AI War:Current 4.0 Beta

Prerelease 3.700

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

• 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.

• The keyboard bindings are now able to be edited.

• 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.

• 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 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.

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