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 3.043:(Cumulative release notes since 3.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-(From 3.043: Transports now move vastly faster, have almost doubled shields, have 10x more health, and cost 2x as much crystal.)
-Transports are no longer of a higher priority than any other ships.
-Ships that are placed into cold storage are no longer removed and re-added to their planet's secondary rollups (they are just kept in those rollups the entire time). This removes the lag at the start of games from ships going into cold storage, as well as about all of the lag when ships are coming into and out of planets that are in cold storage. This makes transports that are traveling through many large planets that are in cold storage no longer cause the game to repeatedly hitch for about 2 seconds every time they enter or leave the planets of that sort, while still keeping practically all the benefits of cold storage itself.
-Solving one of the more annoying pockets of micromanagement of the game, manufactories now auto-optimize their on/off states to keep resources flows as positive as possible (assuming there is enough free energy to turn them on).
-A new control node has been added to disable the new auto-management of manufactories, so that players can continue to manually manage them as before
-modified the "don't chase teleporting units" code to prevent a problem causing human player ships in FRD mode to do nothing because they were constantly picking a teleporting target and dropping it again.
CHANGES TO PAST PRERELEASES
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-in the last few prereleases the onboard forcefield module (can be mounted on Riot MkIs) was correctly functioning as a non-weak forcefield but as a result was reducing attack power of protected objects by 75% (like normal forcefields), changed to not apply this reduction in this particular case.
-moved Riot starship buy button to from the Starship Constructor's "STAR" tab to its new "RIOT" tab, and added two buttons for two pre-configured "templates", one 2L/2M/2S engine wrecker, and one 4L/2FF protector; if you use the first (non-templated) buy button it will build as before and you can mount whatever you like. Templated ships behave as normal after construction, and you can scrap modules and replace them if you want to.
-autotargetting now essentially ignores modules, though they will often be hit by a small percentage of shots in a heavy firefight due to the "spread it around" logic. Hopefully we can figure out a good way of incorporating modules in the autotargetting routine, but for now this should prevent any really stupid target choices.
Updates in 3.045:-Further changes have been made to the per-planet ship rollups to make them more efficient in general with AI ships, and also to make them extra effective with cold storage. This helps to keep the cold storage population costs low, as with the last change, but also makes the cold storage itself once again more effective when there are truly massive numbers of AI ships.
-Previously, auto-manufactory management was including still-constructing ships. Fixed.
Updates in 3.046:-More performance improvements have been made, and the FRD logic for ships has also been improved.
Updates in 3.047:-Yet more performance improvements have been made for when ships are in FRD mode in particular, but also for combat in general.
-When loading from a savegame, the fg object numbers are now internally remapped to lower numbers to keep transmission requirements and savegame size as low as possible (so this can also help performance at least a little in very long games).
-Added Riot Control Starship MkII and MkIII and associated modules. Added tractor module to the MkI list, and removed the tazer (which is now exclusive to the MkII). A few changes to MkI balance.
Updates in 3.049:-Changed Icon Grouping refresh logic to automatically refresh the icon grouping data every few game seconds regardless of other conditions to help with some edge cases where ships were not being displayed.
-Bugfixes to the riot starships in the last version, plus the rest of the riot starship images and a riot starship icon in far zoom.
Updates in 3.050:-Removed the fgobjectnumber remapping from 3.047, as it was not leading to much (if any) of a performance benefit in practice, and was leading to desyncs in some cases in multiplayer.
