Mostly Keith handled the questions there, but to the ones not addressed:
I have a couple of questions about this whole thingy.... First of all
Simulation-independent framerate: Right now when AI War starts getting slow in a big battle, the game speed actually drops significantly. In Unity, the first thing to drop will be the framerate. So things will get jerky in a big battle, but the game speed won't drop unless things REALLY get bad. This has a ton of benefits, and will let you get through that moment of lag (when one happens) much faster and more painlessly.
Is that going to help with my Quad core 2.3ghz chugging about 10 hours into an 80 planet two player game, when no combat is going on, and I'm looking at the Galaxy map, or empty systems? Or is that purely a visual graphics speed adjustment? Because my graphics card can handle everything AI Wars has thrown at it fine so far.
As Keith noted, this isn't liked to help with simulation-related performance (although, having a profiler like the one in Unity we expect to really help us to improve simulation performance over time -- but that won't be an immediate or a guaranteed thing, we'll just have to see what it tells us). But, like he noted, if you're not on the latest betas there's a good chance your slowdown problems are already fixed in that beta. Otherwise, a save and a bug report would be helpful, it might be something wonky with some specific unit.
Linux Support: AI War currently does not work in WINE. But, we have reports that Tidalis does, even though Unity is not officially supported on that platform.
If it does end up running on Linux, will you officially support it, and create Linux installers, etc? Because games & laziness are pretty much the only reasons why I haven't switched to Linux, so knowing that AI Wars was fully supported would be cool. Plus I have some friends that might be interested if it ran on Linux, but otherwise aren't interested.
No, we won't be officially supporting Linux if Unity doesn't, because if there are issues then there's just nothing we can do about it, it's in the Unity area. I don't think Linux particularly uses installers, at least not in the sense of Windows. At some point, if Unity improves their Linux support and officially supports it, we intend to do the same. In the meantime, it's sort of swim at your own risk with AI War on Linux, simply because we don't have any control over the low-level code to the degree we'd need to do any fixes there. Same as with the faux-fullscreen support, that's just out of our hands.
Although, I suppose I could dig out the little eve window grabber and use that to move the window. But having it native would be cool. Maybe you could check out the window grabber program and put in code like that into AI War it's self. Or something.... Personally, the only reason at all to not play in Faux-Fullscreen would be if it was fully dual screen supported, like Supreme Commander. Every other game I play if windowed.... *shrug* I suppose it's not a big loss, but it's something to whine about, and let you know that it will be missed, etc.
To be clear, you can still play windowed, you just get the toolbar at the top and the "chrome" along the sides. We won't be writing any windowing helpers to go with the game, I can promise that, because: 1) it's not something that would be cross-platform, and as much as possible we're not going to develop solo-platform features; 2) if there are already third party apps, those are battle-tested and you might as well just use them; 3) I'm not a C++ programmer, nor do I want to be, and having worked with windowing functions and global OS hooks some in the past is enough to make me never want to again. It's different on every OS, and it's nasty, and it frequently breaks or has unintended consequences on the user's system.
But, if it's as popular of a feature as some folks make out, then hopefully Unity will add support for it in the next version or two...