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 3.051:(Cumulative release notes since 3.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-Previously ships were sometimes failing to perform "opportunity fire" while pursuing a primary target currently outside their range. Fixed.
-Previously units with extremely high single-shot attack power (e.g. Devourer) were massively overkilling targets. Fixed to cap overkill at 100% (i.e. will keep shooting until health = -maxHealth).
-gave cloaker starships slightly higher collision priority than other starships
-fixed rare wrapping oddity in galaxy map planetary summary hover text
-made special forces AI ships less likely to pursue minor faction ships (including devourers)
-previously it was possible in very rare cases for ships to get "stuck" on the edge of a hostile strong forcefield. Fixed to use more exact distance checking in case of possible collision to check for a real collision.
-mining golem now immune to sniper shots.
-Super Terminals added to the list of units that absolutely, positively, must not move when the game is loaded (Exo-wormholes are the other such unit).
-Localization changes.
-Some changes to resistance fighter spawning logic.
-Attrition Emitter no longer put in cold storage.
-Transport boarding distance is now considerably more forgiving to teleporting units (previously it was very difficult to load a teleporting unit into a moving transport).
-Ships with attack bonuses against all other starships now have similar bonuses against experimental starships (the beam and bird starships).
-Previously if a scrolling key (up/down/left/right) was pressed while clicking on the scores screen, after the scores screen was closed the game would still think the scrolling key was pressed (thus leaving the screen scrolling until the same key was pressed and released). Fixed to clear the pressed-ness of those keys when closing the scores screen.
-Added in-game screenshot key (F12), images are saved as .png files to the Screenshots directory under the local application data directory (so it's a sibling directory to the Saves directory).
CHANGES TO PAST PRERELEASES
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-Fixed a bug with cold storage that was, in the last few releases, causing cross planet attacks to stall out until a savegame was loaded.
-Advanced Factories now no longer replicate upon capture, but instead "fold out" and spawn an "Advanced Factory Core" nearby for each human player other than the player that captured the factory. If the number of human players changes during the game, the number of such cores will also change (it checks for updates about every 10 game seconds). Accordingly, advanced factories and cores are no longer giftable.
-Some additional refinement to icon grouping code to catch cases where ships come onto the screen but aren't drawn.
