AI War:1.009 Release

-In recent releases, long-range shots (such as cruisers) that were targeting a ship under a force field would fail to hit that force field. They would only succeed if the shot was short-range enough, if the shot was directed straight at the force field itself, or sometimes if the mode was Fast & Dangerous. Fixed.

-In recent releases, the CounterSpy ship was unable to actually hit cloaked ships. Fixed.

-Previously, if there was no command station present at an AI planet receivingreinforcements, then some of the ships would just appear at the center of the planetary area. Now those ships will appear at one of the command posts, or the ship that is providing the reinforce ability.

-When players are dragging the selection rectangle, there are now little counts of how many ships belonging to the local player, to allies, and to enemies are present on the planet. This makes it much easier to determine the size of forces at part of a planet instead of at the planet as a whole.

-Previously, if a ship caught by a tractor beam cloaked, it would disconnect from the tractor beam but it would also become immobile until the game was saved and reloaded. Fixed.

-There is now a "Team Income" line in the intel summary view for planets owned by the human team. It shows the aggregate amount of metal and crystal being produced per planet, taking into account the efficiency reductions and other negative/positive effects, but NOT taking into consideration metal/crystal manufactories, since those are really a secondary conversion control and not a primary source of income.

-In recent releases, the count of wormholes on each starting planet was not showing in the lobby. Fixed.

-The wormhole reinforcements of the turtle and fortress baron AI types have been toned down somewhat. Also, wormhole reinforcements in general have been toned down a bit until AI difficulty 8.

-There was a very, very rare crash bug with calculating Sin/Cos. Fixed.

-On planets on which players would normally not be able to see enemies on the planetary summary sidebar, the players now also can't see a count of the enemy ships in their selection range (instead just seeing ???). Also, cloaked enemies are no longer included in this count.

-When AI players still have a ship (or an Exo-Galaxy Wormhole) on a player's planet, that shows up as a hostile wormhole in the hostile wormholes count in the galaxy map.

-The Z+X attack range circles will no longer include cloaked enemy ships.

-A new Z+A key combination has been added. Holding this allows the player to see the range of all their selected ships with the center at the cursor position rather than the ship positions. This is very useful for moving ships into a specific range of a target.

-Vampires and Cutlasses now have infinite engine health, since they are completely useless without engines (and since cutlasses cannot be repaired). Mobile Force Fields (Mark III force fields) also now have infinite engine health.

-All command posts and command stations are now immune to being insta-killed.

-Pressing F1 will now make the planetary summary show entries for every ship type in the game, rather than just the ship types that are at the local planet. This is useful as a lookup tool for enemy ship types that are incoming but not yet present, or as an "icon key" for deciphering the icons in the galaxy map intel summary.

-The sound effect for when home planet command stations are under attack is now better.

-There is now a visual warning in the upper left when command stations are under attack or are destroyed. There is also a new auditory warning, low in pitch, that goes along with this.

-Engineers are not allowed to repair other engineers that are making repairs, but now engineers are allowed to repair other engineers that are simply assisting space docks or other constructors. This makes it possible for a free-roaming engineer to repair engineers attached to a dock.

-Previously, it was possible for the lines between ships (tachyon, cloaking boost, munitions boost, tractor, etc) to keep displaying for a fraction of a second between the ships when one of the ships pass between planets. Fixed.

-The cloaking booster ability now has more of an affinity for scouts, and then higher-level ships, instead of just going for the highest-costing ships. This prevents scouts from boosting the cloaking of mines if there are better targets around. Additionally, scouts will no longer boost the cloak of any ship that is immobile, which prevents them from wasting their boosters on mines in general.

-In recent releases, mobile repair stations were forgetting to stop repairing ships that were fully repaired, and they were also not doing a very good job of finding all the new targets around themselves unless the players manually moved the repair station. Fixed.

-Previously, engineers that were assisting another ship but were in attack-move mode, would oscillate back and forth between the two tasks. Fixed.

-Engineers once again collision detect properly when moving to assist a target.

-If the music stream gets corrupted, it should no longer crash the game.

-Previously, pressing comma when not in-game could sometimes cause a crash. Fixed.

-All of the checkboxes in the lobby now have their tooltips show up on the right of themselves. In recent releases, the left-most column was sometimes not visible under their own tooltips.

-The tooltip font size in the lobby no longer scales up with the "Extra Tooltip Font Size" setting. That settings is now for in-game tooltips only.

-The four different ship type abilities that are AI-only now only show "AI ONLY" in parentheses behind them to be more clear.

-Ion cannon shots are no longer blocked by counter-sniper turrets.

-The guard radius for AI ships has been increased slightly, and the radius into which they retreat has been increased as well. This should stop the large bunches of ships from not being able to find a place to stop.

-The AI Progress now goes up by 30 points when a human player's home planet command station is destroyed. This is only relevant for multiplayer.

