Geoff’s posted the contents of the patch on the forums. There’s just so many fixes, I originally wasn’t going to post them in this news item. However, it’s just so cool to see them all.
Multiplayer Improvements
a. Players will now be able to host and join games from behind NATs and Firewalls.
b. The whisper function in the GameSpy lobby no longer misdirects messages to the wrong recipients.
c. The number of players in a given game is now reported correctly.
d. Players can now ignore people in the Gamespy lobby.
e. Players can now whisper to a group of people in the Gamespy lobby.
f. The ignore list in the Gamespy lobby is now automatically saved.
g. The Whisper list in the Gamespy lobby is now automatically saved.
h. There is a new ‘Suppress’ button to the GameSpy lobby. This adds the ability to ignore the join / leave lobby messages.
i. Lobby chat has been updated so that private game chats will no longer being displayed in the lobby chat.
j. Game chat has been updated so that lobby chat won’t cause the messages to be lost anymore.
k. There is a new PRESETS button that creates a default setting for gameplay options, including CPU difficulty, open/closed slots, and CPU player colours. Settings are only saved to the profile when you start a game.
l. Players can now kick a lagging host.
m. DirectPlay sessions are now closed asynchronously. This corrects the long wait at the end of a game.
n. Badges with long filenames (>32 characters) no longer cause multiplayer games to crash at the loading screen and/or the waiting for content download screen.
o. Players that have been defeated or have dropped from the game are no longer listed in the diplomacy and chat menus.
A random race setting has been added to the race selector.
q. The game now looks in both data:LevelDataMultiplayer*.level and profiles:Levels*.level for level content.
r. Users can now add a file called _Thumb.tga. It will be loaded as the preview image in the level picker. Unfortunately preview and loading images cannot be autodownloaded with the levels.
Fixes to Game Crashes
a. Using the rally to object command on a moving ship will no longer result in a crash.
b. If a ship is destroyed in the frame before it executes an order, the game will no longer crash.
c. The game will no longer crash due to rapid switching between tactics.
d. Matrox Parhelia users will no longer experience loading crashes after installing the latest drivers for their cards.
Gameplay Fixes
a. Probes and scouts no longer attract mines when passing through mine fields.
b. Defense fields will no longer stay active after the frigate that generates them has been destroyed.
c. Scouts with the EMP upgrade will no longer lose their ion trails after using the EMP attack.
d. Fighters can no longer undock while the carriers are in hyperspace transit.
e. It’s no longer possible to control enemy player and enemy AI ships.
f. By using hyperspace gates, platforms no longer can be issued more than one move order.
g. Platforms no longer attack when moving.
h. Players can no longer hear ships outside of visible range.
i. Research abilities that are transferred when ships are donated no longer stays if the ship is transferred back.
j. Ships that are docking or being built no longer cause ships already docked to launch when the ship hold is full.
Tuning and Balance Changes
a. General
i. Resource Collectors repair rate increased (from 25 hitpoints/second to 35 hitpoints/second)
ii. Start positions have been updated on the multiplayer map Shields.
b. Hull defence guns (located on Vaygr and Hiigaran Carrier, Mothership, Resource Controller, and Shipyard as their main weapon):
i. Hull defence guns have increased accuracy vs. fighters - 40% increase in accuracy vs. fighter (from 0.1 to 0.14).
ii. Hull defence guns have increased accuracy vs. Corvette (from .4 to .45).
iii. Hull defence guns vs. Resource Collectors Penetration Decrease (from 100% to 75%).
iv. Hull defence guns vs. Platforms penetration increased 300%.
c. Platforms
i. Platform controller build time increase (from 30s to 70s).
ii. Hiigaran Platform controller cost increase (from 500ru to 650ru).
iii. Ion Platform accuracy vs. corvettes and fighters has been decreased (from 10% to 4% for fighters and from 8% to 4% for corvettes).
iv. Ion Platforms Penetration vs. Corvettes and Fighters has been decreased from (from 100% to 1% vs. fighters and from 100% to 10% for Corvettes).
v. Ion Platform research time has been increased by 70 seconds (from 30s to 100s).
