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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

Gameplay Balance Changes

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

Settings Changes

• 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 screen will never prompt players for a reboot now except when a previously-disabled expansion is enabled -- Unity 3D can resize its windows in realtime. Yay!

• 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).

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.

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