-A new "Show Icons at" slider has been added to the settings screen. This allows players to tweak the threshold of zoom at which the "far zoom" icons are shown instead of the actual ship graphics.

-A new "Always Show Selected Unit Hover Text" option has been added. There is also now a background for this, and the columns for the selected units now show up evenly.

-The tooltip text for some of the checkboxes in the lobby was confusing in regard to whether the checkbox needed to be checked or unchecked to enable the type (they are all checked = enabled, unchecked = disabled). This wording has been fixed.

-The lobby now has an option for enabling cheats. The first fifteen cheats are also now available (see ArcenWiki for details: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI War:Cheats).

-Metal and crystal harvesters that are being manually placed now "snap" to their final placement locations even before they are placed. Thus if there is a problem at the final location, it is found; no more cases where automatic placement would fail, but manual placement would erroneously work.

-Previously, engineers could not assist another engineer that was under construction if the under-construction engineer was already given a repair order. Fixed.

-The AI is now MUCH more intelligent about how it sends batches of ships through wormholes to player planets. It will try to batch its ships together instead of letting them trickle through, which lets them be much more damaging and surprising with just the same number of ships as they previously had. A new "wait point" mechanism has been added to the underlying AI capabilities in order to support this, in addition to some other AI data structure extensions. This is all handled on the AI thread, so it doesn't slow down the main simulation.

-The game no longer tries to sync planet rotations, and now silently skips bad syncs of foreground object rotation. This allows for greater compatibility with non-English-language OSes playing with one another.

-The planetary summary should never now overlap the scores display when it is just at the threshold of being too long for being two columns instead of one.

-The Planet Notes editor in the galaxy map now also allows for the names of the planets to be changed.

-The green bubbles for ships under force fields were not showing in recent releases until the ships were shot at. Fixed.

-All of the resource and constructor ships are now immune to reclamation by parasites/leeches.

-The recharge bar on ships (formerly red) is now white instead.

-The health bars of ships now show up as yellow when less than 66% health is remaining, and red when less than 33% health is remaining, and the usual green otherwise.

-Performance-affecting entries in the Game Settings are now shown in either green (for items that can improve performance) or red (for items that can reduce performance).

-There is now a settings option for turning off the recharge bar display on ships.

-There is now a settings option for always showing the ship bars (health and/or recharge) in far zoom icon view.

-It is now possible for any player to export the unit relative chart by using Ctrl+Shift+F5 (partial), or Ctrl+Shift+F6 (full), when the F3 debug info is visible. See the controls document for more information.

-The way that blades hit their targets are now consistent with other shot types, which means that they will now properly trigger the command station warning sounds, etc.

-Cutlasses and Vampires are now immune to tractor beams, since they are completely helpless when held in that fashion.

-Previously, ships that had cloaking would never fire unless in attack-move or free-roaming modes, or unless they were explicitly given an attack order. This was very problematic when they were hit by tachyon beam emitters, since they would then not defend themselves. Now they will automatically fire at targets as long as they are decloaked, but they still won't break cloaking of their own accord to attack unless in attack-move or free-roaming modes.

-Previously, it was sometimes possible for maps to have fewer than 8 available starting positions for players. Fixed.

-The cost of Mark II engineers has been increased by 400 each of metal and crystal, and they now take 10 seconds longer to build.

-New ship: Mark III Engineers can now be unlocked at the ECON tab of command stations. These engineers have an even larger repair radius, a very fast movement speed (but no teleportation), cloaking, and a high hull strength. They have to decloak in order to perform repairs/acceleration, but they recloak quite quickly after stopping.

-The AI now uses more Mark III engineers on its core, home, and upgraded planets. Most AIs still use the regular Mark I engineers everywhere else, but the Teleporter Turtle AI type uses Mark II (teleporting) engineers instead.

-The Mobile Repair Station is now immune to being insta-killed.

-Missiles can no longer be repaired.

-New Ships: The mobile repair station can now build five different variants of space tug, which are very fast ships with tractor beams that can automatically bring ships back to the nearest mobile repair station for healing, then send the ships back into the fray.

-Shot and explosion objects are once again reused, since it is now clear that they were not causing the prior desyncs. This should help to keep memory usage as low as possible.

-The way that unit data is sent to the AI thread now requires no string concatenation, which should prevent the rare OutOfMemory exceptions that a few players with extra-high amounts of RAM were getting.

-When the scores or graph displays are shown, the game now immediately goes into non-input-focus mode. Mouse scrolling and zooming also no longer works at all when the game does not have input focus, to prevent confusion.

-The game timer is now positioned such that it will slide over and still be fully visible for games that last longer than one day.

-Previously, dead players could not capture planets. That was very old logic. Now they are allowed to.

