Hello everyone. You know that 97e release you've been looking forward too? Well, we're killing it. There will be no 97e. Sorry.

No 97e?!
Yeah, sorry about that. There's a very specific reason for it, though....we're releasing it as 98a!

Yes, the upcoming version you all know and love is so incredibly huge that we're releasing it as an entire NEW series of Skulltag! We were looking through the changelog, and we said to ourselves, "you know, there's just too much good stuff in this release to just give it a letter! This represents more than two years of work, dedication, and love. We want a number!"

And thus, the 98x series of Skulltag was born.

So, what's new?
Well, if you don't know the whole story about 97e 98a yet, don't worry! We've been working on this release alongside 97d for several years now, so it's a literal treasure trove of changes. Fully understanding what's new is therefore a bit of of a challenge!

Thus, every other day or so, I'll be posting a preview topic! Each will highlight a cool new features of the release. It's a tough job, with so much to pick from! (FMODex support, voting redesign, the ability to mute annoying players, support for voodoo dolls, skulltag.wad in 10MB and Skulltag "lite", etc) But I'll do my best.

We'll be doing some side things, (like releasing new wallpapers for the release), too! So follow us on twitter* or Facebook to stay in on the action. We can post informal updates and messages there that don't make it into the newsposts.

And I'll see you in a few days!

*If you don't use Twitter but have an RSS reader, you can use our update RSS feed.

This was really called for considering the tons of hardwork that was put into 97e98a

YES

Also, I heard this version is gonna be less laggy. Is that true? If so, I think I can finally play Skulltag properly.
Great work guys

Haha you know, I've looked through the Skulltag changelogs, and I was just thinking "Damn, they really do a lot to JUST add a letter nowadays... look at the 95 series! A letter for 1-5 changes almost every time!"

Interesting development Can't wait for a 98A release!(I'll be able to play ALL the servers in native x64 linux then, hurray!)

EDIT: Moti : Well perhaps a tiny bit less, but I think you are thinking of the New Netcode Torr talked about putting in, however, this was delayed until 97F 99A? Basically people were complaining that it's been long enough, and several people were anxious for the ZDoom core to get updated again, which won't happen until the next release(doing this now would effectively nullify all the bugfixes and work the past... do to creating hundreds more because of the newer codebase).

Skullltag without lag.

=)

Yeah, and we're getting rid of that 97d4-RC2-BLAHBLAH3 nonsense. It'll just be 98a, clean and simple. The next will be 98b, and so on.

There were a few minor changes (like the rewritten, now accurate ping code), but it wasn't our main focus for this release.

Oh, okay. Skulltag 97E has been renamed to 98A. Cool. (Wait, the different numbers are supposed to be different series?)

Ah, very nice! All of that extra stuff at the end of the version name was so confusing/distracting. Anyways, I'm looking forward to this release!

Well... Glad to hear this is coming out I'll look forward to knowing how you can mute someone? Will it be by IP address or just that name until they disconnect and come in with a different one?

IP Address, but when you disconnect and reconnect your mutes are lost. Of course, you can always bind the "ignore" function(which mutes whoever)

Obligatory post addressing awesomeness of thread.

Awesome

That's just all I can say.

NICE! New series .

Great! No more build 1337, etc. If it's less laggy then HELL YEAH!! Totaly looking forward for this.

I assume this will have the same ZDoom features as 97e? If not, awesome anyway. If yes... double awesome.

Testing releases will still be determined by a build number. Only "stable" releases will be using the A.Bc scheme. However, this does mean the number after the letter should be gone though and certainly the RC tag should be gone (since they were treated identically to stable releases). I don't think as a team we've decided exactly how testing releases are going to be done, but I imagine they're going to be 99a-r1337.

It is 97e so the feature set is identical. All we did was change the number and drop the letter down to 'a'.

This is all too awesome. I can't wait! Is it possible to merge some codes from the Eternity engine into SkullTag?

No word can qualify how great this is, good work !

Schweeeet *Is very excited*
This does merit the 98a name. It's far superior in many ways to 97d.

Finally! ... although it would have been nice to have some releases with smaller changes, and not a big chunk of new stuff every 69 years. Especially as soon as the new zdoom stuff gets put in... Since there's been always trouble like "WTF skulltag doesn't support this yet and it's been in zdoom for a year?"

If you accidently release something instable, that's where the quickfixes come in.

Anyways, hurrah!