Ants (1998) - Changelog

The running list of what changed in every version of the Ants remake, newest first. The version number lives in include/ants_app/version.hpp and is shown on screen next to the FPS meter (bottom right of every screen). This file is updated with every release, together with the README; it is also published on the beta site at beta.playants.org/changelog.html.

How to read it: versions before v0.0.24 approximated the original 1998 game; from v0.0.24 on every system was re-derived from the disassembly of Ants.exe and replaced (the "Original ..." series). "Rewritten tests" are old tests that encoded behaviour the original does not have; they were changed to the verified behaviour, never deleted or disabled (each commit message lists them). Ground truth for every entry is in docs/GAME_REVERSE_ENGINEERING.md; the network port is described in docs/NETWORK_PORT.md.

Unreleased

Fixed: the setup screen's status line follows a state change at once. The notice of a map that could not be loaded appeared one frame late, which made a network test fail one time in six.
The v0.0.46 commit was missing tests/test_net/test_netgame.cpp; it was added in the next commit and the pushed tree was checked with a clean clone (configure, build, run the new suites).

v0.0.46 · 2026-09-29 - Network port: the game meets the network

Host and join: --host [port] opens a room (TCP, port 4001 like the original), --join host[:port] joins one, --loopback accepts only this machine. The setup screen is the room: a row per player with the portrait in the player's colour, the name and a thumb for the connection quality (netgood green thumbs up below a 1200 ms round trip, netok yellow sideways hand below 1800 ms, netbad red thumbs down, netunk orange question mark before the first measurement; the thresholds are the original's, Ants.exe 0x1013289). The host picks the map and the fog and presses START, which needs a second player and every thumb ("Press START when all players' thumbs have appeared."); a guest sees the host's choice and can only leave. The status line uses the original's texts ("Waiting for the host to start the game...", "Trying to connect to the host..." then "Having trouble connecting to host..." after 30 s and "Unable to connect to host, recommend you quit..." after 60 s, "Loading game...", "Waiting for others...").
Names from the command line: --name, the original's -N<team><name>, --team-name <team> <name> and -pnum= reach the room, the HUD's score labels for every player, the results rows, the chat headers and the simulation's alliance and drop-out texts. A network game says "Player" unless --name is given (it never sends the user and machine name).
Matches over the network: every machine loads the same map file (hash checked) with the same seed, roster and fog; the ticks come from the lock-step runner (no wall-clock ticking), the frame is drawn at the runner's sub-tick position; the HUD's orders go through NetGame with an immediate predicted acknowledgement (voice and pedestal feedback), chat goes through the host and back with the sender stamped by the connection, a waiting / out-of-sync overlay (remake text), no pause, no team switching in a network match, chat and Leave work as before.
Roster: teams without a player do not exist (the original's team table holds NULL for them): no hill and no hill art, no start markers, no eggs, no score label, no voice (SimulationEngine::init(level, seed, roster_mask), LevelData::for_roster).
Drop-out (FUN_0100d03b): a player who leaves, is thrown out or is silent for 60 s is dropped by a host-only Drop command in the next turn, so every machine drops the team at the same tick: "%s dropped out of the game!", the cue, every ant of the team starts its death clip, its alliance ends, its egg in the incubator is lost and nothing hatches for it.
Fixed: the ant that answers a group order is decided by GoTo's real result, as in the original; before, a refused order could still be answered because of a stale path request of the ant.
Protocol version 2: the Room message carries every seat's measured round trip (the host pings every guest each second; up to eight pings in flight so slow links are measured too).
Build: ants_app links ants_net; the test targets list the libraries in link order (no duplicate-library warnings).
Docs: docs/GAME_REVERSE_ENGINEERING.md 5.47 (team table, drop-out, CHECKGO end rules) and 5.48 (the thumbs and the setup screen's status texts, decoded from Ants.exe), docs/NETWORK_PORT.md (the application, host migration design), README and the launcher banners, the changelog page on the beta site, hard-coded local paths removed.
Limits: the host leaving ends the match for the guests (host migration is next), raw TCP only (no NAT traversal, no browser build yet), the alliance dialogs are not shown, the match ends by the clock only.
Tests: test_commands N1.16 - N1.21 (rosters, drop-out, the predicted acknowledgement: 2000 of 2000 random orders identical), test_lockstep N2.18 - N2.21, test_lobby N4.9, new suite 2.14 test_netgame (10 tests, real sockets), the room screen in test_hud_layout (555 checks), new suite 3.6 test_network_app (5 tests: command line, a headless application as host and as guest, bit-identical matches). No existing test rewritten (only the version assertion of 12.108 and the Room codec assertions gained the round-trip values).

