Welcome all to 0.49.13

This release marks a significant milestone for MegaMek as we finish the second year of 0.49.x development. It features numerous fixes and quality-of-life improvements. The breadth of exciting additions is extensive, making it challenging to decide where to begin. We recommend reviewing the complete list to see all changes. However, we’ll highlight a few noteworthy ones for now. It’s important to note that this release, being the 13th in the cycle, may still contain a few new bugs due to all the awesome new stuff.

Here we go…

We have a few of VERY important things to be aware of in this release especially around the units.

  1. Anti-aliasing is now an option and if you’re having graphic slow downs or “chugging on the map” trying to change the option in client settings.
  2. We have made changes to the unit files to align them with the MUL by removing the term “(Standard)”. This was a significant data task and resulted in the removal of nearly 1000 instances of “(Standard)”. Our Quality Assurance (QA) team has thoroughly tested these name changes by creating campaigns and loading them with every unit. However, there is a potential risk in MekHQ with CPNX files, as they rely on unit names for matching. If you encounter any errors while loading your campaign file, we apologize for the inconvenience and kindly refer to the following post for further assistance.
  3. Lastly we’ve ripped the unofficial unit band aid off. We’ve moved the unofficial units zip out of this release. The reasons and poll for this was discussed here. Between our Discord and this poll 75% of players were good with us removing them. It allows us to have the releases be focused on canon units.

The file is still available but players will need to add the zip file manually. We have no plans to further support or add units into that zip. It would be safe to just set it up in a customs folder and move that folder between releases.

To add the units back:

  1. Download the zip file from the MegaMek Extras.
  2. You need to right click and use the “Save link as”
  3. Save this as a zip to the data\mechfiles folder of the program. - As a suggestion save this to a customs folder in the data\mechfiles
  4. On restart they will be added.

We continue to find small improvements in stability over 49.12 but we still aren’t 100% where we want to be. We know from experience that when we say this players generally stay away. But you can run both a stable release (0.48.0 or good dev release 0.49.12) you just need to keep them in separate folders. We need players to use Dev releases.

Remember that MekHQ campaign files aren’t backwards compatible so if move your campaign from an earlier version to this you can’t go back. But you can keep backups and play in both versions to see the difference.

MegaMek

See the notes above and below for specific things.

MegaMekLab

A big option to the unofficial record sheets, On record sheets, hit location and cluster tables can now be printed in place of the fluff image; activate this option in the record sheet settings. You can see an example here.

Remember to check the FILE-Configuration for all sorts of options for Record Sheets.

MekHQ

There isn’t a lot of MekHQ outside of some fixes, but we do have StratCon fixes.

MekHQ StratCon Alpha

StratCon is starting to get a little more work and bug fixes (see below). Nickargua the dev is looking for help and see here for how to help. It sounds complicated but it’s quite easy to make the files he’s looking for.

Stable 0.50.0 Status Update

We are still in the development portion of the current cycle. We’ve been able to implement a new version of Gradle (our build language) starting with the 0.49.11 release. As well as adding support for Java 17. This is still undergoing testing and we encourage players to use the programs with Java 17 but Java 11 remains our recommended choice for the .49.x Dev cycle. We are still working on the connection stability issues.

We’ve found the primary cause of these disconnects is the use the Unofficial “Simultaneous” options. These options create a host of issues and while they worked in 0.48.0 Stable the changes in this Dev Branch have made them problematic. As a fair warning we are considering removing them when we get to 0.50.0 Stable. These are the options we are referring too.

Sim Options

We are getting to a point where we are starting to talk about 0.50.0 Stable but we still have some significant things we need to complete and don’t anticipate a new Stable anytime soon. At this point we have some really good solid development releases and for security alone I’d recommend upgrading to Java 11 from Java 8.

Once that is done we’d recommend trying a dev release like 0.49.12. With a milestone of 0.50.0 we need to make sure we get it right.

Java 11 and Java 17

We’ve updated to Java 11, which means you’ll need to update to use the 0.49.x development branches. As Java is now open source, we recommend Adoptium Temurin 11 We have a help page for Windows and Mac. Further, for Linux, you should be able to use your package manager to install Adoptium Temurin from their repository. Finally, all our automated tests (with the exception of MegaMekLab) are done with Temurin 11.

This release implements support for Java 17. We need to stress this has had some testing and needs more players to use the programs with Java 17. But Java 11 remains our recommended version.

Social Media

We are also happy to announce we have an official MegaMek Discord. This is now our primary community location for the suite, providing superior voice support, individual channels, and assistance for the official public servers. There are also the following community Discords with regular MegaMek channels, namely Everything BattleTech and Classic BattleTech. We are also on Facebook, at MegaMek BattleTech and MegaMek for our group and page respectively.

Mac Users

Please check out this workaround for Mac Operating Systems.

Contributing

Please check out this document for contributing to the suite. Deadborder has us covered from land unit sprites and camos. But we desperately need sprites for aerospace units.

Updating Your Campaign

  1. Make backups of your campaigns and customs.
  2. Always treat each release as a stand alone release and only copy your data forward from older versions, never backwards.
  3. Do not copy MegaMek saves nor any preference file from a different version.

MegaMek Change Log

DOWNLOAD

MegaMekLab Change Log

DOWNLOAD

MekHQ Change Log

DOWNLOAD

Enjoy everyone!