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 3.093:(Cumulative release notes since 3.060 are attached at the bottom)
-------------------
-reworked autotargeting and collision throttling so that throttles exhausted in a cycle now remember the last planet and ship allowed through, and on the next cycle won't pass ships before (or equal to) the last-allowed-ship at all, so the game will eventually "work through" everyone even if the load is very heavy.
-reduced the amount of collision checking the game is allowed to do per player per cycle, which may result in some odd visuals, but significantly increases performance in some situations (like a large player fleet emerging from a wormhole).
-added info from the central throttle to the standard F3 debug info, so players/developers can see what sorts of processing the game is defering to later cycles and roughly how fast it is working through the "pile".
-made Stay-At-MRS node not affect ships of the official force-field-generator line, to avoid untimely loss of home command stations
-changed health of mk II, III, and IV forcefield bearers to make a greater distinction between mark levels.
- Aggregate targeting will now work for minor faction and zombie units (not zombies), with a check to make sure that a ship cannot subscribe to an aggregate leader of a different action-status (normal, minor-faction, or zombie).
- on loading the game, any minor faction planet-population of either resistance fighter ship type will be trimmed to 1500 if in excess of that (so 3000 max between the two); does not apply to human-controlled populations of these ships.
- on the "every 80 game seconds" check for spawning a resistance wave, it will cap the spawn-size counter to 2000 regardless of what it might be
- the 80-second-check-resistance-fighter-spawn will now not greatly exceed the 1500/1500 cap (the spawn-cheat can still break that, though if you save and load after that it'll prune again).
- a bug was fixed where the number-of-resistance-to-spawn was being computed pretty much exactly the wrong way, such that in many cases you would never see them spawn.
- Golems and Broken Golems can now be paused to temporarily conserve energy.
CHANGES TO PAST PRERELEASES
=======
- quietly increased the number of heavy beam cannons the AI can have on a given planet (1 MkI to 3, 1 MkII to 2; restrictions on which planets can have which marks haven't changed)
Updates in 3.095:- Electric Shuttles again have a bonus against teleport raiders.
- previous version had unintentionally low throttles on autotargeting; greatly increased.
Updates in 3.096:- fixed a bug from previous versions where a ship could get "stuck" with an empty target list because they were insisting on using the "in-range" list instead of the "out-of-range" list, despite the fact that the in-range list was empty.
Updates in 3.097:- More FRD fixes.
