TSC 2.1.0 released

Written by quintus on 2020-05-18.

Stable version 2.1.0 released

The TSC team is proud to announce that after five years of development, the new stable version 2.1.0 of The Secret Chronicles of Dr. M. (TSC) has been released to the public yesterday.

This is the first stable release of TSC 2 after version 2.0.0 was released back in 2015. I would like to take this as an opportunity to thank every single contributor to the new TSC version. We know that there are still so many things that could be improved, but we believe that after five years, it is more than overdue to issue a new release even if some features did not make it into 2.1.0 which we would have liked to (for instance, there is still no replacement for turtle boss that was removed in 2.0.0). But still, this release is in many parts better than the preceeding 2.0.0 release from 2015. New enemies, an improved level editor interface, new music, and several bugs fixed. And last but not least, this is the first stable version of TSC that finally compiles again on current Linux distributions.

If you want to help TSC now for the next release, please note: we are urgently looking for a graphics artist. There are numerous tickets on the tracker open that require someone to draw SVGs for TSC, but as of now, there is no graphic artist in our team anymore. If you are one or know one, please speak up here on the mailing list, on the forum or in our IRC channel #secretchronicles on Freenode! There will be no new enemies or other graphical additions until we find a graphics artist.

The release has been tagged on the Git repository as v2.1.0 and has been uploaded to our web server. You can find the download links below.

We welcome Linux distributions to package this new stable version of TSC. If you would like to package TSC and find problems with it, please report those problems on our tracker and we’ll see if we can resolve them for the next release.

Future of TSC

The 2.1.0 release terminates an effort of many years to finally get TSC into a distributable state again. We have fought with numerous API break and backward compatibility break issues from our dependencies for this release, which probably are the largest part of source code changes between version 2.0.0 and 2.1.0. TSC still has a large number of dependencies, and it is a goal for future versions to reduce this number of dependencies, so that such problems may not occur again.

It is too early to give definitive statements about TSC’s future, but we expect there to be some maintenance releases and probably smaller feature releases over the next years. The large overhaul that should at some point result in TSC3 however is not anywhere near to see.

What has changed since version 2.0.0?

  • Several new background music tracks
  • Switched some SMC graphics for original TSC ones
  • New enemies: Larry and Doom Larry, which fuse and ultimately explode if hit
  • Improvements to level scripting
  • Editor UI overhauled
  • Multiple level exits with different overworld pathes possible now
  • Levels load much faster compared to 2.0.0
  • Secret Area markers are available in the editor
  • New in-game scripting console on pressing [F7]
  • Several bugfixes, including some crash fixes
  • Several build fixes
  • Several scripting API documentation fixes, and build documentation fixes
  • Upgrade CEGUI dependency from 0.7.9 to 0.8.7
  • Support for and requirement of a C++11-capable C++ compiler
  • It compiles again on modern Linux distributions!
  • New desert levels by datahead. They were added to the campaign in world 3.
  • Scripting documentation system was overhauled and the dependency on RubyGems for the scripting API generation was dropped
  • Level music is now stopped rather than faded out on death
  • New great title theme music by refi64
  • Scripting expansion packs are back
  • Experimental build support for FreeBSD/OpenBSD

The CEGUI upgrade deserves a separate mention. CEGUI 0.8.x broke their API and as more and more people do not have access to the outdated CEGUI 0.7.9, it was necessary to conduct this upgrade. This upgrade however bound so many of TSC’s team resources that the 2.1.0 release ultimately ended up with fewer new features than it was originally intended. Now that the upgrade has been done it should be much easier to compile TSC on modern Linux distributions than it was the case with the old 2.0.0 stable release.

A feature that did sadly not make it into 2.1.0 is a story. We have adopted a final story draft for the future of the game, though, which can be found online.

The levels contained in version 2.1.0 are mostly equivalent to those in 2.0.0. Some small changes have been made to the levels, and a few new levels included. We encourage users to provide quality levels on the mailing list or forum for inclusion into TSC. Levels that implement parts of the story mentioned above are preferred.

Download

Source Code

Binary Downloads

Windows

Linux

quintus
On behalf of the TSC team.