v0.0.45 · 2026-09-29 - Network port: room / lobby protocol and framed TCP transport

New TcpConnection / TcpListener: a non-blocking, message-oriented, reliable, ordered Connection over TCP (u32 little-endian length frames, 64 KB message cap, 512 KB bounded send queue, bounded reads per pump, TCP_NODELAY, no SIGPIPE, Winsock support). Not built for the browser target.
New room protocol: Hello / Welcome / Reject, Room, Start (seed, map name and FNV hash, fog, roster, names), Loaded, Begin, Cancel, Leave. HostLobby / ClientLobby: seats in arrival order, the host picks the map and the fog option, a start barrier (Begin only when every machine has loaded the same map file), plain .LVL map names only (no path separators, no hidden names).
Sessions drop a leaving peer at once; the simulated network closes like TCP so that a final Reject is delivered.
Tests: suites 2.12 (room, 8 tests) and 2.13 (TCP: framing, hostile frames, a real-socket match, 6 tests). No existing test rewritten.

v0.0.44 · 2026-09-29 - Network port: the lock-step core

New library src/ants_net (pure C++17, no threads, no blocking calls, driven by the main loop with a millisecond clock): the Connection interface, the wire protocol (bounds-checked decoders that reject every malformed or trailing byte), the host's turn Sequencer (issuer stamped from the connection, 64 commands per peer and turn, a 100 ms turn in canonical order, state-hash comparison, flow control at 30 turns), the LockstepRunner (jitter buffer of two turns, one tick every 50 ms, stall at a missing turn, double speed while far behind, a state hash every 10th turn), HostSession / ClientSession (acks, hashes, ping / pong, chat relay with the sender stamped by the host, 8 violations and out, drop-out reported once, a desync freezes the match) and a simulated network with latency and jitter.
Tests: suite 2.11 (17 tests, 119,335 assertions): every message round-trips, 400,000 random and mutated messages never crash, a host and three clients over 60 ms links play 90 s bit-identically (two seeds) and over 40 / 150 / 300 ms links, a corrupted client is named within a second with the differing subsystem, hostile clients are thrown out unnoticed by the others.

v0.0.43 · 2026-09-29 - Network port, milestone 1: command layer and state hash

Every player action is a plain-data Command (group move / special / attack, Stop, hatch, alliance invite / accept / deny / withdraw / break) applied by SimulationEngine::apply_command: the issuer is stamped by the transport, a group order keeps only the issuer's own ants, tiles are range-checked, an answer needs the invitation it answers, nothing changes after the match. The HUD sends its orders through a CommandSink, so one code path serves single player and a network match. Byte-exact wire codec and a canonical application order (by issuer, stable).
SimulationEngine::state_hash(): FNV-1a 64 over the whole gameplay state in seven named parts, in fixed-width little-endian order.
Fixed: Grid::init_from_level resized instead of resetting the cells, so a second map inherited stale per-cell flags of the first.
Removed: the alliance auto-accept (an invitation was accepted after 30 ticks by no player at all); an invitation now waits for the invitee's own answer (no bots).
Tests: suite 2.10 (15 tests, 490,504 assertions). Rewritten tests: integration 10.5 (an invitation stays open, a bogus accept is refused).

