AI War:Current 4.0 Beta

Prerelease 3.701

• Re-implemented drawing of cost lines for Buy-Button and Tech-Button mouseovers.
  • Thanks to Fleet for the bug report.

• In previous version any buy menu with 4 rows was having the top row chopped off, fixed.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the bug report.

• Internal note: removed last two references to Input.mousePosition (they were in DrawGUI, from ported Tidalis code), in favor of Event.current.mousePosition.

• Fixed a couple bugs preventing the Debug and TakeScreenshot KeyBinds from properly working when a game is not actually running.

• Fixed a crash when using the new Blitz combat style.
  • Thanks to Dazio for the bug report.

• Fixed the "Unknown Client Message 116|1" bug.

• Fixed a bug where left-mouse-button-down was clearing the existing selection, breaking all kinds of normally expected behavior.
  • Thanks to freeman08 for the bug report.

• Fixed bug where lobby was not properly initializing host player color from the current profile.
  • Thanks to freeman08 for the bug report.

• Fixed bug where color selection in lobby was not working properly.
  • Thanks to freeman08 for the bug report.

• Fixed bug where it wasn't possible to properly disable an expansion from the License/Expansions window.
  • Thanks to Zenchess for the bug report.

• In the previous version we had made more of the lobby options regenerate the map for various reasons, but this has been found to cause very annoying lag and has been reverted.
  • Thanks to RCIX for the report.

• The SimSpeedPlus and SimSpeedMinus keybinds now have aliases that respond to KeypadPlus and KeypadMinus; the pre-existing ones only responded to the alpha-side +/-.
  • Thanks to RCIX for the report.

• Internal Note: SimSpeedPlus and SimSpeedMinus previously did not send network messages, but did the change directly on the local machine, now they use the network.

• OpenChatPopup keybind is now an InGame bind instead of AnyTime; in Tidalis you could be connected on the main menu and could chat, but not in AI War.
  • Thanks to RCIX for the report.

• In the previous version the default key for the AssignToControlGroup keybind was incorrectly KeyCode.Slash (for internal development purposes, we can't use Ctrl+1, but players can). Changed back to KeyCode.LeftControl (and added an alias that maps to RightControl). If you've already played 3.700 this won't change your binding from Slash to LeftControl, but you can do so manually or simply close the program, delete inputbindings.dat, and restart to get the new defaults.
  • Thanks to RCIX for the report.

• All AnyTime binds will now fire... well, any time. Except when the loading screen is visible, just to be contrary.

• Fixed some missing loca problems with the chat popup.
  • Thanks to RCIX for the report.

• Fixed some missing loca problems on the keybindings screen.
  • Thanks to Kalzarius for the report.

• The LobbyOptions window will no longer revert to previously saved-to-disk settings whenever opening (unless an expansion has been enabled or disabled since the last time it was opened). The LobbyPlayer window will still do this, at least for now.
  • Thanks to MoonshineFox for the report.

• Remains can no longer be gifted.
  • Thanks to LanceFighter for reporting an exploit related to this.

• Fortresses now have infinite engine health, as they are unable to have their engines repaired.
  • Thanks to CogDissident for reporting.

• Fortresses now only take 2 hours to fully repair themselves from nearly-dead, rather than 3. SuperFortresses now take 3 hours to repair themselves from nearly-dead instead of 5.
  • Thanks to CogDissident for suggesting.

• The + key now increases the game in increments that are 2x faster.

• Some internal timing changes have been made to the game, leading to a bit lower simulation load on the processor, a bit lower network load, a bit slower animations, a bit faster movement and build times, and similar. Mostly these changes are pretty subtle,

• The current combat style is now shown on the galaxy stats screen, since that's now the only way to see that data while in the game itself.

• The build modifier for placing 50 ships has been removed, and the build modifiers for placing 10 and 5 ships have been switched to thos that were for building 50 and 10 in the last release. This fixes the conflict with holding shift to place ships in a series.
  • Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting.

