Differences between Dune II v1.0 and v1.07

[MrFlibble]

Since there seems to be no detailed list of changes introduced by the official v1.07 patch for Dune II, I decided to compile one myself. The list is probably not complete though, as it is based mostly on observation.

Bug/error fixes:

• Fixed the "Frigate arrival in T-0" Starport bug.
• The numbers of units in stock at the Starport that are defined in each mission are now used correctly (there were some problems with it in v1.0).
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused Carryalls that drop scripted reinforcements to get stuck at the border of the map.
• Fixed a small graphical glitch on the Atreides Mentat screen.
• Fixed a broken frame in the Gun Turret animation.
• The corners of the map are no longer revealed from shroud at the beginning of the mission.
• Fixed some minor errors in briefing texts.

Gameplay changes:

• The AI now rebuilds destroyed structures more actively and frequently.
• Building repair cost has been reduced.
• Palace repairs now cost nothing. This is actually a bug, read more here.
• The maximum overall number of buildings that can be present on the map reduced from 81 to 80.
• The player can now build concrete slabs and wall segments even if the building-per-map limit is reached (in v1.0, no construction whatsoever is possible if the building limit is reached, although concrete slabs and walls are actually not affected by it).
• The saboteur is now visible to the player.
• The maximum number of saboteurs that can be present on the map at any given time reduced from 3 to 2.
• Ornithopter hit points increased from 10 to 25.
• Troopers and Launchers are now able to fire at air units.
• The maximum number of Sandworms that can be present on the map at a time reduced from 3 to 2.
• The number of units a Sandworm will swallow before disappearing reduced from 4 to 3.
• Fremen units and Sandworms are no longer ignored by turrets.

Interface changes:

• The "Repair" button on the sidebar now starts flashing red when a building is below 50% its original HP (in v1.0, the button always flashes red regardless of the damage).
• Most unit orders can now be correctly issued from keyboard by pressing the first letter of the corresponding order's name.
• Pressing the "A" key no longer can be used to issue a "Harvest" order to a Harvester.
• Pressing the "G" key now orders a combat unit to guard.
• Pressing the "H" key no longer orders a combat unit to retreat.
• The wormsign is now announced for the Atreides player (in v1.0, the wormsign would only be announced if the owner of the sandworm was not Fremen, presumably because the Atreides and the Fremen are allied).

Miscellaneous:

• Added two more player ranks ("Chief Warlord" and "Emperor") to the scoring system.
• The Fremen colour scheme has been made a bit brighter.
• Removed several animation frames of the Heavy Factory, Repair Facility and High-Tech Factory.
• Removed two Mentat database entries: "Sardaukar" and "Frigate" (the corresponding image of the Frigate had also been removed from the files of the US patched version; it is still present in the Eurpoean releases).
• Certain characters from the 6p font (used on the game sidebar) have been narrowed down by 1 pixel. These include C, E, F and L.

[Nyerguds]

haha, you added the palace bug?

[MrFlibble]

What do you mean by "added"? ??? My aim is to list all the differences between the versions, no matter if they are tweaks, improvements, changes or bugs.

[Nyerguds]

I just mean you edited the post to add it to the list :P

[MrFlibble]

I'm trying to keep the list updated as new facts are discovered. The Palace repairs entry was there from the beginning, with the only difference that it said it was possibly a bug. Now this is confirmed.

[dynasty]

It seems that spice silo storage was reduced from 1005 to 1000 credits. Refineries are unchanged though.

Removed several animation frames of the Heavy Factory, Repair Facility and High-Tech Factory.

Were frames actually removed from the heavy factory? There are two tank leaving the factory frames, though the second is rarely seen due to timing issues.

[Nyerguds]

Just checked, and it seems to cut the animation short, sometimes even after the first frame.

The full anim should be 4 frames: #4: tank half out + flag up, #5: tank half out + flag down, #6: tank all the way out + flag up, #7: tank all the way out + flag down.

