Unreleased RC patches

TribesNEXT’s development roadmap laid out releases beyond RC2 that were never published. RC2a remains the last stable release of the RC line, and it is where that line ends.

This page records what was planned, because the intentions still turn up in old forum threads and in the wiki’s own archived news — the 2010 IRC entry refers to changes expected in RC3 that never arrived.

These will not be produced

None of the releases described here exist, and none are coming. Thyth, who wrote the roadmap and the RC patches, no longer works on TribesNEXT, and development of the RC line ended with RC2a.

Treat this page as history rather than a list of things still on the way. If you want a patch to install, you want RC2a or a QOL patch.

RC3

The most fully documented of the unreleased versions, and the one closest to happening. It was slated to bring:

• An overhauled IRC client, replacing the in-game chat implementation. The wiki’s 2010 news entry about the in-game chat server becoming hostile to Tribes players points at RC3 as the fix, since it was to repoint chat at a more stable network.
• A Linux and macOS distribution compatible with Wine and CrossOver Games. A pre-RC3 testing build was circulated on the forums at the time.
• Reactivation of the community features — T-Mail and the player/clan browser — with the intention of making them usable from a web browser as well as in-game, so clans could be managed without launching the game.
• A revised anticheat, adding server-side checking of client versions and improvements over the framework introduced in RC2.

The groundwork was real rather than speculative: RC2 already shipped DCE certificate handling on both client and server, and the delegated community enhancement server that would have driven the browser and mail systems was described as due to be unveiled in RC3.

RC4

Two features were slated for RC4, both aimed at server operators rather than players:

• A comprehensive, customisable anticheat system. Where RC3’s anticheat was an incremental revision, this was to be the full version: a black-box set of server-side APIs plus a sample implementation of roughly Defense Turret’s capabilities. Crucially it was to be entirely optional, with each server operator deciding what their own anticheat actually enforced.
• An API for building and reading ZIP files, so servers could hand players custom resource packages on demand. The archive format was chosen deliberately to keep the transfer to data only — no executable code, and nothing else unwanted reaching the client.

Don’t confuse RC4 the release with RC4 the cipher

Searching the TribesNEXT forums for “RC4” returns a great deal about cryptography rather than about a patch. TribesNEXT’s account system encrypts a user’s private key with the RC4 stream cipher, so technical threads use the term constantly in that sense. The two are unrelated.

RC5

The furthest-out release on the roadmap, with two items:

• UPnP support, adding an IGDP (Internet Gateway Device Protocol) client so the game could configure port forwarding by itself on the consumer routers that support it. The intent was to cut down the steady stream of players who couldn’t get forwarding or firewall rules working by hand. It was to trigger only when the listing server actually reported a forwarding problem, rather than running on every launch.
• Leaving Tribes2.exe untouched on disk. The patch’s code loader would have been reworked to run as a replacement for IFC22.dll — the library handling force feedback support that essentially nobody used — instead of modifying the game executable itself.

That second item is worth noting, because it eventually happened. The QOL patches no longer modify Tribes2.exe during installation, delivering in a native rewrite what RC5 had planned to achieve by swapping out a DLL.

What happened instead

Development of the RC line stopped after RC2a and did not resume; Thyth has since moved on from TribesNEXT. The work that followed, years later, came from Krash and didn’t continue either the sequence or the codebase: the QOL patches are a native rewrite, and they target stability, performance and modern hardware compatibility rather than the community features and server tooling RC3 to RC5 were aimed at.

A few of the old goals did land there by other means — Wine support, for instance, ships in the QOL builds out of the box, roughly fifteen years after RC3 first promised a Wine-compatible distribution.