Novadrop Progress Report - February 2024

[alexrp]

This is part of a series of progress reports that are posted with a monthly-ish cadence when there's notable progress made on the project.

v2.1.24 Release

v2.1.24 saw two major improvements:

• We added support for loading and saving older data center format versions (Support older data center format versions #19). This was a much-requested feature that should make life significantly easier for folks working on 'classic' servers, servers for the 32-bit client, etc.
  • To use this feature, pass the appropriate --architecture (X64, X86) and --format (V6X64, V6X86, V3) options to novadrop-dc commands.
• We optimized loading of XML data sheets slightly and made it use less memory, and optimized serialization of data center files to be around 30% faster.

Some minor improvements were made as well:

• We enabled FakePaddingCryptoTransform to handle arrays of any size (FakePaddingCryptoTransform should handle arrays longer than a single block #24).
• We eliminated some unnecessary allocations in the GameMessageServer window procedure.

Finally, we changed the data center loader to perform some region sanity checks regardless of the DataCenterLoadOptions.Strict property. This should have no meaningful effect since malformed regions would previously cause exceptions in other places anyway.

We decided to punt #33 since demand seems very low.

v2.1.25 and v2.1.28 Releases

v2.1.25 and v2.1.28 were minor bug-fixing and optimization releases, addressing some issues in the data center navigation APIs:

• DescendantsAt() will now evaluate the given path correctly (DescendantsAt() always returns an empty collection #108).
• DescendantsAt() will no longer allocate an enumerator for every node it descends into.
• SiblingsAndSelf() will no longer return an empty enumerable for the root node.

v2.2.7 Release

v2.2.7 was a housekeeping release that marked Vezel.Novadrop.Interop with [Experimental] (#117). This change was intended to be included in v2.0.280 but was forgotten.

This change means that users of this library will now get ND0001 errors when using its APIs, making it clear that the API surface is unstable. That diagnostic can then be suppressed in the project file with something like <NoWarn>$(NoWarn); ND0001</NoWarn>.

Future Plans

There are no changes to our plans for v3.0 since #104.

These are the planned features for v4.0:

• Figure out an AOT-friendly solution for the Protocol Buffers usage in ClientMessageServer #31
• Expose key flags on DataCenterNode #33
• Replace OrderedDictionary from Microsoft.Experimental.Collections with the BCL type in .NET 9+ #43
• Switch minimum TFM to net10.0 #132