Here's the latest prerelease:
http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar1009E.zipUPDATE: If you previously downloaded 1.009D, you probably ran into the ship placement bug that Admiral reported below. The E version is now linked above, and is identical to the prior D except for that one fix.That version is an upgrade from version 1.008, so you have to already have 1.008 (or greater) installed. Just unzip it into your game folder (usually C:\Program Files\Arcen Games\AI War\ unless you specified something else). Please make sure that your unzip process keeps the folder structure from the zip file, rather than just unpacking all of the files into the base target directory.
What's new since 1.009B (C was a minor release in another thread):
(Cumulative release notes since 1.008 are attached at the bottom)
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-If the music stream gets corrupted, it should no longer crash the game.
-Previously, pressing comma when not in-game could sometimes cause a crash. Fixed.
-All of the checkboxes in the lobby now have their tooltips show up on the right of themselves. In recent releases, the left-most column was sometimes not visible under their own tooltips.
-The tooltip font size in the lobby no longer scales up with the "Extra Tooltip Font Size" setting. That settings is now for in-game tooltips only.
-The four different ship type abilities that are AI-only now only show "AI ONLY" in parentheses behind them to be more clear.
-Ion cannon shots are no longer blocked by counter-sniper turrets.
-The guard radius for AI ships has been increased slightly, and the radius into which they retreat has been increased as well. This should stop the large bunches of ships from not being able to find a place to stop.
-The AI Progress now goes up by 30 points when a human player's home planet command station is destroyed. This is only relevant for multiplayer.
-A new "Show Icons at" slider has been added to the settings screen. This allows players to tweak the threshold of zoom at which the "far zoom" icons are shown instead of the actual ship graphics.
-A new "Always Show Selected Unit Hover Text" option has been added. There is also now a background for this, and the columns for the selected units now show up evenly.
-The tooltip text for some of the checkboxes in the lobby was confusing in regard to whether the checkbox needed to be checked or unchecked to enable the type (they are all checked = enabled, unchecked = disabled). This wording has been fixed.
-The lobby now has an option for enabling cheats. The first fifteen cheats are also now available (see ArcenWiki for details:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Cheats).
-Metal and crystal harvesters that are being manually placed now "snap" to their final placement locations even before they are placed. Thus if there is a problem at the final location, it is found; no more cases where automatic placement would fail, but manual placement would erroneously work.
-Previously, engineers could not assist another engineer that was under construction if the under-construction engineer was already given a repair order. Fixed.
-The AI is now MUCH more intelligent about how it sends batches of ships through wormholes to player planets. It will try to batch its ships together instead of letting them trickle through, which lets them be much more damaging and surprising with just the same number of ships as they previously had. A new "wait point" mechanism has been added to the underlying AI capabilities in order to support this, in addition to some other AI data structure extensions. This is all handled on the AI thread, so it doesn't slow down the main simulation.
-The game no longer tries to sync planet rotations, and now silently skips bad syncs of foreground object rotation. This allows for greater compatibility with non-English-language OSes playing with one another.
