Oh, boy. I haven't been here to report something in a long time. I really should do a better job of remembering / noting down what my mantis password is!
Steam pulled AI War 8.009 for me this morning. I didn't think much of it until I loaded a game I started last night in a galaxy I knew was still going to be rather empty because there was only twenty minutes of gametime in it.
I noticed pretty much right away that the zoom in on Home Command that happens on load was way too choppy for what my machine is capable of, especially in a galaxy where nothing of real value is happening yet. After checking in Graphics Settings for any new toggles I might not have been aware of, I next went to the in-game performance profile settings and deliberately started screwing with it to see if that had something to do with it. Yep - setting it to something ridiculous like 166ms caused the Champion I was using as a test ship to start skipping more than a shiplength in distance every time the game redrew rather than being a graceful glider that just happened to be slow to respond.
My default performance profile is 33ms, baggage from my previous machine. I've upgraded since my last major AI War binge. :p If I was on 17ms (current machine can handle this just fine) I may not have noticed, but my old unchanged default of 33 caused the framerate coupling issues to pop out at me right away.
Current machine, if it helps!
Custom Build:
Intel Core i5-3570 (3.4GHz, 4 cores)
16GB RAM
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, fully up-to-date as of earlier this week
Boot drive / Steam drive is an SSD, but Steam games (including AI War) are on spinning disk storage.
All of the above is with the game running through Steam. I'm going to try running it with Overlay disabled, then completely independent of Steam to see if that has any relation to this condition.
edit:Steam, Steam w/o Overlay and Launch without Steam doesn't seem to matter. I had to check to see if Steam was part of the problem, I know it's been giving you guys a few headaches recently.