v0.0.42 · 2026-09-29 - Original keyboard, button class and always-active chat

The keyboard is the original's (FUN_0102609a) and nothing more: a dialog takes every key; the chat box is always active and takes the printable keys; F1 quick help, F9 - F12 quick messages, Enter sends, Esc deselects (no quit dialog); Ctrl+A select all, Ctrl+H home hill (no hatching), Ctrl+L hit-point digits, Ctrl+N / Ctrl+P next / previous ant, Ctrl+O options, Ctrl+Q quit, Ctrl+S stop.
Buttons follow the original's button class: a press captures (the click sound plays at the press), the action runs at the release while the pointer is still on the button, leaving cancels it.
Removed as invented: chat focus by click or Enter, Esc opening the quit dialog, Space / H / A / N / P / M / C letter hotkeys, Ctrl+H hatching.
Rewritten tests: integration 7.5, 9.7, 11.3, 12.58 and the status-message chat checks.

v0.0.41 · 2026-09-29 - Original pointer model

A click is decided by the cursor mode found at the release point: 1 deselect, 2 select, 3 / 7 move, 4 special, 5 attack. Ant hit boxes are the original's (3 x 3 tile scan, last box wins, no filters), the cursor table follows FUN_01026aa3, special targets follow FUN_01026f91.
A left drag of at most 4 px is a click at the release point; a bigger one is the red 1 px rubber band that selects your ants by positive-area overlap (Shift adds in panels 3 and 4). The right button gives its order at the release, at the press point's tile.
Pedestals: the Move and ability pedestals only latch (a visual state), Stop stops the ants, flashes, locks the mouse for 250 ms and deselects, hatch exists only while eggs remain, the ally pedestal only with more than two players.
Removed as invented: the armed order mode and its hotkeys, 18 x 24 px ant boxes with filters, the "smart ability" right click.
Tests: suite 3.5 (pointer model, 329 checks with the keyboard and button tests of v0.0.42); rubber-band drawing checks in the HUD layout suite.

v0.0.40 · 2026-09-29 - Original input task and edge scrolling

The view scrolls like the original's input task (every 50 ms): eight 12 px edge strips show the scroll arrows, only the 5 px inner strips scroll, the step is scroll rate + 10 px around the target point of the pointer. Holding the left button on the minimap scrolls to the point under the pointer; nothing scrolls with the keyboard or the wheel.
Removed as invented: the continuous 480 px/s pan, the 13 px band, edge panning while a dialog is open, the minimap jump.
Tests: suite 3.4 (input model, 70 checks, 1,152 golden samples of the original's scroll code). Rewritten tests: integration 7.6, 7.7.

v0.0.39 · 2026-09-29 - Original alliance texts, News Flash lines and the chat log

Alliance protocol texts, sounds and channels as in the original (invitation question, "accepted / rejected / withdrew", "A team has been made.", "... are a team now!" / "... are no longer a team!", "... dropped out of the game!").
The chat log keeps the original's entries: a header in the sender's team colour and a body of up to 100 characters, wrapped and indented, on a 12 px grid; chat needs the "Participate In Chat" option; F9 - F12 send the quick texts; a team message reaches only the sender and the sender's allies.
Removed as invented: the "Alliance proposed / formed!" status messages, the 120-character input, the 50-line cap.
Tests: the status-message suite grows to 255 checks. Rewritten tests: integration 9.7, 12.9, 12.54, 12.68.

v0.0.38 · 2026-09-29 - Original status line, selection and order texts, voices, CHECKGO time warnings

The status box under the unit card is one slot (PostStatus): a post replaces the text, it lives 5 s, six messages flash first; idle is empty. One table of the original's strings by id; every simulation message carries its id.
Selection and order texts and voices follow the original (worker, combat ant, thief, bomber, fire ant, swimmer); only the closest ant of a group order answers.
The match clock is checked every 200 ms like the original's CHECKGO task: warnings at 1:00, 0:30 and eleven countdown steps from 0:10; the match ends within 200 ms after 0:00.
Tests: new suite 3.3 (status messages, 214 checks at the time). Rewritten tests: integration 6.1, 9.6, 12.31 and others.