• The zooming and panning was previously often laggy at the start, simply because of how that was being calculated (it was simply one of those porting things).
  • This also means that there won't be any extra lag introduced into scrolling or zooming based on slowing down the simulation speed with the minus key.
  • Thanks to vonduus for reporting.

• There is now less apparent lag when first loading a game (even compared to the SlimDX version), as the AI thread is started right at the tail end of the load process rather than during the first frames of the game.

• Some tweaks have been made to the sound playback engine to make it get less overwhelming (and thus distorted) during massive battles.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient for reporting.

• The stars, nebulae, and planet graphics are loaded right on the game start now. This makes the game start up slightly slower (still much faster than the SlimDX version), but prevents lag and some visual artifacts later.

• The in-game processing is no longer nearly so interrupted by images streaming in belatedly. This causes more pop-in the first time that a new ship or graphic is seen, but makes the experience significantly smoother than ever before (especially compared to the SlimDX side). This is particularly notable for multiplayer, when one player has a significantly slower hard drive than the others.

• The "Hide Ship Recharge Bars" settings option has become a "Show Ship Recharge Bars" option, because these bars really don't need to be shown for most people and they cause significant visual clutter and extra graphical load.

• The "Show Ship Bars In Far Zoom" settings option has become a "Hide Ship Bars In Far Zoom" option, because these bars are really important to being able to see the battlefield at a glance from far zoom, and need to be on unless people specifically want to disable them for performance reasons (which isn't likely to be needed, these days, anyway).

(note: the above changes reflect our work-in-progress build that has not yet been released)

Prerelease 3.700

• AI War version 3.189 converted to the Unity 3D engine. Only new features since 3.189 are mentioned here.

Performance Improvements

• There are no longer any prerequisites for running the game.

• The game no longer uses GDI+, so it is no longer at all dependent on system fonts, and programs like FRAPS are able to record the menus as well as the actual gameplay.

• Thanks largely to the removal of the GDI+ components, the game application itself opens markedly faster now.

• The draw-framerate is now independent from the simulation-framerate.
  • This is a huge benefit, because now the draw framerate automatically drops under serious load (like a big battle), which lets the actual simulation speed stay at 100% during play in many cases.
    • Thus the game doesn't slow down to a crawl during big battles (it just gets briefly choppy, if that), which passes much more quickly and is markedly less frustrating.
    • Also, if one player has a slightly underpowered machine during a network game, it is less likely to slow down the simulation for the other players, which is also excellent.

• In-game textures are now streamed into the game in a queue, rather than loaded-all-at-once when first encountered. This avoids choppiness and momentary lag when loading savegames and similar. This does cause images to be invisible and then pop-in during that same time, but that's much preferable in the main.

• The methods for rendering general in-game shots is now 1/5th as GPU-intensive as before. The method for rendering missile shots is now 1/9th as GPU-intensive as before. The method for rendering explosions are now about 1/2 to 1/4 as GPU-intensive as before. The method for rendering the new uv-animated line effects is about 1/5 as GPU-intensive as the old "fuzzy line" effects. Paired with new graphics, they also look better, which gives a double bonus to this shift.

Visual Improvements

• A new and better-looking game HUD visual style is now in place. This new visual style is also intended to improve readability while also increasing performance.
  • The GUI for the game no longer uses bordered text -- this both aids in readability for some players, as well as improving performance, and with the higher-contrast window backgrounds this is more readable than ever.
  • All of the in-game fonts have been replaced and improved with prettier, sharper, more-legible fonts that also contribute better to the sci-fi theme and feel less spreadsheet-like.

• The status text over most of the in-game ships (poor efficiency, exhausted, knowledge income, etc) now appear with a nice little bounding box that makes them look better and also easier to read. These boxes now conveniently disappear when moused-over, so that they are never in the way of what the player is trying to click on. When the Alt key is held, all of these also now disappear, which makes it even more convenient.

