postal/Postal Plus.txt

Postal Plus
===========

Postal Plus is basically the latest version of the code (which adds new
features and improvements) with the original Postal levels along with
the Special Delivery evels.

The basic method for getting here was to start with the "Postal Japan"
product and remove the japanese levels, characters and voices.



Changes since Super Postal (Japan versions)
------------------------------------------

Did a "share and branch" of the "Meister Japan" SourceSafe project to
create the "Meister Plus" SourceSafe project.  The new project was labeled
"From Meister Japan" to make it easier to see where the differences are.
It also makes it possible to rebuild the Postal Japan products from this
code base.

Added projects for Super Postal and Japan Add On.  They seem to work, but
unfortunately the final exe does not match the exe that was released to
Japan.  At least one reason for the difference is that the error messages
were changed and that affects all targets.  There may be other such
differences, but I'm not sure what they are and I didn't have time now
to try to work it all out.

Changed the workspace (.dsw) and project (.dsp) files to use the new
Postal Plus sourcesafe project.  This was a huge pain-in-the-ass.

Removed the no-longer-uesful Alpha processor build targets.

Added new icons to the resources, and instituted a new method for selecting
which icon will be used on a per-project basis.  In the Project Settings,
the Resources tab contains a field for "Preprocessor Definitions".  Enter
the name of the TARGET, such as "POSTAL_PLUS" or "SUPER POSTAL" and the
appropriate icon will be used (do NOT use TARGET=POSTAL PLUS, which will
not work).  When adding a new icon, simply define a "Condition" by
specifying the target for which the icon is intended.

Added START_MENU_ADDON_ITEM macro to control whether an additional item
is added to the single-player START menu.  Previously, the inclusion of
the additional menu item was based on the TARGET macro, which was more
difficult to maintain.

Added TITLE_SHOW_DISTRIBUTOR macro to control whether the distributor
screen is show during the title sequence.

Added conditional compilation sections to remove the Japanese characters
and their voices.  They are now only included if TARGET is set to either
of the Japanese products.

Removed an unwanted trace from SampleMaster.h (was previously added to
determine the value for MAX_SOUNDS).

Changed the Postal Plus MP project ("SPAWN") to use Pentium instead of
"Blend" for code generation (a left-over setting from long ago).  Also
changed the executable name from "pspawn" to "Postal Plus MP".

Added REQUIRE_POSTAL_CD macro to differentiate the test for the original
Postal CD from the test to see if the CD= path specifies a CD-ROM drive.

If the MUST_BE_ON_CD macro is used in debug mode, then even if the CD
path is not a CD-ROM drive, the program will be allowed to continue
after displaying the error message.

Added AUDIO_SAK_SEPARATOR_CHAR macro to allow easy setting of the
separator.  The Japanese products use a "j" instead of the original "_"
so as to differentiate the Japanese-language sak files from the
original English saks.

Moved the definition of the APP_NAME and PREFS_FILE macros into
CompileOptions.h, which should make it easier to maintain.

Made major changes to the error messages in Localize.cpp.  The general
intention was to reduce the verbage and instead refer the user to the
help files for detailed information on resolving the problems.

In several places, changed to using the ENGLISH_LOCALE macro instead of
a series of tests for specific LOCALE's.

Added MAIN_MENU_TITLE macro to control the text that is displayed at
the top of the game's main menu.  The value is set in CompileOptions.h
based on TARGET, LOCALE, etc.

Discovered strings that had not been properly converted into French or
German and took a rough stab at what they should have been.  This was
deemed to be better than what they had been set to, which was something
like "RETRANSLATE: ORIGINAL LEVELS".