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 nowappear 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.
