[Singling] 2022-03-27-2000 - 1.00, 1.07, 1.08 Removed. Improved Players Command for 1.05b.

[fearedbliss]

Hello all,

The latest Singling (2022-03-27-2000) has removed all support for versions 1.00, 1.07, and 1.08. It also contains an Improved Players Command that contains a simple behavior parity bug fix for typing 'players' in upper case / mixed case letters and some internal refactoring. In 1.09b, typing 'PLAYERS' or 'pLaYeRs' will work perfectly fine just as 'players' does. The previous Singling release only worked with lower case letters. Since the Singling players command strives to maintain behavior parity between its implementation and the one in 1.09b, I've implemented this fix.

In regards to the removal of 1.00, 1.07, and 1.08, this removal is only for Singling support for them. All of the 1.00, 1.07, and 1.08 vanilla files (including not needing the CD to play the game - same as what Blizzard implemented in 1.12 due to newer computers no longer having a cd drive), are still fully included in Cactus and fully supported when it comes to version switching. Nothing changes there. This is only for the Singling changes that I maintain. Cactus was designed to allow people (and myself ;D) the ability to easily switch between any version of the game and to allow us to explore all of the versions, its history, and the specifics within each of these versions. Singling however was designed to provide non-gameplay modifications and improvements to specific versions of the game. For me, I'm primarily interested in maintaining support for versions that had a fundamental impact on the history of the game in a way that clearly delineates the major "eras", and that also had a fully working implementation of all game systems, in their most stable capacity. Specifically, allowing the player to focus on actually playing and immersing themselves in the game and building a good foundation, and not having to worry about whether or not a major game system does or doesn't work (MF, Treasure Class, and Runewords are just some examples of this) as they are playing the game. For these specific reasons, Singling removed support for all non stable and incomplete versions of the game.

The following versions are the three eras that I'm supporting:

• 1.05b (Original Classic)
• 1.09b (Original Expansion)
• 1.10 (New Expansion)

Through my years of playing all of these versions, and a lot of the other versions in between these patches, I believe these are the three eras of Blizzard North created patches that captures the game in its best and stable state at their time of release. I'm happy to be focusing on these particular versions since it may help others concentrate on enjoying the game in these different time periods without having to worry about other fundamental game system issues. Of course, I'm all about time traveling so I encourage exploration, however I'm also a time traveler that doesn't play different versions of the game in order to get specific "bugged" or "OP" items and try to forward them to other versions. On the contrary, I specifically believe in not forwarding anything and playing the game with the items that existed in that particular version itself. Thus the concept of "forwarding" items never applied for me and I was never really interested in that particular aspect of time traveling. I always preferred on actually playing the game and enjoying each of these patches within the particular patch in question.

Furthermore, this reduced set of supported versions allows me to increase maintainability of the project since it removes a lot of unnecessary noise and duplication of work. I'm sure there will be many out there that don't support this decision, but I hope you can understand the points I mentioned above.

I've updated the Singling documentation accordingly. But I'll like to highlight the Description & Goals section and the Patch Rationale section. I encourage everyone to read them.

As always, you can download Singling as part of Cactus.

- fearedbliss