AI War Beta 3.701 Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2010/10/ai-war-beta-3701-released.html

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Hot off the heels of the recent 3.700 beta of the new AI War 4 comes this new bugfix-laden version.  Seriously, that's a lot of release notes for it having been the weekend!  Predictably, there were a number of issues with the prior beta version, and this new beta resolves most of the serious reports; this new version will play much better.

The updater in the prior version works just fine, but a number of the issues in the prior version were with the installer itself, so I've opted to just do another installer and start fresh from 3.701.  You can download 3.701 here.

One challenge we've faced in the last couple of days is how to distribute all these soon-to-be-daily beta updates without breaking the bank on bandwidth; another challenge was how to deal with the influx of bug reports and suggestions in an organized fashion.  People kept giving us walls of text with unrelated thoughts all clumped into one topic, and our bug reports forum wasn't really cutting it in general lately, anyway.  Nor the suggestions forums, either.

So, to solve this problem, we turned to Mantis BugTracker, and have a new Arcen Games Bug Track tool.  Some helpful souls have been helping us to migrate the old bug reports and the old suggestions.  That's a pretty gargantuan task, though, because there are probably over a thousand topics relating to suggestions.  If anyone has any spare time and you don't mind spending a few moments even moving just one or two topics over and filing them properly, that would be a huge help to us.

Even more helpful?  Please log any future bug reports or suggestions in the new tool.  It makes it easy for you to search to see if someone else has already suggested/reported the same thing, and it makes it easy for us to manage the flow and our own workload, as well as communicating to you roughly what's in progress, what's planned, etc.

Anyway, so this new beta is mostly bugfixes, but there are a number of smallish balance tweaks and similar in there, too.  Check out those release notes for more info.  Enjoy!

[Mánagarmr]

Quick work! The new bugtracker certainly makes things easier, even for us! Thanks for picking up on the suggestion!

Also, that first screenshot of the Galaxy Map...looks hot actually. I haven't spent much time staring at it (been busy hunting bugs), but you did a really good job on the UI. Good work guys!

[Mánagarmr]

[shameless self-promotion]It seems that in the release notes "themachineissentient" is credited with the sound engine report, while it was actually me.[/shameless self-promotion]

Sentient did move it to the tracker though.

[@B0FH]

Seen as the bug tracker is refusing to give me a password , my reported bug #37 (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=34) seems to be fixed in 3.701

[Mánagarmr]

@BOFH
Check your spam folder. The bugtracker sends an email to your specified email-adress with a confirmation link to create your account password and allow you to login. If you did this more than 6 hours ago, you should try again as I think there was an error with emails back then that Chris has now fixed.

But you are saying that particular bug no longer happens in 3.701?

[eRe4s3r]

Aesthetic comment:   Better now as the conversion is still young ;P

The stars are very nice........ except theres too many ;p I am only mentioning it because tis the same problem with the background noise that was there before - the star "parts"have too much low-brightness noise which results in the "splotches" of brightness in the nebula. But now its not because of editing error but rather because the starfields as they are now are too densely populated when they are layered over each other.

The weird thing is i can't trace back the noise to any particularly star image.png...so they are all contributing to the effect but if they are "layered" then the starfield png's need drastically less stars than they have now. Someone just needs to go trough them with the eraser (heh no thats pun on my name) and make them a bit drastically more sparse.


So this is not always as noticeable depending on what starfields are used how (as this seems random)

Just dropping this here as thats the first thing that i noticed, besides that the new effects are awesome, though i would also kindly request to have all GUI elements (and of course, sprites in the research and galaxy tabs) preloaded at all times. I opened the research and galaxy tab and i saw it loading which makes the GUI appear the very opposite of "snappy"

Besides that it looks all pretty well and nice, particularly the engineer beams are very neat ;P

Edit: Also

Can we get FPS Limiter and Vsync settings please? 

[Mánagarmr]

eRe4s3r, I'd suggest (no pun intended) you post that suggestion in the new tracker, so they can easily see it. I can imagine that after closing down the Suggestions and Bug Report forums they'll be more heavily inclined to scour the tracker for suggestions. Please also make on report per suggestion, so in your case two. One for the starfield issue and one for the VSync one.

If you don't want to, I can do it for you if you wish.


EDIT: I have no idea how "wish" became "sih"...

[@B0FH]

@BOFH
Check your spam folder. The bugtracker sends an email to your specified email-adress with a confirmation link to create your account password and allow you to login. If you did this more than 6 hours ago, you should try again as I think there was an error with emails back then that Chris has now fixed.

But you are saying that particular bug no longer happens in 3.701?

Junk folder is empty after 2.5hrs, but yes that bug seems to have disappeared in 3.701. Alt-tabbing now no longer crashes the game, nor does using the Steam Community overlay, or the Raptr overlay.

[quickstix]

Using a bug tracker looks like a good call, especially Mantis. The Freespace Source Code project has been using Mantis for ages now and its worked very well for them.

[Mánagarmr]

@BOFH
Check your spam folder. The bugtracker sends an email to your specified email-adress with a confirmation link to create your account password and allow you to login. If you did this more than 6 hours ago, you should try again as I think there was an error with emails back then that Chris has now fixed.

But you are saying that particular bug no longer happens in 3.701?

Junk folder is empty after 2.5hrs, but yes that bug seems to have disappeared in 3.701. Alt-tabbing now no longer crashes the game, nor does using the Steam Community overlay, or the Raptr overlay.

Okay, then I'd suggest trying to sign up again. Also, don't use the "@" in your username. It might get confused xD

[eRe4s3r]

eRe4s3r, I'd suggest (no pun intended) you post that suggestion in the new tracker, so they can easily see it. I can imagine that after closing down the Suggestions and Bug Report forums they'll be more heavily inclined to scour the tracker for suggestions. Please also make on report per suggestion, so in your case two. One for the starfield issue and one for the VSync one.

If you don't want to, I can do it for you if you wish.


EDIT: I have no idea how "wish" became "sih"...

I shall do so but atm am rather lazish ;P Actually its 3 issues too, as Vsync and Frame Limiter are not the same. (Vsync limits your fps at all kinds of weird FPS counts depending on the frame rate, where as frame limiter freezes it at a certain, never changing value).

Though i have nay an Idea how that bugtracker works

[Mánagarmr]

Bugtracker is easy, actually. Just register for an account (yeah, bothersome), then press "Report issue" and enter everything. Done! Just select the proper category from the dropdown list and you're good to go.

[goodgimp]

Is it normal not to have any music with this beta release?

[Mánagarmr]

Is it normal not to have any music with this beta release?

Quite normal. All the remastered music will be in the 4.0 release, as per the release notes.

Music of any sort (we left this out on purpose until final release).

[goodgimp]

Good grief, I can't believe I missed that /BONK.  Thank you.