Community News

By RANews.

Contents

Devember 2022
Retro Olympics 2022
RA Minecraft
Site Updates
- RAWeb v2.2.0
Emulator Updates
- RAIntegration v1.1.0
- RALibretro v1.4.0
RATools Updates
Discord Updates
Developer Compliance
DevQuest
- DevQuest Awards
- Vet Developer Progress

Devember 2022

It’s that time of year where we unite to destroy tickets

Devember🍂 2022, the annualy ticket clearing event, will run until December 23rd at 23:59 GMT.

Once again, both Developers and Non-Developers can participate. Players can provide saves/states to help knock out the tickets!

All necessary info can be found in the #🍂devember-2022 and #🍂devember-submissions Discord channles.

Quick Stats

16 participants have qualified for the hardcore badge!
9 participants have qualified for the softcore badge!
18 participants are still working toward a badge! (a lot of them are close thanks to the community bonuses)
111 Dev Wheel of Doom™️ challenges have been completed!
62 saves/states have been submitted to help clear out tickets!

Community Bonuses Applied

500 Total Tickets Resolved (20 points) (Goal reached on Nov. 22nd)
All Tickets from 2020 Resolved (15 points) (Goal reached on Nov. 26th)
1000 Total Tickets Resolved (50 points) (Goal reached on Dec. 1st)

Community Bonuses To Go

All Mega Drive Tickets (we’re at 83/122, 10 points)
All Tickets from 2021 Resolved (we’re at 189/293, 20 points)
All Early Set Tickets (we’re at 72/86, 10 points)

Please remember that the above points only apply to those who are actively participating

Hardcore Badge Requirements

Earn at least 150 points during the event and complete at least three Dev Wheel of Doom™️ challenges

Softcore Badge Requirements

Earn at least 100 points during the event and complete at least one Dev Wheel of Doom™️ challenge

Retro Olympics 2022

Join in on the Retro Olympics fun, The live-streamed competition where tons of RA’s strongest players are facing off against eachother today to defend the glory of their country & continent!

Twitch Stream:

New Retro Olympics Webiste in the making here.

All information you need will always be available in the Retro Olympics 2022 Schedule, available here.

RA Minecraft

RetroAchievement now has an official Minecraft server where you build anything you want in the most popular sandbox game ever created.

The server can be accessed at: mc.retroachievements.org:25588

If you would like access to the server please contact:
Scott, SporyTike, luchaos or BatFastardJordy

Site Updates

RAWeb v2.2.0

Junior developers are now allowed to update game information, rich presence, and achievement order for games where they have an active new set claim by MrOwnership in #1211
Add explain blocks for leaderboards by Jamiras in #1216
Add Type filter to search page by Jamiras in 1195
Eliminate ticket karma by Jamiras in #1203
Only show recent players from the last six months on game pages by Jamiras in 1197
Separate PC Engine CD from PC Engine by televandalist in 1129
Restore Set Exists marker on All User Set Requests page by Jamiras in 1193
Fix display issue when embedding game and achievement with same ID in same page by Jamiras in 1198
Fix notes not showing up for PS2 achievement definitions by Jamiras in #1210
Fix completion badge not being awarded if last unlock was hardcore by Jamiras in 1196
Fix rank calculation for lower is better leaderboard when rank is shared by Jamiras in #1202
Fix player activity not showing up when invalid by Jamiras in #1204
Fix hardcore border not showing on game compare page by Jamiras in #1218
Fix RSS feeds date, strip HTML tags, add guid by Krylan in #1223
Prevent creating account with invalid username by Jamiras in #1206
Prevent exception trying to create a ticket when not logged in by Jamiras in 1190
Prevent exception trying to return data for non-existent game by Jamiras in 1191
Prevent exception calling RecentlyPlayedGames without a user by Jamiras in #1205
Don’t try to send email to deleted user when closing ticket by Jamiras in #1213

Full Changelog

Emulator Updates

RAIntegration v1.1.0

Support for indirect code notes (code notes derived from a note on a pointer)
If the first line of a code note contains the keyword “pointer”, then any following line that starts with a plus (no indent) immediately followed by a number (hexadecimal [0x prefix] or decimal, no whitespace) is treated as an indirect code note. After the number, any number of whitespace characters and/or a single non-alphanumeric character separate the indirect note from the offset. Following lines that don’t start with a plus are also considered part of the indirect note. Some examples are shown here.
Support for local code notes
- Allows making temporary notes while trying to narrow down addresses
- Fixes loss of note-in-progress if selected address is changed
- Note modifications are kept locally until published to the server
- Unpublished notes will appear in red in the code notes window
- Notes are deleted by reverting (if not published) or by setting to blank and publishing
Support for offline development (if the game was previously loaded in online mode)
- Offline mode is only activated if the server cannot be contacted during login.
- It’s not meant to be something a developer can just activate whenever they want.
- Changes will be saved to local file (XXX-User.txt)
- Publishing is disabled
- Achievements unlocked in offline mode will not be sync’ed to the server, and will not be eligible for manual unlocks.
Add Open All and Code Notes items to RetroAchievements menu
Add MBF32 LE memory size
Add BitCount search type
Add XOR (^) AddSource/SubSource modifier
Add ASCII as selectable size in bookmarks window
Add warning when serialized size exceeds limit
Add Export button to search results
Automatically change asset filter to local if local assets exist and no published assets exist
Changed points field on achievement editor to dropdown
Allow Invert to be selected for non-value logic
Allow rich presence monitor to be resized
Fix app title being updated on login/logout when not using RA_UpdateAppTitle
Fix search results being cleared when switching between disks of a multi-disk game
Fix crash enabling highlights without a loaded asset
Fix comparison against initial values for aligned searches
Fix redundancy warning between trigger and non-trigger conditions
Fix decoding of denormalized floats (values where exponent is 2^-127)

