Sunday, February 21, 2010

1.73 Release

1.73 is released today.  There is only one major change.

Network games now default to 30 frames per second.  A long time ago I decided to go with 60fps to make it a much smoother experience than the original game, but I didn't reckon for high bandwidth needs at the time.  For a long time I've been meaning to make this change, but it took a lot of motivation because of how much code I would need to modify.  Bear in mind that, since this is an expansive code update, there WILL be bugs as a result of it. :)

The game won't "appear" to run any slower as I've modified all the calculations in the game to account for the lower frame rate.  It will look a bit choppier but you won't notice it after a short while.

Also due to this change, I had to re-write some nagging "loose ends" in the code.  It was actually a good thing as it forced me to resolve some older issues.  Carryalls should "wiggle" less often now and generally behave more smoothly, and units should NEVER be unable to hit their target due to weapon speed and distance (occasionally before you might have seen a Quad firing at an adjacent Infantry and never being able to hit it, for instance).

Please let me know in the forums how this affects network game performance compared to the previous version.  My hope is that it will be quite a noticeable improvement and may even correct some sync loss issues.