vi. Missile Platform research time has been increased by 45 seconds (from 60s to 105s).
vii. Speed for all platforms has been reduced by 75 (from 200 to 125).
viii. Platforms have had significant reduction in amount of damage done to collectors (75% damage reduction for gun platforms 50% damage reduction for missile platforms and 60% damage reduction for Ion Platforms).
d. Resource Controllers
i. Number of Hull Guns reduced from 8 to 4.
e. Corvettes
i. Missile Corvette Damage vs. Platforms has been increased by 90%
ii. Pulsar Corvette Damage vs. Platforms has been increased by 60%
iii. Laser Corvette attack style changed to an attack run vs. subsystems
iv. Vaygr Corvette armour upgrades reduced (from 1.5 to 1.3 for level 1 and from 2.0 to 1.6 for level 2)
f. Frigates
i. Vaygr Assault Frigate cost has been reduced by 50 RU (from 700 to 650).
ii. Vaygr Assault Frigate research cost has been reduced by 150 RU (from 800 to 650).
iii. Marine and Infiltrator Frigate HP has been increased (from 18000 to 20000).
iv. 10 second reduction in build time (from 55s to 45s) for Ion Frigate, Vaygr Assault Frigate, and Vaygr Missile Frigate.
v. 5 second reduction in build time (from 55s to 50s) for Flak Frigate and Marine/Infiltrator Frigate.
g. Bombers
i. Bombers are weaker vs. platforms: 20% decrease in penetration vs. platforms (from .55 to .45).
h. Vaygr Battlecruiser
i. 20% decrease in engine repair speed (from 250s to 200s).
ii. 20% increase to engine subsystem HP’s (from 30000hp to 36000hp).
iii. 20% decrease to duration of inactivity after damage (from 80s to 64s).
i. EMP
i. Recharge - 10 second increase (from 60s to 70s).
ii. Frigates - Shield vs. EMP increased 40% (from 220 to 310).
iii. Research time - 10 second increase (from 60 to 70).
Singleplayer Game Fixes
a. General
i. Players unit caps will no longer be lowered when they load a game from the in-game menu.
ii. The shipyard is no longer listed as having two sensor spots.
iii. The Vaygr laser corvette now displays badges correctly.
iv. The Hiigaran Sensors Array textures are no longer inverted.
v. Vgr Refinery badges now display properly.
b. Mission 2
i. Bonus corvettes and bombers are now delivered 100% of the time.
c. Mission 4
i. The difficulty level has been reduced.
ii. Destroying the station before destroying inhibitors no longer results in a lock up.
d. Mission 6
i. The Derelict Mover is no longer targetable by your ships.
e. Mission 8
i. Scuttling Dreadnaught will now cause the mission to fail.
f. Mission 13
i. The difficulty level has been reduced.
g. Mission 14
i. The difficulty level has been reduced.
h. Mission 15
i. Ships can no longer be led out of the area of play in pursuit of the planet killer missiles.
Graphic Card Fixes
a. Disabled color bits in P-buffer to speed up the rendering of shadows and hyperspace FX.
b. We now handle a pbuffer error correctly.
c. We now only use WGL_TEXTURE_TARGET_ARB if renderToTextureCap is supported (so Parhelia can create a pbuffer).
d. We now only use 8 megabytes instead of 24 for the shadow buffer.
d. We removed a dust cloud workaround as nVidia updated a driver feature.
e. New 4 texture ship shader (Matrox/Intel).
f. We’ve stopped disabling multisampling on every frame.
g. Shadow map quality is increased from 1.5 to 4.0.
h. We now always clear the stencil for improved performance on Intel systems.
i. We’ve turned TXP into TEX when getting texture coordinates in fragment programs to save an unneeded divide for better performance.
j. Intel
Added driver dll name.
Updated driver version.
Disabled smooth points.
k. ATI
Updated driver version.
l. nVidia
Updated driver version.
Wrote a new nv2x shader (gives us a nice performance boost).
m. Matrox
Updated driver version and disabled display lists.
n. SiS
Updated driver version and disabled some features.
o. XGI
Update driver version.
We’ve disabled VBO and pbuffers as they don’t work correctly with XGI beta drivers.