v0.0.37 · 2026-09-29 - Original food

Map Block 2 is a table of food objects (anchor, units, points per unit, stage tiles), not respawn schedules; nothing respawns.
Harvest: an ant is ordered onto the pile, plays the ?gf grab clip (action 5); when the clip ends one unit is taken, the ant carries its points, "Got Food!" is posted and it heads home; an ant that already carries food answers "Can't - already have food.". A lunchbox is a food object of one unit. Food footprints are generated from ants.chd (tools/gen_food_footprints.cpp).
Tests: new suite 2.9 (food actions, 21 golden cases). Rewritten tests: integration 9.1, 12.5, 12.47, 12.61, 12.63.

v0.0.36 · 2026-09-29 - Original attack orders, pick rectangles and knock-back presentation

A click on an enemy ant is the original group order with the attack flag: ants already attacking that tile are skipped, the nearest one answers. Before, every click restarted every ant, so spamming clicks kept the attacker from arriving.
Ants are picked by the original sprite boxes; action clips are shown at the frame the original's real-time player shows; a thrown ant no longer vanishes at the screen edge; frozen (dud) ants are not drawn; the pile-up dust cloud is back; stun.wav is no longer heard after every hit.
Tests: integration 12.142 - 12.145 and render / combat / movement checks. Rewritten tests: integration 12.74, 12.103, 12.28.

v0.0.35 · 2026-09-29 - Original power-ups

A power-up is taken only when a move or power-up order ends on its tile (action 4, the 770 ms getpow clip; the type changes at once, hit points stay). A "can't go" order given while the ant crosses into the tile cancels the pick-up: the ant stands on the power-up and cannot be attacked (power-ups are solid for paths, attacks and knock-backs). The old power-up is dropped on a free neighbour tile.
Removed as invented: the 6-tick pick-up dwell, pick-up under any idle ant, the 15-tick transformation.
Tests: new suite 2.8 (power-up actions, 16 golden cases). Rewritten tests: simulation 13.6 - 13.8, combat 6.4, integration 12.21 - 12.29.

v0.0.34 · 2026-09-29 - Original abilities

Plant, defuse, ignite, extinguish, bridge build and demolish are the original's action clips with their frame sounds; the world changes when the clip's old action is cleaned up; a melee hit or stun cancels an ability. A refused order plays the can't clip with "Can't do that...". Fire walls need grass, sand or dirt (never mud).
Removed as invented: ability tick states and timings, the ability cooldown, the detonation of an ant standing on the target.
Tests: new suite 2.7 (ability actions, 17 golden cases). Rewritten tests: integration 12.55, 12.56, simulation 5.3, 8.1, challenger 4.1, 5.1.

v0.0.33 · 2026-09-29 - Original combat

Melee follows the original's action model: contact is the attacker's step into the target tile (no range, no cooldown), hit points are lost at contact, the strike frame throws the victim (gh one tile, combat ant gb four tiles), landing blocks in the original order (bomb, pile-up dispersal, fire wall, water), stun only after bomb flights, deferred death with the death clips, the free hatch of a team's last ant. The combat ant's only AI is the original auto-engage; the guard-post AI is gone.
Removed as invented: the physics engine, bounce and scuffle states, attack cooldown, pursuit, instant death, melee immunity flags.
Tests: new suite 2.6 (combat actions, 24 golden cases). Dozens of old tests rewritten to the verified behaviour (listed in the commit).

v0.0.32 · 2026-09-29 - Original hill actions

Entering the own hill is the original's single clip; food scores and the ant heals when the clip ends; the waiting queue is the original's (ANTHILLQ every 200 ms, the ring, first come first served); hatching takes 8 s, costs min(200, score) and spawns a worker with the aghatch clip; a thief raid plays atcr501 for 3.5 s and moves the loot at the end.
Removed as invented: the underground flag and emergence invulnerability, the slot table queue, the hatch key.
Tests: new suite 2.5 (hill actions, 13 golden cases, 321 assertions). Rewritten and retired tests are listed in the commit.

