The latest beta is available via the Updates window in version 3.000 or greater of the game. Just open the game and you can quickly download the prerelease through the updates tab. If you don't yet have 3.000 or greater, you can download 3.000
here. This prerelease version is compatible with any vendor's version of the game -- Steam, Impulse, whatever.
Note: If you have bug reports related to this release,
please log them in the
bug reports subforum with one bug per topic. It makes things infinitely easier for us. Thanks!
Looking for a Patch That Can Be Manually-Installed?Because of the time involved in creating multiple versions of each patch, we only create manually-installable patches for official versions of the game, not each beta prerelease. But, if you're running version 3.022 of the game or higher, you can easily create your own manually-installable beta patch! If you don't yet have 3.022, but do have 3.000 or greater, you can download a simple zip containing the files of 3.022
here. Simply unpack those on top of your existing files in your AI War folder, and voila -- you're on 3.022.
To create your own manual beta patch, you'll want to go
here. This folder contains all of the beta updates. You just need whatever the most recent one is at the time (probably the same version number as this post). Download that zip file, which if you try to open will say it's corrupt -- that's okay, it's not really a zip file. Next download the updated
Director.Xml file from that folder. Finally create a new zip file on your computer, and put both the director and the fake-zip-file inside it. Call your outer zip file something that starts with Beta and ends with an extension of .zip. Beta.zip will work just fine, or you can name it after the specific version number if you want to hang onto it. And that's it! Now you have your very own manually-installable package of the AI War beta version of your choice, which you can install by simply selecting via your Updates window in the game.
What's new since 3.052:(Cumulative release notes since 3.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-new rule in hit chance calculation: if the defender is held in a tractor beam and the defender is within the attacker's normal range, the attacker's minimum hit chance is 5%.
-modified autotargetting-throttling to be quicker about digging through a massive line of ships waiting for autotargetting (mainly when just loading a game with tons of ships fighting) to avoid large groups of ships sitting there doing nothing for minutes.
-Ships that are within the normal attack range of enemy ships are now given a 1% chance of hitting the enemy ship, whereas previously they could have a 0% hit chance if the enemy ship had shields that were too high. This prevents confusion when turrets, etc, just sit there stupidly when a highly-shielded target is in their outer range, but not in their effective range.
CHANGES TO PAST PRERELEASES
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-Previous version was putting an _ after "Autosave" when creating normal autosaves. Fixed to not do this.
-Absolute ship cap (normally 1500) raised for mines, emp mines, area mines, and perma mines. Basically this means that multi-homeworld starts can use the same number of mines as they used to.
-Changed icon grouping back to not including all ships on the planet in the grouping calculation (it was really tanking performance in middlish-zooms) but periodically doing so to prevent problems with ships not being drawn.
-Autotargetting for armor ships modified to not care very much about doing engine damage, preferring other things like how much damage it will do. They will still try to target ships that can take more engine damage if most everything else is equal.
-In the last few versions the munitions boosting caps (which should only apply in case of massive abuse of the fact that ships don't collision detect as strictly while moving) was not being computed correctly (based on boost_range*pi instead of boost_range*boost_range_pi), fixed.