[edit]

I checked the other versions with my editor, and they all have the same frames for the animation. Didn't check v1.00 gameplay behaviour though

[edit again]

If the factory is blocked, and the unit is waiting to be taken out by carryall, the full animation DOES play, and loops on the last 2 frames, as the script in the exe dictates.

I could make it more likely to show the full tank coming out anim by replacing frame 5 by a copy of frame 7 in the icon.map file.

Oh, on a related note, it seems the tile editor uses 1-based indices, whereas the game uses 0-based ones. Annoying X_x

[Nyerguds]

I found another version difference... I can give much longer names in the Hall of Fame in v1.00.

[edit]

Nevermind. It's only on the first levels. It seems related to the length of the title it still has to add behind it :|

[Nyerguds]

It seems the "production ended" animation bug isn't version dependent. Just played through v1.00, and it reacts exactly the same.

[MrFlibble]

Thanks for all the research! For some reason I thought that in v1.0 the Heavy Factory animation plays all the frames while in v1.07 it's always cut at the half-exiting tank. I even thought that it could have been on purpose, since the last frames show a unit exiting the structure that is definitely a tank, while the player could have been building something else entirely.

BTW, have you noticed that while the tank in the animation does not look like any particular vehicle in Dune II, it bears a very close similarity the the Nod/Allied Light Tank from C&C/Red Alert?

[Nyerguds]

lol, it's just a generic tank.

Hmm. I just captured a CY in v1.0, let it finish the structure it made, and placed it, and it was owned by the side I captured the CY from, lol. Was that fixed in 1.07?

[MrFlibble]

Hmm. I just captured a CY in v1.0, let it finish the structure it made, and placed it, and it was owned by the side I captured the CY from, lol. Was that fixed in 1.07?

Right, now I remember something similar. Man, I ran those tests quite some time ago.

Not sure, but I think it's fixed in v1.07. Then again, maybe not :)

Also a thing I've noticed is that if you capture a Windtrap, you'll get the additional power but the overall power consumption will no longer be correctly calculated: the extra power from a captured Windtrap is not counted, and the power usage info you get when clicking any Windtrap will tell you that you have insufficient power if the base starts to use some of the captured Windtrap's output. I think it's true in both v1.0 and v1.07.

[Nyerguds]

heh.

Well, I made an expanded version of my fix for the repair facility and hi-tech factory, with the adjusted second frame for the heavy factory's "production ended" animation, to show the tank exiting faster.

dune/dune2patch/rep-hi-hv-fix.zip

Of course, to use this, you either have to put the files in dune.pak, or put them in the game folder and disable xms loading on dune.pak with my editor

[Nyerguds]

You know how the graphics files in 1.00 are all in a different format than the 1.07 ones? Well, I found out why.

Recently, I've been digging into game file formats, to help out some Italians with their efforts in translating old games (the same guys who translated C&C95 to Italian), and pretty quickly I came across compression in graphics formats. The simpler of those, RLE, simply collapses duplicate bytes, but there's a more complex one, namely LZW, which took me quite some time to wrap my head around. To give you some context, LZW is the compression used in GIF images.

Now, the people of the RedAlert++ project told me that the older Westwood games used LZW compression, but around the time Dune II was released, the patent owner of LZW was starting to notice that loads of companies used LZW in their applications without paying royalties. Because of this, Westwood developed their own LCW algorithm, which is a variety of LZW (combined with RLE I think) which differs enough from normal LZW to fall outside its patent.

So I suspect the v1.00 files are all compressed with LZW, and the files were replaced with LCW-compressed files in v1.07 to avoid any chance of legal troubles

As a side note, this means that fairly soon I'll have a reader/converter for the Dune II v1.0 graphics formats

Edited September 14, 2017 by Nyerguds

[drnovice]

Beautiful discovery!

We'll wait for news about it.

[Nyerguds]

Turns out that LZW was not the reason for the update. The real change is a tiny upgrade of the file headers, which got one byte bigger.

Oh right. I got a tool that can convert Dune II v1.0 WSA now

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/project_stuff/2017/CnC64FileConverter/release/

Edited March 18, 2018 by Nyerguds