• The galaxy map has seen a number of improvements.
  • The planet graphics in the galaxy map are now much-improved, and make use of shaders and rotation to make themselves look much more realistic.
  • The lines between the planets on the galaxy map also now use shaders and have a much more modern, realistic look to themselves.
  • The little row of ship icons below each planet has been removed from the galaxy map, as that was useless clutter that made the galaxy map harder to read and which most people didn't notice anyway.

• Flares are now shown on top of player ships, rather than under them. This is a longstanding request from players who found them too hard to see when under ships. Holding the alt key now hides the flares, so you get the best of both worlds.

• A completely new starfield generation algorithm is now used -- it looks a lot better, is incredibly more varied (not every planet has the same kind of starfield background), and has nice parallax depth to itself. It is way faster to draw than the old SlimDX style of starfields, which is another excellent bonus.

• A completely new nebula generation algorithm is now used -- it also looks a lot better, and is way way faster to draw than the old SlimDX style of nebulae. The nebulae no longer have parallax scrolling, but the starfields themselves do a plenty fine job enough of that, and this overall effect looks better.

• The way that the galaxy map in the lobby is drawn has been completely reworked to look better.
  • The "obstacles" (black holes, asteroid belts) are no longer shown at all, as they were distracting and just getting in the way of the relevant visuals, anyway -- they are still shown in-game, though, of course.
  • The scale and quality of the lines and graphics shown in the galaxy are now far superior to what they previously were, making them easier to read.
  • The galaxy map in the lobby now scales on both the X and Y axes individually, again to allow for the maximum visibility on varying scree resolutions.

• Every last shot/weapon visual effect in the game has been completely redone in a much higher-res, fancier fashion.

• The explosion visuals have been completely replaced and upgraded.

• In recent releases, damage smoke had been unintentionally disabled. It has now been re-enabled, and has been notably upgraded to look a lot more realistic at the same time.

• The shot hit effects have been revamped so that it is much easier to tell when a shot has hit (and it just looks cooler, too).

• Shield blocks now have a much more distinctive visual look, so that it will hopefully be more obvious to players that something is actually happening out of the ordinary there.

• All of the old "fuzzy line" effects have been replaced with much fancier and better-looking uv-animated special effects.

• Beam weapon effects are now animated, and have a different color and animation per mark level (from 0 to V).

Keyboard Control Changes

• A number of keyboard control changes have been made. If you don't like them, the beauty is that you can now remap them as you wish, but we wanted to take this opportunity to clean up the keycodes to make them as sensible as possible -- they grew up a bit unevenly as the game has developed, and there were a few things that have been bugging us for a while.
  • Ship contruction keycodes have been made consistent:
    • It is now possible to build queue-constructed ships in groups of 10 by holding alt.
    • It is now possible to build directly-placed ships in groups of 50 by holding ctrl.
  • Ship selection modifier keycodes (when using hotkeys such as S to select science labs, or when clicking items on the planetary summary) have been made more consistent with the general selection modifiers (when just dragging selection boxes):
    • When holding Shift, it now adds the new ship to the selection rather than centering on it.
    • When holding Space, it now centers on the ship.
  • The button for showing control group assignments, and for showing ship movement/attack lines, and for toggling on all the attack power modifier overlays, has been changed from Ctrl to Alt.
    • This keeps the lines, etc, from getting in the way when players are just using the Ctrl key normally, which is a lot -- and still makes it readily accessible to see these lines and control groups at an easy click of the button, though.
  • The keyboard shortcuts for "frame skip" have been removed, as that feature no longer exists (it's no longer needed).
  • The keyboard shortcuts for "game speed" can now go between -10 and 10, rather than 0 and 10. This allows players to slow down time as well as speed it up.

