The latest beta is available via the Updates window in version 3.060 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 3.060 or greater, you can download 3.060
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 you can easily create your own manually-installable beta patch! Please note that current betas can only be successfully applied to version
3.060 of the game or later (if you later wish to revert to the official version for any reason, you can download the full raw files from the above link to do so).
To create your own manual beta patch, simply download these two files:
1.
Current Beta Director Xml File.
2.
Current Beta Zip File.
If you try to open that zip file, it will say it's corrupt -- that's okay, it's not really a zip file. 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. Please note that "Beta" in the filename is case-sensitive.
What's new since 3.083:(Cumulative release notes since 3.060 are attached at the bottom)
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-To prevent unintentional difficulty against cloak-heavy AI types that also have Zenith Mirrors, Decloakers are now immune to shot reflection.
-Added new AI modifier: No Wave Warnings, which simply causes the normal wave timers to not be shown. The total number of ships in incoming waves is still shown. This can greatly increase the challenge of the game and should be used with caution.
-Added new AI modifier: Cross Planet Waves, which causes all AI waves to spawn on an AI planet and travel across normal space rather than spawning at one of your wormholes. This is the logic normally used when there are no warp gates adjacent to a human-controlled planet. This can greatly increase the challenge of the game and should be used with caution.
-Ion Cannons now do a better job of disabling the engines of ships when no insta-kill targets are available, rather than trying to kill ships with normal damage.
-Core Warhead Interceptor health dropped from 150 million to 75 million, and now dies with the command station.
-Previously tractored ships were often "fighting" the tractor by moving the opposite direction if the tractoring ship moved. This was particularly odd for ships towed by friendly tugs. Fixed to move smoothly at the same rate as the tractoring ship.
-Previously the game would sometimes stop auto-incrementing AI progress despite game settings, fixed.
-AntiArmor MkIII health was low compared to other anti armor ships, raised to compensate.
-The game no longer clears out the various error txt files in the game directory when starting up, to help prevent cases where testers were losing the info because they restarted the game before opening the file.
CHANGES TO PAST PRERELEASES
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-More changes to forcefield collision logic, hopefully will produce fewer strange results while still avoiding the various units-getting-stuck and other problems.
-In previous versions a bug in the aggregate targeting code was sometimes causing significant performance slowdown over time (it was a death by a million cuts situation), fixed.
