Some of the changes that this patch brings are: updated editor, rendering improvements and various others. You can see the full list as always in file details.
Darwinia by Introversion - retail v1.3 patch
===========
VERSION 1.3
===========
- New Control Method
Holding TAB will bring up the new Task Manager
Icons are clicked instead of drawing gestures
Keyboard shortcuts added for all important actions
Camera zoom modified to be smoother/nicer (cutscenes and zoom key pressed)
Note: Old gesture based system can be selected from the Controls menu
Alt-tab no longer bound by window when in Icon mode
- Selection Box changes:
- The yellow selection arrows will now fade in at 200m, rather than 400m
- The yellow selection arrows will be rendered beneath the Task Manager
- Highlighting a unit or entity in the world will now highlight the
appropriate task manager icon
- Conversely, highlighting a task manager icon will now highlight the
appropriate unit or entity in the world
- Fixed : The yellow selection arrows would leave a square around them
that
would prevent the game cursor from being rendered.
- Fixed : If squaddies were killed, the yellow selection square would go
very large for around 2 seconds before resizing properly
- Added the option "Show First Time Intro" to the Bootloaders option on the
Other options panel. If selected this will cause the first time intro
sequence to play the next time you start Darwinia.
- Rendering changes:
- Offscreen culling improved for Generator buildings
Mine buildings
Spirit Receiver buildings
Laser Fences
Spawner buildings
- Sepulveda's highlights are now correctly depth sorted
- Improvements made to movement smoothness of many objects including:
laser rendering smoothness
mine cart movement smoothness
- Research items will now have their blue control line to heaven rendered,
even when the item itself is out of view
- Editor changes:
- When moving a land tile, all buildings on that tile will move the same
amount. You can enable/disable this from an option in the land tiles
menu.
- Fixed : Bug with editor which would create radar dish links erroniously
if the first building created on the level was a Radar Dish.
- Fixed : Editor would crash if a Power building (eg a Solar panel or
Pylon) had an invalid building link, eg if the target building had
been deleted.
- If you create a Centipede that is not in a unit the game will now tell
you not to do this, before exiting. Previously it would just crash.
- Squaddie changes:
- Squaddies will now look after themselves a little better when not under
direct player control (chance of attacking doubled)
- Squaddies are now impervious to water. They still can't walk through
it,
but it won't kill them if they try.
- The icon for a running Squad now shows how many Squaddies are left alive
- Save system changes:
- Will now save your currently running programs, eg your Squads, Engineers
- Fixed a bug that made Virii units reload vastly more spread out
============
VERSION 1.22
============
- Sound System changes:
- Fixed : The default stereo arrangement was the wrong way around,
requiring most people to enable Swap Stereo even though their speakers
were wired correctly.
- Fixed : Bug that would cause an object to the left of the camera to play
its sounds in the right speaker, if the player was looking mostly up
or
mostly down. This bug only happened when Swap Stereo was enabled.
============
VERSION 1.21
============
- Fixed : The Radar Dish on the mountain at the end of Generator could not be
aligned to the lower down dish on the final island...it was too low.
===========
VERSION 1.2
===========
- New selection box system:
- Highlighting a unit by mouse-hovering over it will bring up a yellow
selection box over the unit.
- Selected programs that are offscreen will be tracked by an arrow at the
edge of the screen, pointing to the programs location.
- The Radar Dish code has been significantly improved. Radar Dishes should
now
behave in a much more solid manner.
- Darwinians will no longer get trapped trying to enter a radar dish that
isn't connected.
- The mouse cursor and new selection box system should give you strong
hints about the effect of clicking on a radar dish at any time.
- When you are aiming a Radar Dish you will see a targetting crosshair not
unlike the one used for the Battle Cannon.
- Squads, Officers and Darwinians will no longer blunder into a radar dish
unless you specifically click on it.
- Squads should no longer get split up while entering a dish.
- Two way links should now work much better.
- Darwinians with orders to go into a Radar Dish will now correctly
remember their orders when the game is saved.