Full Changelog

RALibretro v1.4.0

support for identifying CHD-formatted CDs
ability to launch game using command line arguments
cascade Select Core menu if it contains more than 20 systems
attempt to report error from core when savestate loading fails
separate PCEngine from PCEngine CD
enable FreeChaF core for Fairchild Channel F
enable SameDuck core for MegaDuck

Full Changelog

RATools Updates

new internal representation of logic
- small performance boost due to not having to reevaluate on each usage
- allows for more optimization opportunities
  NOTE: this causes errors to be generated for several previously allowed syntaxes:
  - Implicit always_true() and always_false() are no longer supported in logic chains. Logic such as: 0=1 && never(byte(0x1234) == 3) will now collapse to false as 0=1 can never be true. Script authors must replace the 0=1 with an always_false() to preserve the logic in the output.
  - Memory addresses can no longer be compared to true or false. Compare to 1 or 0 instead.
  - always_true() and always_false() are no longer supported for leaderboard values. use measured(repeated(0, always_true())) and 0 instead.
  - Integer division is no longer implicitly converted to floats for leaderboard values: byte(0x1234) * 3 / 2 will no longer be automatica0lly converted to byte(0x1234) * 1.5. use byte(0x1234) * 3.0 / 2 for automatic conversion.
  - Calling repeated or tally with a count of 0 is no longer supported outside of a measured clause of a value expression. Doing so implies an unbounded hit requirement which cannot be reached and is equivalent to always_false(). Using these to generate an AndNext/OrNext chain was not intended. If you absolutely want to prevent the OrNext from being converted to alt groups use the __ornext(condition) function. If you have a valid reason for forcing an AndNext chain let me know.
  - measured(A && B) will now generate an error instead of just setting the Measured flag on B. The actual logic it previously generated was A && measured(B) or measured(repeated(0, A && B)) depending on whether it was being used in a trigger expression or a value expression.
  - once(A && once(B)) will now keep a separate hit count for B and for the entire clause by reordering the conditions or injecting an always_false() condition to hold the total count.
  - once(unless(A)) will now generate an error. use unless(once(A)) or disable_when(A) instead. Similarly, unless cannot be used inside repeated or tally clauses.
  - repeated(10, trigger_when(A)) will now generate an error. use trigger_when(repeated(10, A)) instead.
  - repeated(10, measured(A)) will now generate an error. use measured(repeated(10, A)) instead.
support for local code notes
add Progression analysis dialog (open from Game Stats dialog)
add ability to autogenerate function names in New Script dialog
fix measured(bitcount(X) == 8) being converted to measured(byte(X) == 255)
fix measured(X + 100 > 200) being converted to measured(X > 100)
fix float(X) < 0 being converted to always_false()
fix never in tally clause being replaced with AndNext
fix Copy to Clipboard not working on Rich Presence and Leaderboard title/description
fix duplicating of file extension for local badge images
fix dumping Rich Presence with measured value in display string
fix viewing Rich Presence diff where lookup was removed

Full Changelog

Discord Updates

art-requests channel has been updated to be forum based to make it easier for the art team to organize, track and discuss art requests.
rapatches forum channel has been created allowing users to request patches to add to the RAPatches GitHub, help creating or converting patches, general reports, etc.
site-feedback channel created for quick feedback. The official RAWeb GitHub should still be used for more in depth discussions regarding site issues and enhancements.
minecraft channel created to discussion everything regarding the RA Minecraft server.
duckstation created to help test DuckStation standalone compatibility.

Developer Compliance

Junior Developers permissions expanded if they have an active primary new set claim, allowing them to do the following:

Update game page information (Developer, Publisher, Genre, & First Released)
Update game page images (Icon, Title, In-Game, Boxart)
Update Rich Presence script
Update achievement ordering

Code of Conduct Updates

Set Plagiarism rules introduced
Reservation Renewals
- Added details about the progress reports requirements.
- Adjusted of the cooldown after denied progress reports (from 3 months to 1 month) to align with the “drop and resume before 1 month” rule.
- Added the requirement to post progress reports after every renewal if an 1-month cooldown happened.

Approved Subsets