Galaxy Map Functional Changes

• The glow around planets that are alerted to the human presence is now red instead of yellow, as with the new blending, etc, the yellow was extremely hard to see.

New Features

• Added "Blitz" combat style which is like Fast and Dangerous but the ship speed is doubled again. Also, "Normal" has been renamed to Epic/4X-like and "Fast and Dangerous" has been renamed to "Normal".

• The keyboard bindings are now able to be edited. The editing interface is on the settings menu, and the bindings themselves are stored in inputbindings.dat, separate from all other settings for ease of sharing, etc.

• The way that the "Game Speed" options (+/-) on the keyboard work is now completely different.
  • Previously, the options went from 0 to 10. Now, they go from -10 to 10... meaning that time can be slowed down as well as sped up.
  • Additionally, in the past when the speed was increased from 0 to 1 it more than doubled the speed of the simulation, whereas increasing it all the way to 10 had very little change compared to the initial shift with 1. Now the speed scaling is a lot more linear, which is quite helpful.

• There is a new "AI War Pre-4.0 Settings Importer" application that allows players to import pre-4.0 settings files into the new 4.0 version. Unfortunately, the new versions of AI War can't directly read the legacy settings files because of a bug in the Mono framework (regarding deserializing generic collections, if you're curious).
  • Our settings importer tool also moves across savegame files as a convenience, although there is no compatibility issue with them.

Interface Improvements

• The resource bar has seen some rework, making it a bit more concise and relying on icons and tooltips instead of spelling out things like "knowledge" in it. On the flip side, a few things that were previously unlabeled (like the number of planets under attack at the moment) now have a label.
  • Warnings about energy levels are now shown directly in the resource bar, and more concisely, with a tooltip over them to explain further.
  • The game speed modifier is now shown right next to the game clock in the upper left, and the game clock flashes red and white when slowed down, and green and white when sped up.

• A new ship selection scrollable window now shows up whenever ships are selected, making for a significant update to the old selected ships button and dropdown.

• The Planetary Summary window on the right-hand side of the screen has seen significant visual improvements that make it easier to quickly read, especially during battles or multiplayer games.

• The position and styling of both chat messages and alert messages have been changed a bit, emphasizing readability and keeping the screen as clear as possible for actually showing gameplay.

• The main menu is now nigh unrecognizable, it's seen so much rework.

• Our license key screen is now miles better, as well. It lets you enter all of your license keys on one screen, rather than having a separate screen for each (with the expansions buried in an expansions tab of the settings window). Now it's all on one place, accessible directly from the main menu, and should cut down on confusion as to which license key the application is asking for at any given time (a fair number of people tried to enter their expansion keys as a main key, for example, if they bought the game and expansions at the same time).

Gameplay Balance Changes

• Metal and Crystal Harvesters no longer require energy to operate -- they produce enough energy for themselves directly.

• When AI ships in old savegames are converted to a new type (such as all the guard posts), those now start out at full health rather than whatever their health was previously.

• The engineering range on mobile repair stations has been increased from 15,000 to 20,000.

• Engineers (including mine layers and cleanup drones) no longer have teleportation. However, they do all now move at speed 100 and they have vastly larger enginering ranges. They also no longer automatically move toward targets to heal (they just heal what's in their considerable range). All in all, this makes engineers vastly easier to control; something that was a learning issue for new players in the past, and an annoyance for experienced players.

Settings Changes

• The settings screen will never prompt players to restart the game now (previously it did on resolution changes and on expansions being enabled/disabled). Yay!

• It is no longer possible to manually select a starfield type in the game settings -- a completely new starfield generation algorithm is now used.

• Same as with the starfields, it is no longer possible to select styles of nebulae, as they are now handled differently and better. Also, nebulae detail levels can no longer be set in the game settings, but nebula can now be turned off via a toggle if desired.

• The option "Scale Game On Large Monitors (Keeps game objects the same relative size on larger and smaller monitors, but may cause lowered overall quality)" has been removed, as it no longer applies on the new platform (it looked awful on the old platform, anyway).

