knows?

The patch took around 15 mins to compile/compress 6174 files totaling some 508MB, down to one 72MB file. The 0.81 full installer takes a bit longer to build, probably around an hour, although it has to compile 19765 files, which gobble up a whopping 1.22GB, down to single 362MB exe. The compression stage is the toughest part on the machine: it uses ~750MB of memory. Which is a lot IMHO. But I suppose it gets a tougher workout when running EB!