v0.0.31 · 2026-09-29 - Original ant sprite rules

Mirrored parts are drawn one pixel right of the plain flip, the held bomb is the neutral 2bomb.bmp, selection and hill markers, the click marker and score bubbles are children of the view container (drawn over ants, foliage and fog). The invented ant shadow and hop are removed. The table generator now extracts the action clips of SetAction from Ants.exe.
Tests: render parity 214 checks; movement-table counts grew with the generated table.

v0.0.30 · 2026-09-29 - Original button states, click sounds, option defaults and setup screen layout

Buttons are drawn from the original three-state animations (up, hover, pressed); click sounds follow the pressed animations (sound 0, sound 89 only for the pedestals, silent toggles); option defaults are the original's (sound 100, music 65, scroll 50, chat on, quick help on) and the quick-help option decides whether the startup help is shown; the setup screen takes its controls from the original animations.
Tests: HUD layout 520 checks. Rewritten test: integration 12.75.

v0.0.29 · 2026-09-29 - Original HUD shell, minimap painter and cursor rules

The static HUD is the original composite animation uishell; the minimap follows the original painter (119 x 91 palette image, speckled class colours, object colour and size table, ants as one-cell dots); the map cursor only applies inside the view rectangle.

v0.0.28 · 2026-09-29 - Original command-panel pedestals

The left and right pedestal slots play the original animation chains in real time (rise, sink, icon swap, press), driven by the original's 56-row transition table (pedestal.cpp).

v0.0.27 · 2026-09-29 - Original HUD digits, home panel and screens

The match clock and all scores use the dig0..dig9 sprites at the original positions; the home panel (egg tray, hatch / ally / stop pedestals) and the options, quick help, quit and match-start screens are the original composites; the match-start modal lasts 5 s.
Tests: new suite 3.2 (HUD layout, 139 checks at the time).

v0.0.26 · 2026-09-29 - Original effect sprites

bombex for every detonation, burnout / collapse / splash puffs, the death clips death1..death4, floating score bubbles with the original layout; one stable y-sorted sprite list; effects follow real time.
Removed as invented: the overhead health bar (the original shows health only through the selection ears).

v0.0.25 · 2026-09-29 - Original sprite drawing rules

Animation parts are drawn last stored part first; the colour rule (ants add the team colour offset, everything else uses the raw palette); terrain and objects share one template clock per animation id so that all cells of an id animate in lockstep.
Tests: new suite 3.1 (render parity, 136 checks at the time: every multi-part frame, all six maps, 0 differing pixels).

v0.0.24 · 2026-09-29 - Frame-exact 1998 ant movement

Movement re-derived from the disassembly and ported 1:1: no speed constants (an ant moves by the current walk frame's displacement), the original SetAction / WalkStep / TryEnterTile / GoTo logic, the asynchronous PATHMGR A* (one 1000-expansion slice per 50 ms per team), the group order with distance sort and first-ant acknowledgement, blocking with 300 ms waits and the bump effect, the exact paces per terrain. Tables are generated from Ants.exe / ants.chd (tools/extract_movement_tables.py).
Tests: new suites 1.1 (movement tables, parity with the executable), 2.3 (path planner) and 2.4 (movement golden, 22 golden timings). Existing tests updated to the verified behaviour (none deleted or disabled).

v0.0.23 · 2026-09-16

Power-up pick-up dwell, walk-on / walk-off and can't-go standing (approximation; re-derived from the binary in v0.0.35).

v0.0.22 · 2026-09-16

Enemy base targeting, knock-back base landing exclusion, queued click move orders and 1 HP auto-retreat invariants.

v0.0.20 · 2026-09-14

Stun animation pacing, bomb deflection, placement detonation, combat locomotion, punch and water drowning. (There was no v0.0.21.)

v0.0.19 · 2026-09-13

Bomb knock-back deflection, ant collision bumping, bridge demolition survival, the options scroll-speed slider, asset thumbnails on the web.

v0.0.18 · 2026-09-13

Bomb blast fly-back, sidebar pedestal buttons, glow fix, thief bottle-cap invariants, dud stability, base queuing.

v0.0.17 · 2026-09-13

Anthill mound bounds, 8-direction random bounces, bomb knock-back momentum.