• The "Disable Very Far Zoom" option has been removed from settings. It's long-since been clear that nobody in their right mind would want to do that.

• The "Disable Cleartype" option has been removed from settings because it also has no meaning on the Unity platform (text comes from prerendered textures, never from the OS, now).

• The "Default Frame Skip" option has been removed (as has the "frame skip" feature in general), because Unity 3D manages the render-vs-sim framerate automatically (and does a much better job of it, we might add).

• The "Extra Tooltip Font Size" option has been removed, as fonts can't be dynamically resized in the same way on Unity 3D the way we're using the fonts. BUT, because the game now supports true fullscreen, that shouldn't ever be a need any more, anyway -- this feature was added for a few players so that they could compensate for the text looking too small when viewed at their overlarge desktop resolution.

• The settings option "Use Simple Render For Far Zoom Icons (Slower, But Prevents Invisible Icons On Some Graphics Card Drivers)" has been removed, as with the new Unity 3D system there is no risk of the invisible icons -- again, yay. Now it's definitely always nice and fast for everyone, and there's one fewer confusing settings options.

• The "Always Show Selected Units Hover Text" settings option has been removed, as the new Selected Ships window has replaced the entire older way of handling selected ships (and this new way is much better).

• The "Combine Planetary Summary Icon Colors" and "Hide Planetary Summary Icon Counts" settings options have been removed, as the planetary summary has been revised substantially enough that these sorts of options really don't have any solid purpose any longer (and we're really making an effort to weed out settings options of that sort, so that the useful ones are easier for players to look at and find).

• The settings options "Disable Blending of Shot/Explosion Effects" and "Use Simple Shot Effects" have been removed from the settings screen, as these were performance-boosting settings that no longer are needed with the new special effects rendering methods now employed by the game.

• The "Disable Explosion Debris/Embers" option has been removed, as the debris/ember emission has been taken out of the engine in favor of more complex base explosion effects (the end result looks better and runs more efficiently).

• The "Show Window Toolbar" settings option has been removed, as unfortunately that's not something we can control in Unity.

• New settings options have been added that make it possible to set the windowed resolution to anything, or to set the fullscreen resolution to a list of general resolutions, and to toggle which one is presently active. Basically, the identical setup to Tidalis.

Misc Changes

• The Unit Relative strengths is no longer compiled into the game itself, but is now in a UnitRelative.dat file that is in the RuntimeData folder. This lets players update the relativestrengths file if they are so inclined (sometimes it takes us a while to do it).

• Previously, the game only ran in a "faux fullscreen" mode that was the size of the player's desktop resolution. For many that worked very well, but for some that made the fonts unusably small. Now, thanks to Unity 3D, the game supports both true fullscreen as well as windowed mode.
  • Unfortunately this means the loss of the "faux fullscreen" mode, which we're sorry to see go, but that is not yet something Unity 3D supports.
  • The game also now supports resizing (and changing between fullscreen and windowed modes) in realtime. Previously, the game had to be restarted whenever sizing changes were made.

• A brand new Tidalis-style in-game updater is now included. This beats the pants off any updaters we used in the past in terms of speed, efficiency, and overall flow.

• The screenshots function (F12) was previously unable to function on some computers. It should now work for everyone.

• The screenshot function, plus any external video recording software (FRAPS, XFire, etc) previously would not pick up the menus in the game because of their GDI+ nature. Now this works with all of them.
  • Also previously, externally-inserted overlays like the Steam interface and XFire had to have special support (as in the case of Steam) to avoid conflicts between the overlay and our GDI+ menus. Now that is no longer a consideration either, it all works as you'd expect.

• Our installer is now much better. The old versions used MSI packages, which are clunky and extraordinarily slow. It helps that we now have no prerequisites for the game, but the installer is miles better even discounting that.

