Prerelease 3.013 (Bugfixes, Electric Shuttle Balance, Music Playback Update)

[x4000]

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!

What's new since 3.012:
(Cumulative release notes since 3.000 are attached at the bottom)

-------------------

-Electric Shuttles now have a smaller maximum damage modifier against any enemy ships.

-Dyson Gatlings are now unable to hit core ships.

-The modeless message boxes are now larger, to make sure all text is always able to fit with the larger font that is now present.

-Rebel Colonies will no longer spawn on AI planets that have an original tech level greater than II.

-Remains Rebuilders now have a delay before they will start rebuilding.  For players, that delay is a simple 3 seconds, but for the AI that delay is 2 minutes.  This makes the burden of cleanup drones significantly less onerous.

-The collision-detection issues with objects in cold storage have now been fully resolved; objects now collide with objects in cold storage as if they were not.

-All non-melee ships in the game now have an extra 2,000 range.  This solves many of the targeting issues for fighters in attack-move stance, etc, and provides for a better large-battle experience in general.

-Leech Starships were previously not counting as starships.  Fixed.

-Scouts and scout starships are now immune to force fields to prevent them from ever getting stuck on enemy planets while traveling automatically.

-The cost of resistance ships has been increased by 33%, but rebelling human colonies now produce +55 metal and crystal per second.  This makes capturing multiple rebel colonies valuable.

-Ships are no longer able to be put inside Hive Golems as a transport; hive golems only transport the wasps that they create themselves.  This also fixes an issue with engineers being unable to repair hive golems.

-Engineers and Mobile Repair Stations no longer require supply to function.  This lets them work on enemy planets to support longer-range raids if players desire (thus letting no-engine ships be healed in those circumstances), and it also allows players to repair broken golems on nuked planets, and other similar circumstances.

-The game now auto-corrects for AI ships that were accidentally placed on top of one another in past versions of the game, though it doesn't touch the placement of player ships.

-AI immobile ships are now unable to be placed directly on top of wormholes.

-Marauders and human resistance fighters will now have half as many ships as before.

-The logic for resistance fighters spawning was incorrect, and they never were.  They should actually start showing up now.

-In addition to drawing ship-to-ship lines, munitions boosting is now indicated by ships having a pink hue to them when you are zoomed far in on them, and shield boosting is now indicated by ships having a light green hue to them when you are zoomed far in.  There is now an option to turn off the munitions/shield lines in the settings window, since in extreme cases that could adversely affect performance.

-Previously, the "niche text" on icons was not being shown in ship placement mode until the ship was actually placed.  Fixed.

-Previously, lightning warheads and other explosion-type units (warheads, autobombs, etc) were detonating too early against very large structures.  Fixed.

-Armored and Lightning Warheads no longer hurt allied ships when they go off, and now properly hit enemy command stations and similar.

-New music streaming code should do a better job under high latency conditions on some audio drivers.

-Lack of metal or crystal no longer prevents allies from having their ships be assisted in self-construction or queue-construction.

-Alt-clicking ships in the planetary summary now deselects them.

-Previously, command station home cores were not being created for a new player to a game until they were given at least one other ship from another player.  Fixed.

-Previously, some listbox popups could hang off the bottom of the screen.  Fixed.

-Previously, the Auto AI Progress values were not being set properly from the game lobby.  Fixed.

-Previously it was possible for expansion minor factions to be enabled in non-expansion games.  Fixed.

[Kalzarius]

-All non-melee ships in the game now have an extra 2,000 range.  This solves many of the targeting issues for fighters in attack-move stance, etc, and provides for a better large-battle experience in general.

Does this include lightning warheads?  I noticed when I was testing the other fixes for them that when holding Z to see the protection ranges, the circle shown was vastly outside of its actual effective damage radius, which seems rather counterintuitive.  Since lightning warheads can't see, it only makes sense to show their damage radius.

I am very happy to report that they otherwise seem to work as expected, though they need to have their tooltip info updated to reflect the recent change of no longer damaging friendly units. 

-New music streaming code should do a better job under high latency conditions on some audio drivers.

This does in fact reduce the issue that was being experienced.  I should note, however, that it only makes it easier for the stream to recover from buffer underruns.  It cannot, unfortunately, prevent them altogether.  Using my system under very high stress (6000+ ships all moving on screen at once, shifting through zoom levels, with over 100,000 units total in game), some buffer underruns were still encountered.  The buffer did, however, recover and the constant clicking that was being experienced previously is no longer an issue.  There was one case in which it took several seconds for the buffer to recover, but that was in an uncommonly laggy scenario.  I would further recommend doubling the StreamBufferSize while leaving the number of sectors the same.  This should help reduce the frequency of buffer underruns.

[x4000]

-All non-melee ships in the game now have an extra 2,000 range.  This solves many of the targeting issues for fighters in attack-move stance, etc, and provides for a better large-battle experience in general.

Does this include lightning warheads?  I noticed when I was testing the other fixes for them that when holding Z to see the protection ranges, the circle shown was vastly outside of its actual effective damage radius, which seems rather counterintuitive.  Since lightning warheads can't see, it only makes sense to show their damage radius.

