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. 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 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).

• 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.

• 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.

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