Known Issues

• At the moment, we've done very little testing in multiplayer, and especially using the lobby in multiplayer. We know that connecting to existing savegames seems to work great, but the lobby could be completely broken in multiplayer for all we know at the moment. We'll be focusing more on this soon, and would appreciate feedback on what works and what does not with this (as always).

• The following items have not yet been implemented (if a feature isn't on this list but seems to be missing, feel free to check with us, but it's probably an oversight in terms of the list rather than what we're planning):
  • The tutorials, or the tutorials menu.
  • The achievements menu.
  • The high scores menu.
  • Most of the in-game stats window tabs.
  • In-game graphs.
  • The buttons along the left-hand side of the galaxy map.
    • You can still set priorities and display counts/filters via the keyboard shortcuts.
    • This does make the Find function inaccessible, though. Also the planet notes function.
  • The minimap.
  • The missions list.
  • The in-game context menu (was X+right-click, will be something else).
  • Music of any sort (we left this out on purpose until final release).

• We know that currently force fields stack and get pretty opaque if there are a lot of them. We're planning to revamp the graphics for them entirely, but haven't managed anything that looks good yet. Bear with us, please. :)

• Some of the thicker angled lines are drawing offset. This has been a real stumper, going back to pre-4.0 times, too. We might post the code and see what others think.

• At some resolutions, the in-game graphics can look slightly fuzzy. For [ http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/21782/how-to-properly-set-up-quad-positions-for-2d-with-an-orthographic-camerareference]. This has been another stumper.

• There are other performance improvements planned, and of course a laundry list of bugfixes already reported in the bug reports forum relating to pre-4.0 versions.

• We have major plans for the balance of the Neinzul younglings, and how easy the new lower AI ship caps can sometimes be.

• The credits scroll is currently missing from the main menu, along with the logos for the expansions.

• The logo for the game is missing from a number of menu screens at the moment, actually.

• The tooltips on the resource bar at the top of the screen are currently largely missing, and the few that are there show up as all black. Just haven't had a chance to look into that yet.

• The handy little colored icons next to the alerts in the box at the top left aren't yet there. They will be.

• Ships with what we called "niche text" showing on their icon (like "Lit" on the lightning warheads) currently don't show that text. We plan to make that icon-based instead, but have not yet had a chance to.

• (fixed in 3.701) The metal/crystal/energy icons aren't currently shown in the tooltips. And tooltips aren't shown for items in the build queue at all at the moment.

• The text on the buy/tech category buttons is currently pretty unreadable. We know what to do to fix that, just haven't had the time yet.

• Some of the other buttons, like Pause All, Group/Lone, etc, have their big central button text pretty offset at the moment. That will also be fixed soon, it just wasn't too important. The smaller text under these buttons (generally numbers) is offset by design.

• There may be some text, especially in the galaxy map, that is hard to read based on clutter and/or font colors being at too low of a contrast. Those are artifacts of the porting, and while we've cleaned that up some, we could definitely use help from folks with finding more of them.

• The put-in-low-power button doesn't always show up on the interface. Thankfully there is a key bind for that (defaults to K) which still works.

• The unload-transport button doesn't show up on the interface. Regrettably there is currently no key-bind for that, so the only way to get units out of a transport is to get the transport blown up (can't even scrap on a hostile planet).

• There is no mouseover text on buy-queue-item buttons.

• The mouseover text for tech buttons erroneously indicates "Already Unlocked" for a tech that is available but not unlocked.

• (fixed in 3.701) The mouseover text for buy buttons does not include the cost line.

• Shots being fired up and to the left sometimes point straight up, looking weird.

• Some popups (like dropdowns) appear mysteriously distant from their parent controls.

• ...and that's all we can think of! If it's not on this list and it seems to be missing or broken, please do let us know about it because we probably aren't aware of it. For being a beta, this is actually surprisingly far along!

(Released October 2, 2010)