-Previously, the game would completely stop when a gameover was reached, and gameover games could not be saved. Now the game will let players continue playing as normal once a gameover is reached, saving included, but scores will not increase for any players once a gameover is reached. Also, previously the defeat or victory music would play on a game over, and then there would just be silence. Now it will start playing regular game music again after the victory/defeat music is finished.

-The AI is now more responsive with combat with large numbers of ships, giving them orders more quickly than before. Previously, really large AI armies tended to get a bit sluggish.

-Pressing Ctrl+Alt+F8 now exports the Excel Secondaries: StrongWeak.xml, AgainstBasic.xml, ShipDataFull.xml, ShipDataStatsOnly.xml, TechData.xml, KnowledgeBreakdown.xml. Unlike the unit relative export this does not require a lengthy simulation to be run, so it executes in just a couple of seconds.

-The AI will now taunt the players (with audio as well as text) when the human players lose a big battle, or when the AI destroys the command station of a human player.

-All of the remaining zoom/rotation/scale related uses of floating point math have been converted to use fixed-point math instead. This should prevent any potential related multiplayer desyncs based on different machine architectures.

-Previously, when the client in a TBS-friendly pause game hit pause, it would sometimes just hang on Pausing... and never actually go to full pause. Fixed.

-A shift has been made to the way the planetary summary items are aggregated, that should prevent the issue of duplicate entries (one white, one red/yellow/blue).

-There was previously a desync that could be introduced when loading a saved game from an older version with the 1.009 versions for the first time. Simply saving the desynced game again and loading it would fix it, but now the root issue is also fixed.

-The science lab I and II no longer show the I and II text on the planetary summary, nor do they show as separate entries any longer.

-There is now a direct link to the community wiki from the tutorials screen in the game.

-Previously there was a very rare bug where less knowledge might be gathered from a planet than was actually available at the planet (the example is having 3 too few). Fixed.

-Fixed a bug with too many higher-level engineers being added to AI Planets.

SPECIAL THANKS

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Thanks to Revenantus for reporting the issue with the long range shots hitting force fields, for reporting the issue with counter spy ships, for suggesting the selection rectangle counts, for reporting the issue with the tractor beams and cloaked ships, for suggesting the updates to the selection rectangle counts, for suggesting the Z+A functionality, for reporting the minor graphical issue with the lines between ships, for reporting the engineer oscillation in attack-move mode, for reporting the issue with engineer collision detection, for reporting the comma crash bug, for reporting that counter-sniper turrets were blocking ion cannon shots, for inspiring the change to "snap" metal and crystal harvester placement, for suggesting that anyone be able to export the unit relative export xml files, for reuquesting the excel export secondaries.

Thanks to Quitch for suggesting the Team Income display in the intel summary, for suggesting the icon key (F1), for suggesting the Always Show Selected Unit Hover Text setting.

Thanks to darke for reporting the missing wormhole counts in the lobby, for reporting the Sin/Cos crash bug, for reporting that z+x was showing cloaked enemy ships, for suggesting that cutlasses have infinite engine health, for inspiring the change to have all command posts/stations be immune to being insta-killed, foir suggesting the warning when command stations are under attack or destroyed, for suggesting that engineers be able to assist other engineers that are assisting docks, for suggesting that cloaking booster ignore mines, for reporting the issues with the mobile repair stations, for reporting the issue with under-construction engineers, for suggesting that harvesters not be reclaimable, for reporting the issue with blades not triggering command station warnings, for suggesting the addition of Mark III engineers with cloaking, for suggesting the teleporter turtle AI type use teleporting engineers, for suggesting some more improvements to how the AI groups ships to send them through player wormholes, for reporting the issue with the knowledge gathering, for reporting the bug with too many higher-level engineers being added to AI planets.

Thanks to JSiegrist for reporting the issue with music stream corruption causing a crash.

Thanks for Kalzarius for suggesting that AI-Only abilities be marked as such, for suggesting the increase in the guard retreat radius, for reporting the issue with no-input-focus mode of the game and mouse zooming, for reporting the issue with the timer being cut off on games longer than one day.

Thanks to Admiral for suggesting the "Show Icons at" slider, for reporting the issue wiht the planetary summary sometimes overlapping the scores display, for suggesting that the names of planets be editable, for suggesting that the health bars should change color based on how damaged they are, for suggesting the ability to turn off the recharge bar display, for suggesting the ability to show ship bars in far zoom, for suggesting that the game remain playable/saveable after a victory, for suggesting green instead of yellow for settings items that improve performance, for reporting the issue with floating-point math, for reporting the issue with the pausing... text on client machines in tbs-friendly pause, for reporting the issue with the duplicate ship type icons in the planetary summary.

Thanks to PhilRoi for reporting the unclear wording in the tooltip text for some of the lobby checkboxes, for reporting the issues with space tugs going to the wrong location.

Thanks to Ozu08865 for suggesting the addition of cheats.

Thanks to fuchu and Revenantus for reporting the issue with checkbox tooltips in the lobby.

AI War:AI War