Prerelease 3.027 (Far Zoom Perf+, Balance Changes, Middle-click panning)

[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!

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 crete 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 3.026:
(Cumulative release notes since 3.000 are attached at the bottom)

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-Ships over a certain cost threshold (500,000 right now, for either metal or crystal) now use an alternate build-increment timing so they only update every game-second instead of every cycle (20 cycles a game-second).  This should help prevent cost-rate spikes towards the end of building a Zenith Power Generator, for example.

-Added "No Friendly Evade" control node that prevents scout evasion behavior when exiting a wormhole onto a friendly planet.

-Added "Stay with MRS" control node that makes ships repaired by your multi-repair ships stay with the MRS unit rather than returning to their previous location.

-Cluster attack bonus ability description in ship info now shows the third decimal place since it was misleading to show autocannon minipod mk2s as only have 0.02% bonus per ship when it is really 0.025%.

-Ships immune to black hole machines were not saying so on the tooltip, fixed.

-Cleanup drones are now immune to tractor beams and aoe damage.

-AI should no longer taunt player for scrapping a command station.

-Added interface option "Icon Grouping Distance" which, if enabled, groups far-zoom icons together to save rendering time.  At the default setting, this makes render performance approximately doubled when zoomed out on a planet with a few thousand ships or more on it.

-Fixed a bug where joining a multiplayer game as a client, quitting, and loading another game for single-player play would leave you stuck "Waiting for players".

-Sentinel Frigate rebalance: towards usefulness to the player and somewhat less to the AI: tripled damage, recharge time from 100 to 80, 40% cluster penalty to 45%, attack power floor from 6% to 2%

-Anti-Armor rebalance: 2x health, reduced ship cap multiplier from 1.5 to 1.3.

-Bulletproof Fighter rebalance: increased health to 80% of fighters, added minHitPercent of 15 (fighters have 30), increased attack to halfway between where they are now (200 for MkI) and fighters (300 for MkI).

-Cloaker starship mkI cloaking range 400 -> 700, cloaking cap 30 -> 20; mkII range 800 -> 900, cap 90 -> 80.

-Added basic middle-mouse-click-and-drag panning.

-Mobile Repair Stations range 2000 -> 3000, but can repair a maximum of 50 ships at once.

-Auto-FRD-Engineers and Auto-FRD-Mobile-Military control node knowledge costs removed (were 250 each).

-Added sanity check to prevent the AI from generating a ship on a planet that already has at least 6000 AI units.

[Ozymandiaz]

Nice to see a boost to bulletproofs, I liked them before as well since they basically gave me more fighters and that fitted into my usual tactic. Now they fit even better .

[Kjara]

I'm a fan of the whole combining icons at far zooms, however I have a couple of issues with it:

When the top unit of a group(I think its the top unit) dies, sometimes the entire icon disappears for a moment or the hp bar gets ahead of the unit.

There really need to be some way to tell large group vs small groups, at least on planets you own(or rather, places you have scouts), perhaps a small number somewhere that tells you how many icons have been stacked?

[Shardz]

Falalalalalalalalawesome! That's all I have to say! LOL! Thanks for the incredible update, I'm loving this one!

[Tayrtahn]

There really need to be some way to tell large group vs small groups, at least on planets you own(or rather, places you have scouts), perhaps a small number somewhere that tells you how many icons have been stacked?

Sounds like a great solution to me.

Can't wait to try out the middle-click scrolling! I knew I felt like something was missing from the interface.

[keith.lamothe]

The middle click scrolling in this release is a little... basic   For 3.028 the mmb-pan is more like a pdf grab-and-pull scroll, and shift-mmb-pan is basically like if you had moved your mouse cursor over to the minimap and used the lmb-pan there, but without having to move over there and back.

[RCIX]

If it's not already planned, can there be an "x[number]" added to combined icons, and ships of different types not have their icons combined? It's less of a performance gain i know, but it's a little disconcerting seeing my entire fleet as a single icon with no overlays or anything to indicate count.

[x4000]

If it's not already planned, can there be an "x[number]" added to combined icons, and ships of different types not have their icons combined? It's less of a performance gain i know, but it's a little disconcerting seeing my entire fleet as a single icon with no overlays or anything to indicate count.

Ships of different types already do not combine their icons.  And ships that are of the same type combine only to a degree that they would already largely be overlapping, at the default.  The x[number] would be quite a significant performance drain based on how we render text (as in, making it much worse than if we did no icon combining at all -- anyone who remembers the performance of showing the old-style control number overlays with more than a few hundred ships can attest to that).  In other words, at the default distance of 12, generally most of the time the screen is not visually much different than before, except that it is not overdrawing the same icons on top of each other quite as much.  And with the larger draw distances, you wind up with more performance gain by more compression (all per-icon/level only).  In both cases, to really see for sure how many ships you have, you need to select them or hover over them, anyway; but I'd suggest the default of 12 if you're worried about being able to judge in a general sense how many ships were there.

I know where you're coming from, and originally that was a goal of mine as well with the number thing, but I think it's just not technically feasible while still making this any kind of savings.

[RCIX]

If it's not already planned, can there be an "x[number]" added to combined icons, and ships of different types not have their icons combined? It's less of a performance gain i know, but it's a little disconcerting seeing my entire fleet as a single icon with no overlays or anything to indicate count.

Ships of different types already do not combine their icons.  And ships that are of the same type combine only to a degree that they would already largely be overlapping, at the default.  The x[number] would be quite a significant performance drain based on how we render text (as in, making it much worse than if we did no icon combining at all -- anyone who remembers the performance of showing the old-style control number overlays with more than a few hundred ships can attest to that).  In other words, at the default distance of 12, generally most of the time the screen is not visually much different than before, except that it is not overdrawing the same icons on top of each other quite as much.  And with the larger draw distances, you wind up with more performance gain by more compression (all per-icon/level only).  In both cases, to really see for sure how many ships you have, you need to select them or hover over them, anyway; but I'd suggest the default of 12 if you're worried about being able to judge in a general sense how many ships were there.

I know where you're coming from, and originally that was a goal of mine as well with the number thing, but I think it's just not technically feasible while still making this any kind of savings.

Oh.

[akronia]

The middle click scrolling in this release is a little... basic   For 3.028 the mmb-pan is more like a pdf grab-and-pull scroll, and shift-mmb-pan is basically like if you had moved your mouse cursor over to the minimap and used the lmb-pan there, but without having to move over there and back.

Yeah, it feels a bit sluggish at the moment. I'd like a more direct correspondence to my movement, just like in 3D programs (e.g. Maya).

The difference being, now, if I press the middle-mouse button that point becomes the center of the force and the more I get away from that point the scrolling will increase, lagging behind the actual movement, making it a more indirect scrolling.

My suggestion would be to have another underlying metaphor, where a mmb-click pins the planet view in place and by moving the mouse I'll shift the view inside the interface frame, making it a direct correspondence. This means, I have to lift up the mouse, still clicking the mmb, to make some bold moves.

It would be awesome to have that as an option, or use this as a default and the Photoshop-like canvas "gliding" as the option.

I also noticed that while panning some of the ship icons jigged around, a symptom of the integer value coordinates?

[x4000]

New version:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,3753.msg24661.html#msg24661