Paradise 2000 Netrek Client

News

Download

Features


Paradise 2000 represents my bend of the Paradise Netrek client. It's not a fork, because that would imply parallel development, but no one else has done anything with the client since about five years ago. Paradise 2000 is in fact one of the most, if not the most, actively developed Netrek clients available today. It is for Linux (and FreeBSD) only, and is not open source*. Don't let the Paradise name fool you, it works just fine on standard bronco servers. Nobody has even played a game of Paradise Netrek for years!

News

Check the README file for a list of changes.

Download

You can download the latest version, from the Netrek FTP Archive, or Speakeasy's server. The Netrek FTP site may be out of date.
From Speakeasy paradise-2000-rc6.tar.gz
www.netrek.org paradise-2000-rc6.tar.gz

The package contains static binaries for the client and sound system, as well as 32 position bitmap albums. There are three static binaries in the archive, one for each of libc5, glibc2.0, and glibc2.1, because static binaries are not compatible between the different library versions. If you don't know what C library your Linux system has, just try them one by one. The package also comes with a base configuration file, the comments for each of the many options serve as the most complete client documentation around.


Features

The biggest new feature of the client, not found in any other, is the sound system. While the old Paradise client, Ted Turner, COW, and COW ports (Netrek1999,2000) have a simple sound effect system, it's crap. Especially the one used by COW. The Paradise/Ted Turner one is better, and is partially written by me, though you wouldn't know that*. The Paradise 2000 sound system has psychoacoustic stereo effects that place sounds based on where they happen. If someone on the left blows up, you can tell they are on the left just from the sound. The newest version of Paradise-2000 has a sound system with speech output using IBM's ViaVoice TTS. If a teammate sends a carrying message, the client will actually say something like, "F one carrying five to org."

A complete list of changes can be found in the client README, but here is a short summary of some of the new features.

As you can see, there are quite a few things. Something I hope to add is more sound effects and background music with MP3 technology. Creating a nice high quality sound effects library is the hold up.
Why not open source
If it bothers you that this isn't open source, why don't you take a look at all the open source software that I've contributed too, and ask yourself, have you done as much? If not, you're nothing but a hypocrite and have no right to tell me what I can and can't do with my work. I've had someone take my code, change one line, and then replace my name with their name and take credit for my work so many times that I'm just sick of it. Experience has told me that if I release my code, someone will just rip me off, and I'm not going to let it happen.


Trent Piepho
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