Show me the Showstoppers

[x4000]

The engine definitely doesn't take advantage of a beefy machine in any interesting way.  But if you want to run at 60fps sim speed, and have the machine for it (which I don't think exists), the Insane option exists for that.  It's called insane for a reason.  And yes, AI War doesn't use more than two cores, and on non-host computers only one core.

The movement away from large space battles is one both of necessity and of interest.  Granted, there are still tens of thousands of ships in the game at any given time, and often massive battles with hundreds or low thousands of ships on a side.  And you can still play with the old ship caps, etc, if you have the CPU for it.  But with the mono framework, CPU and memory aren't quite what they were on the .NET side, which was one motivator for the lowered ships default ship caps (though we'd already been moving that direction in SlimDX, anyway).

The move to Unity 3D brings a lot of ease of programming and of use of more advanced visual effects, etc.  It also brings general stability improvements on varying computer configurations.  The crashes, etc, of the moment are because it's beta, not because it's unity.  While I wouldn't deprive anyone of their ability to play the older SlimDX versions (play what you like, of course), those were a real bear for us to maintain for a few reasons, and the technical shortcomings of the .NET installers, our hybrid GDI+ menus, etc, were definitely holding the game back commercially at least to some extent.

The crashes were fixed in 3.716, but we definitely can't fix them if folks don't report them -- so thanks for the files there.

The galaxy map is quite messy at the moment, we haven't gotten to that fully yet.

Probably the resources are not giftable at the moment, that hasn't been reimplemented yet as it was a fairly obscure feature for most people.

The ship colors when zoomed in haven't changed at all, it's either a perception thing or else a difference in screen resolution.

[Giegue]

on the shipcap thing:

either it was fixed already, I was thinking of another ship, or it was a stupidly realistic dream (doubt it). either way, it appears that there isn't a shipcap problem.

[Lancefighter]

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=626

repair is HORRIBLY screwed up at the moment.

[TheMachineIsSentient]

Keith, are you able to fix the modifier keys being stuck? I thought this was fixed, but the game seems to think I have pressed modifier keys for some reason, and they don't clear unless I hit the key again. Do you have access to a Key.isPressed() accessor? or maybe key down?

[keith.lamothe]

Stuck after alt+tab, or stuck in general?  As in, how to reproduce it?

[TheMachineIsSentient]

After I use alt+tab to get into the game, a little text tip appears beneath my cursor saying alt( which is a warning I guess telling me that it is already pressed).

Here's an easier reproduction:
alt+tab out of the game
Click on the game icon on the taskbar to get back in
notice the text on the cursor

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, there was another mantis report of that today, it's on my list to look at.

Basically Unity's input handling is hosed for a few frames after regaining focus; we've recently found how to properly detect "we-just-regained-focus" so we put in the code to clear out the held-keys stuff and ignore input for a brief time, but I must have not done all that was necessary.

[x4000]

After I use alt+tab to get into the game, a little text tip appears beneath my cursor saying alt( which is a warning I guess telling me that it is already pressed).

Here's an easier reproduction:
alt+tab out of the game
Click on the game icon on the taskbar to get back in
notice the text on the cursor

Keith, regarding this, we'd need to clear that unity property -- I think there's a clearkeys or similar.  If that works, then hooray, but otherwise this is not fixable and we have to wait on unity to put in a fix.

[keith.lamothe]

Here's an easier reproduction:
alt+tab out of the game
Click on the game icon on the taskbar to get back in
notice the text on the cursor

I just did that, both running-in-the-unity-editor and running a standalone build like you guys get, and I could not get it to have a stuck key.  Odd.

[TheMachineIsSentient]

Does it help if I make a video and put it on YouTube?

[keith.lamothe]

If you hold your keyboard in the frame

j/k

I don't think it would really help, unless it can clarify what you're doing more than you already have.  It may be a hardware difference between us.

[x4000]

That Access Denied error message on input came back even when no alt-tabbing or any other screen state changing was being done.  Methinks that the mouse properties need to be encapsulated completely, after all, and then read elsewhere later.  I know you like that anyhow, Keith, and hopefully that will solve that annoying issue.

[Mánagarmr]

Just to clarify: On my Core i7 with a GTX275 the Insane option runs just fine. It's just that the game runs too fast for my taste. I don't have time to react to what's going on.

[Mánagarmr]

GAH! The "ever-rising-threat" is really beginning to piss me off. I try to test different bugs and provide feedback, but I can't do anything as I'm pinned down completely by Mk III and Mk IV units constantly attacking.

That's definately a showstopper in my book.

[keith.lamothe]

Sorry about the threat stuff, that is very frustrating.  We fixed a ton of startup-threat issues; from what you've said lately it sounds like the threat is starting a bit later (in some of my tests threat was a flat zero until the first wave at the 30ish minute mark) and gradually increases, and the ships are much higher mark than they should be.  Or is this another start-of-game-sack thing?