Marauroa 3.8

There are a number of small new features in Marauroa 3.8 that will be explained on this page.

Version compatibility

Client/Server

Summary

Different protocol versions of client and server can now talk to each other

Reason for change

Some other features (see below) required a change of the Marauroa protocol. But it is impractical to force all users to update their clients when a new server version is installed. This is especially true because there is a playdeb Ubuntu package for Stendhal that is usually a couple of days behind.

Impact on Marauroa users

There is no negative impact on projects using Marauroa because games should already check the version of the game client.

Details

The client sends the first message with the protocol version it prefers. The server will check if it understands this version. If it does understand that version it will make sure that it sends only messages to the client with up to that version.

So an old client which speaks version 31 can talk to a server which speaks version 33 (Marauroa 3.8). The server will automatically downgrade all answers to version 31. As a result some information like details in the S2CCharacterList Message will be missing, of course.

To makes things compatible the other way round, the server will now accept messages up to version 40. It will reply with the highest protocol version it can support.

If we want to make some changes to the client-->server protocol that cannot be understood by an old server, we need a little jump in protocol version numbers. But I guess this case is rather unlikely. The normal use case are outdated clients.