I am very happy to report that they otherwise seem to work as expected, though they need to have their tooltip info updated to reflect the recent change of no longer damaging friendly units. 

Yeah, whoops -- fixed for 3.014.  Also, thanks about the tooltip note -- also done for 3.014.

-New music streaming code should do a better job under high latency conditions on some audio drivers.

This does in fact reduce the issue that was being experienced.  I should note, however, that it only makes it easier for the stream to recover from buffer underruns.  It cannot, unfortunately, prevent them altogether.  Using my system under very high stress (6000+ ships all moving on screen at once, shifting through zoom levels, with over 100,000 units total in game), some buffer underruns were still encountered.  The buffer did, however, recover and the constant clicking that was being experienced previously is no longer an issue.  There was one case in which it took several seconds for the buffer to recover, but that was in an uncommonly laggy scenario.  I would further recommend doubling the StreamBufferSize while leaving the number of sectors the same.  This should help reduce the frequency of buffer underruns.

Progress!  Hey!  Good call on the streambuffersize, I have updated this for 3.014 and we'll see how that does later tonight.

[Vaos]

-All non-melee ships in the game now have an extra 2,000 range.  This solves many of the targeting issues for fighters in attack-move stance, etc, and provides for a better large-battle experience in general.

And what about tractor beams? Now that even tanks can be in range of them pretty easily, I can see them getting destroyed very often on the player side.

[quickstix]

Another very impressive update. The non-melee range increase is a great idea, it also makes ship battles feel less clumped than before. Nice work on the music playback too.

[x4000]

-All non-melee ships in the game now have an extra 2,000 range.  This solves many of the targeting issues for fighters in attack-move stance, etc, and provides for a better large-battle experience in general.

And what about tractor beams? Now that even tanks can be in range of them pretty easily, I can see them getting destroyed very often on the player side.

I'm reluctant to change that without seeing it become a problem first.  But, let's see what happens with it.

Another very impressive update. The non-melee range increase is a great idea, it also makes ship battles feel less clumped than before. Nice work on the music playback too.

Thanks!  And the music playback thing was 100% Kalzarius, by the way -- he's in the attached credits, but I should have noted it here, too.  All I did was cut-and-paste his suggested code revisions from the forum.

[Kjara]

-Remains Rebuilders now have a delay before they will start rebuilding.  For players, that delay is a simple 3 seconds, but for the AI that delay is 2 minutes.  This makes the burden of cleanup drones significantly less onerous.

-The collision-detection issues with objects in cold storage have now been fully resolved; objects now collide with objects in cold storage as if they were not.

-All non-melee ships in the game now have an extra 2,000 range.  This solves many of the targeting issues for fighters in attack-move stance, etc, and provides for a better large-battle experience in general.

-The cost of resistance ships has been increased by 33%, but rebelling human colonies now produce +55 metal and crystal per second.  This makes capturing multiple rebel colonies valuable.

-Ships are no longer able to be put inside Hive Golems as a transport; hive golems only transport the wasps that they create themselves.  This also fixes an issue with engineers being unable to repair hive golems.

-Engineers and Mobile Repair Stations no longer require supply to function.  This lets them work on enemy planets to support longer-range raids if players desire (thus letting no-engine ships be healed in those circumstances), and it also allows players to repair broken golems on nuked planets, and other similar circumstances.

-The logic for resistance fighters spawning was incorrect, and they never were.  They should actually start showing up now.

Might want to give melee units a bit more shields then(say 2k more shields?).

Other than that, my response to all of these is: Whee.

[x4000]

Great call on the melee ships.  In 3.014:

-Vampires, Cutlasses, and Wasps now have 2,000 more shields each.

I decided not to give that bonus to the viral shredders (or autobombs), as I felt like they didn't need any more advantage.

[RCIX]

So does this mean that snipers have 1,000,001,999 range now?

[x4000]

So does this mean that snipers have 1,000,001,999 range now?

I should have clarified -- any ships with less than sniper range got the increase.

[Kalzarius]

-Previously, some listbox popups could hang off the bottom of the screen.  Fixed.

Woohoo, the find box is usable again! Would it be possible to make the find box organized by ship class (Mobile Military, Starship, Resource, Turret, etc.) like they used to be, rather than having all of the ship types in the root find box?

[x4000]

-Previously, some listbox popups could hang off the bottom of the screen.  Fixed.

Woohoo, the find box is usable again! Would it be possible to make the find box organized by ship class (Mobile Military, Starship, Resource, Turret, etc.) like they used to be, rather than having all of the ship types in the root find box?

The way this works has never particularly changed, actually, except that we added Mobile Military at one point (which is still there).  It is organized by Ship Type, the only difference is that now there are many more ship types than before -- starships, turrets, and a few others have been split, whereas they used to be all one collapsed line.

[HellishFiend]

By the look of things, 3.014 has an outstanding amount of fixes... any chance of it coming out tonight?

[x4000]

By the look of things, 3.014 has an outstanding amount of fixes... any chance of it coming out tonight?

Funny you should ask... guess what I'm in the process of releasing right now?

[x4000]

And here it is:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,3372.0.html