v0.0.16 · 2026-09-12

Airborne knock-back trajectory clearance over ground ants; animated fire ricochet pacing.

v0.0.15 · 2026-09-12

Chain-bomb knock-back flight decoupling, fire wall landing recovery, 22-tick bomb defusal pacing.

v0.0.14 · 2026-09-11

Uninterruptible power-up transformation, silent rejection of orders during an action, no ability cooldown, friendly bomb path avoidance.

v0.0.13 · 2026-09-11

Fire extinguish animation timing, multi-direction ability queuing, bomb stun recovery.

v0.0.12 · 2026-09-11

Daisy dropper occupancy, fire ability pathing, 8-way bomb redirection, chain bombs, HUD bomb tile parity.

v0.0.11 · 2026-09-11

The 1998 loading screen composite and the Quick Help START button are back.

v0.0.10 · 2026-09-11

Bomb cursor, yellow pedestal glow, seamless bomb placement, knock-back facing and the ready modal; compiler warnings of the adversarial asset tests removed.

v0.0.9 · 2026-09-10

Web leave / quit reset, bomb dud and scorch, multi-ant food handling, base mound offset and right-flank infiltration.

v0.0.8 · 2026-09-10

Version bump with the compose label changed so that the beta container redeploys automatically.

v0.0.7 · 2026-09-10

2 HP ant bounce cancellation fixed, 1 HP retreat timing restored, compiler warnings cleaned up.

v0.0.6 · 2026-09-10

6 s non-dismissable match-start modal (5 s from v0.0.27), mutual friendly bumping, mud humping; a ballistic flight ends cleanly on a scuffle bounce; the anchor ant stays visible during a scuffle; start_game.bat rebuilds the release binary when code changes.

v0.0.5 · 2026-09-10

Action pedestals aligned, bottle-cap thief infiltration, scuffle recoil bounce, empty-steal idle; c_cant (animation 39) documented as an unused asset.

v0.0.4 · 2026-09-10

Windows: launch hang fixed (midiOutSetVolume), window raised on start, SDL2_ttf and the Arial font on Windows, Print Screen released.
HUD buttons, combat guard AI (removed again in v0.0.33), thief infiltration and terrain feedback restored.

v0.0.3 · 2026-09-10

Blocked emergence delay from the hill, moving-ally A* passability; reserved anthill mound tiles clarified as blocked tiles.

v0.0.2 · 2026-09-10

Anthill geometry, occupied-tile bumping, mud cancel and power-up immunity; project rule 8 (no bot AI) added.

v0.0.1 · 2026-09-10

Semantic versioning starts (v0.0.1, pre-release); base concurrency and invulnerability parity documented; the web build sources the emsdk environment automatically and ignores its build artifacts.

Before v0.0.1 - 2026-09-06 to 2026-09-09 (the "v0.01" era)

The first commit is a complete cross-platform remake engine: asset pipeline for ants.chd and Maps/*.LVL, deterministic 20 Hz simulation, audio, map selection, unit health display and test suites.
Game: setup screen, quit dialog, HUD (team palettes, scores, anthill selection brackets, hatch controls, chat), all six unit types, bomber / fire / swimmer / thief abilities, power-up lifecycle, flower droppers, anthill queuing, knock-back, drowning, collision scuffles, 8-connected diagonal paths, map durations read from the .LVL header, fog of war with the original dither, edge panning and cursors, TrueType text, frame-rate meter with a frame-time sparkline, the on-screen version meter (v0.01).
Platforms: native Windows build (SDL2 and WinMM MIDI), WebAssembly port with an HTML shell, Docker + nginx deployment (beta.playants.org), in-engine MP3 streaming, mobile-friendly page.
Asset catalog: an interactive web inspector for all sprites, sounds and animations (sortable views, live previews, zoom / pan, layer inspection, multiple audio triggers per animation).
Reverse engineering: automated Table 4 animation extraction, binary struct mapping and the imported Ghidra decompilation of Ants.exe (docs/legacy/Ants.exe.c) as a navigation aid; project rules for Capstone-first verification.