[Cactus] 2024-12-28-1800 now available! Cactus 3.1.0 Released! cnc-ddraw bumped to 7.1.0.0.

fearedbliss · Dec 28, 2024

Hello all,

I'm proud to announce that Cactus 3.1.0 is now available! There are a bunch of improvements, cleanups, polishing, and even some small new features. Please read the patch notes below, and take a look at the new screenshots which show all of the new UI updates, the new OOTB experience, and About page. The Cactus and cnc-ddraw updates are included in the latest Cactus Bundle (2024-12-28-1800). You can download them from the usual locations (Cactus Home Page or the Resource Manager).

Have fun and happy new year,

Jonathan

Cactus 3.1.0 Patch Notes

New Features
-------------

- You can now add a Note to each of your entries for your own recordkeeping.
This allows you to provide additional information for yourself without having
to workarounds (like making longer label names or using the flags field as
additional text area. Using flags may cause issues since that field is passed
to the game launcher). The Note will also be displayed in the main Cactus
window.
- There is now an About button that displays various information such as the
Author, Version, and direct clickable links to Cactus, Cactus Ports Collection,
and The Moving Caravan. Previously some of these links were only shown once
during the OOTB screen but were never shown again. This allows for a cleaner
OOTB screen, and also for people to easily be able to go to the mentioned
links easily.

Improvements
-------------

- There is now a completely new and dedicated OOTB experience window that is
shown the first time Cactus is ran. It has been fully redesigned to allow
for all of the new information introduced in 3.0.0 to be displayed more
cleanly and elegantly.
- Increased the size of various windows and controls throughout the app to
allow for more information to be displayed. You'll now be able to see
around 15 entries (up from 10) in Cactus before the vertical scrollbars
appear. You'll also be able to see more of the Platform Name, Label, and
other information on the main screen before they start getting cut off.
- The entire header is now removed. The information in each entry is pretty
self explanatory. Removing this allows us to reclaim the UI space to continue
to provide a minimalistic and elegant experience, and allows us to have more
entries shown on the screen at any one time, without substantially increasing
the Cactus window size. This also makes the previous visual weirdness between
the header and an entry being slightly misaligned.
- Removed some remaining deprecation code.
- Other minor improvements and tweaks.

Bug Fixes
-------------
- Fixed an outdated message that still mentioned the "Last Ran" column when it
should have said "Active".