- Darwinians who are in transit in a Radar Dish during a level save will
no longer be left stranded out at sea upon reloading. They will now
appear at the base of the destination Radar Dish.
- Task Manager Changes:
- Engineer tasks will now display their current activity and spirit count
- Tasks that have yet to be placed will flash on and off
- The new selection arrows will appear immediately when a task is selected
through alt-tab, making it easier to tell which task is which
- If your Squad / Engineer / Armour dies while under your control, you
will
see the 'Program Terminated' message
- Engineers will now reprogram a nearby Incubator rather than travelling to a
distant one, assuming you send them near the control tower. Previously
they would refuse to reprogram the incubator, even if you repeatedly
clicked on the relevent control tower.
- Added support for other language translations
- Language selector added to Other options screen
- Languages will be loaded from language.dat. We will distribute the
latest language packs freely on the Darwinia website.
- Mod system improvements
- Mod authors can now provide their own custom strings, or even override
existing strings from the game. Your strings file should be called:
darwinia/mods/mymodname/strings_default.txt
- If you wish to provide translations to your custom strings you can also
create the file strings_german.txt or strings_russian.txt etc, which
will be loaded instead of strings_default.txt if the user has that
language set in his options. Note you should always provide
strings_default.txt at least.
- stats.txt will now be correctly reloaded when a mod is selected in game
(rather than requiring a restart for new stats to take effect)
- Performance improvements
- Optimisations made to Darwinian combat code. Should help during big
battles involving lots of Darwinians.
- Spirit code heavily optimised. Was causing serious slowdown after large
battles due to large numbers of spirits floating around.
- Laser code optimised
- There are 3 possible rendering modes for Darwinia's landscape, which can be
set by the preferences variable 'RenderLandscapeMode':
- RenderLandscapeMode = 0 uses Vertex Arrays
- RenderLandscapeMode = 1 uses Display Lists (default in v1.0)
- RenderLandscapeMode = 2 uses Vertex Buffer Objects
The default has now be seen to 2 (Vertex Buffer Objects), which should be
faster in most cases than Display Lists. If VBO support isn't detected,
we fall back to display lists.
- New bootloader : Amiga
- Created new installer for the full game using Inno Setup (the install shield
installer used on the retail disks suffers from the common autoexec.nt
problem under some WindowsXP installations.)
- Altered Bitmap::ConvertPinkToTransparent to reduce halo around the edges of
textures that use transparency.
- Increased range of Battle Cannon when it is first given on Yard level
- Modified number of Darwinians required to complete Containment level,
from 200 down to 150
- The Construction Yard will now stop producing Armour if there is already
five
or more Armour on the level. It will resume production when the number
falls below five.
- Fixed a very subtle bug that would cause errors to occur (including crashes)
if a Darwinian was running away from a grenade. Very rare occurance, more
likely during intense battles with lots of Darwinians and lots of
grenades.
- Fixed : If you have a Squaddie/Engineer selected and you click select an
Officer, the squaddie/engineer task remains selected in the Task Manager.
This means if you press ctrl-c, both the newly selected Officer AND the
squaddie/engineer are terminated.
- Added a fix for people experiencing a crash during the end sequence
(caused by a corrupted saved Ant Hill). This crash would also cause the
levels 'Yard' and 'Receiver' to crash occasionally on re-entry.
- Fixed : Crash on startup reporting "failed to get CPU vendor"
- Fixed : Crash that could occur when Armour collided with Armour
- Fixed : After changing graphics options, Trees would sometimes be replaced
with a random shape scaled very large
- Fixed : Sepulveda incorrectly tells the user he can upgrade Engineers to
build bridges, which he can't.
- Fixed : Darwinians sometimes get stuck running away from a Battle Cannon.
- Fixed : Un-occupied Battle Cannons will no longer scare Darwinians.
- Fixed : Pressing CTRL-C on Armour that was low on health would terminate the
task, but the Armour would remain alive.
