Welcome to the January 2023 release of Fallout 2 Community Edition. There are many updates in this version, here are some key highlights:

• Improved rendering - Significant boost to performance on large resolutions (and battery life on mobile devices). See #165 for tech notes.
• iOS support - Yes, Fallout 2 can be finally run on iOS (albeit not hassle free, see readme for installation instructions). The controls are far from being perfect, but at least it runs smoothly both on iPhone and iPad (#167).
• Worldmap Improvements - A couple of enhancements that makes worldmap more visually appealing.
• Combat and AI - Some fixes to expected combat stuff and improvements to AI.

Sfall

Despite the integration of Sfall being a top priority, there is not much progress here.

@sonilyan implemented support for wide interface bar (#188). Together with side panels (fa058f24b4b7a86dc8e7001b24a52daa9ffbe9fd) you can enjoy familiar Sfall look in CE. One thing to note is that appropriate art should be unpacked and stored in your data directory. I'm sure many of you don't understand what that means, just hold your breath for next release.

Notable improvements:

• Stretchable splash screen (8a4ce6c658046059ed7d59f2d7580e31d396e67f)
• Game mode tracking (dc90beb69628ce227a2e061ac74ede985d122070)
• Custom message lists support (fe9ba9171ef1f5461d5ed45cb19abd86bbcad2b4)
• Dialog options numbering (897ff2bbd22dcc85c2f1327aa68d7061bed14489)
• Some scripting functions (tracked in #200)

Worldmap Improvements

One of the coolest update and my personal favorite for this release - fade in/out animation when using worldmap (cc1562b056573bea48a97ffcb8d7e05a6c826ee3).

Notable improvements:

• Added shadow to city labels (248d6dfb9298b7f50ecb3489850d2547174d7e02)
• Fixed car disappearing after using town map (e02dcdf69d6f15c17540bdf7df6bb3c9a1813c8f)
• Fixed special encounter blinking icon (95cc863fde9163546e14fd2c0989066c12b30a64)
• Fixed worldmap position calculation (3ec827d5c1f0f04eddc56b64b8678f1e308d0966)
• Fixed some visual artifacts (9976728e0454b7e1c06e632a50782cea59316742, b5701fb9b9f9b3c77aa213dd52591b9b295f341f)

Combat and AI

@drjfaust fixed several combat bugs with #204 which were unnoticed since Reference Edition. With ad3860790c42c859c6a8ac94e86319d1436f9629 wandering NPCs will no longer ignore player and will join the fight on sight.

There is an improvement to "Whomever is attacking me" party member behaviour (34259269a4d1f4c6b4c5a357f902ce21a094496a). The party members will no longer switch targets randomly (especially in big fights). Instead they will try to keep fire on their initial target as long as this target keeps attacking dude.

In addition to this, there are changes to how AI is using drugs (0e11569397c6236034b071438b8f715a362069eb). It includes Sfall fixes and improvements and adds some randomization to the picking process. Instead of using first available drug (according to internal order of items in inventory), we group drugs into buckets (primary desires and everything else) and randomly pick from one of the buckets.

Mods

Some improvements and fixes have been made to run Nevada and Sonora. These mods (at least their original versions) do not require Sfall, but have unexpected scripting style, which resulted in several crashes. Please open up an issue if you've completed either Nevada or Sonora.

There is a separate list for tracking progress towards Olympus support (#200). Most of unimplemented functions are used in unnecessary global scripts like party controls, so it's likely playable.

Some examples of errors discovered and fixed:

• Fixed testing pointers for nulls (ad9b8586e9f701ea59c426420ebccadb88ecc8c9)
• Fixed ini section parsing (a70912d3115a0b81480667b35f17efd70d5b5177)
• Fixed color setters (01f264e0c2e4445a2c3c3bf84a1d1c028708b32e)
• Fixed selecting scripted windows (9c6daa4abe18e290be1259e5914d9a28f5b594b9)
• Fixed setting scripted button handlers (8ee0f478adf15efbc59574580684cae323b8b3c7)
• Fixed storing pointers in global variables (6c03e4e29327e6ad1e5ac0779cdd5619793ed1ae)

Android

@sonilyan identified one of the memory alignment issues (#187). This kind of bugs usually lead to crashes, but totally compiler/environment/processor dependent. This explains why the game crashed on some Android devices.

Eventually more undefined behaviours were found, the last one was fixed with 2714dc1ea14b3786e28be3a631bae0dd43fe3b8f. Thanks to @APAmk2 for promptly confirming this issue is finally resolved.

#206 added support for on-screen keyboard.

Other

There are over a hundred of other fixes and improvements which can be found here. Thanks everyone for your contributions to Fallout 2 Community Edition.