The mIRC installer has improved a lot! The installer now offers several pre-defined modes that allow you to choose between an Upgrade, Full or Custom install. It ensures that backups of old files are successful, reports error and aborts the installation if it failed for some reason.

The IRC Servers dialog now uses a treeview to display the servers list. In response to this change the format of the servers.ini file has changed to accomodate for a larger amount of servers. The DNS routines have changed so that on connect the retrieved pool of IP addresses is randomised to spread the load across connections.

Preparing for a fully Vista (the new Windows) compliant version of mIRC several changes have been made. These incluse minor cosmetic issues, icons, a new help file in .chm format, etc. Also a command line option has been created that makes mIRC avoid all use of the registry. If this switch is used, mIRC stores registry information in the mirc.ini file in a [user] section, and does not modify registry to support irc:// links etc. This comes handy when you want to run mIRC from a memory stick or similar device.

A lot of changes have been made to the way mIRC names and stores logfiles. This is mainly done to prevent file corruption and loss of data when you open multiple server connections. mIRC tries to name and rename logfiles as smart as possible. Also, when settings are changed in the logging dialog, the logging state of windows and any open log filenames are now immediately updated to reflect the new settings. In previous versions new settings were only applied when a new window was created.

We hope to have smashed the confusing 'flash' and 'beep' options by adding a "Default" menu item to System Menu Flash/Beep items, allowing channel/query/chat windows to use the default settings as set in the Options/Sounds dialog. And disabling sounds in the Sounds dialog now does actually disable -all- sounds, even those using /splay or /beep. ;-)

For experienced users and scripting enthousiasts this new version has heaps of fixes, changes and other little thingies to play with. Some of the more useful changes for scripters are: an extension to the /toolbar command that allows you to customize your toolbar, it now has a new switch that makes mIRC remember your current toolbar settings and reload them automatically the next time you run mIRC; the /window -h behaviour has been fixed so that you can hide Status windows from the switchbar; the on WAVEEND event now triggers as it should; Regular expression support has been improved and resolves gpf and speed issues in the previous version; script $error handling should work better now; and /drawrot is now much faster. We encourage you to explore the versions.txt file for all changes. Some changes are obvious, some need getting used to - please take your time to play with them and see how they work.

In total there have been over 80 changes in this version and although most of them are bug fixes or small tweaks, we hope that they result in a more useful and stable mIRC for you.

Labels: under Undernet and mIRC