Game version 0.95.210 released

Notable changes:

• [AI] Fixed Trader AI overriding the script-designated chat back to the default chat. (#924)
• [Labels] Fixed some parametric russian labels. (#987)
• [Labels] Added missing Hungarian labels about the settings screen.
• [UI] The button Start Battle is now only visible if all vehicles have been deployed. (#986)
• [UI] Fixed the trade screen's bounding box.
• [UI] Fixed the tooltip on the building upgrade panel remaining visible after clicking on the upgrade star.
• [AI] AI no longer does research before level 3.
• [Balance] AI on easy no longer deploys tanks to the planet's capacity but only 2/3.

Game version 0.95.207 released

Notable changes:

• [AI] AI no longer builds cheap buildings (housing, food factory) in case there is an energy shortage.
• [UI] Fix for research screen loosing the current technology when a research completes.
• [UI] In ground battle, the start battle button now shows only if all vehicles have been deployed.

Game version 0.95.206 released

Notable changes:

• [UI] Walking around the ship now uses custom mouse cursors. Thanks @p-smith!
• [UI] Scaled spacewar screen now properly displays mouse cursor over objects. Thanks @Zalewa

Game version 0.95.205 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed error in case the user and the auto-build removed a building at the same time. (Issue #920)
• [Simulation] Fixed tax and population calculation resulting in NaN to prevent proper planet death and causing other calculations to go haywire. (Issue #921)
• [UI] Fixed the continue button to be properly enabled/disabled after profile change. (Issue #922)

Game version 0.95.204 released

Notable changes:

• Updated links in the game and other tools to point to the new GitHub page.

Game version 0.95.203 released

Notable changes:

• [Trade] Fixed planet selection box not working. The box lists all player planets and depending on the item type, it may display "No room" for spaceports and "No mil. spaceport" for ships and fighters. [Issue #913]

Game version 0.95.202 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed wrong subtitle text in the Hungarian win video. (Issue #910)
• Fixed the +++ button not filling up the available vehicle count with vehicles (Issues #905)
• AI ships no longer stay in one place if the player attacked a planet the enemy fleet is next to.

Game version 0.95.201 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed crash due invalid diplomatic relation entries caused by Mission 4. [Issue #902]
• Fixed NPE caused by losing mouse status information due desktop switch/UAC.
• [AI] AI will build ground cannons without unnecessary delays.
• [AI] AI will upgrade static defenses without unnecessary delays.
• [Groundwar] Fixed unit movement sometimes not correctly rotated into the movement direction.
• [Balance] Increased ground cannon damage against fighters.

Game version 0.95.200 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed crash in Mission 4 (two pirates).
• Added hp-skirmish attribute to battle.xml settings under space-entities/tech to allow specifying the hitpoints of the entry in skirmish games.
• Added space-skirmish attribute to battle.xml settings under buildins/hitpoints to allow specifying the hitpoints of a building in skirmish games.
• Halved the hitpoints of Space station 2, Space station 3, Plasma projector, Particle Projector and Meson projector in the campaign. For example, 3 Space station 3s with 5 Meson Projectors and a Hypershield will whitstand a full strength Dargslan attack by a margin of 25%, i.e., 2 structures will survive the encounter generally while the attacker is mostly destroyed.
• [AI] Fixed AI sending ill-equipped fleets to attack.
• [Campaign] Fixed some skirmish ships to be available to alien races during the campaign.

Game version 0.95.199 released

Notable changes:

• [Spacewar] Fixed Trader AI causing some problems with 3-way space battles (crash, wrong chat).
• [AI] Increased the initial money of aliens to 100,000 cr in the campaign to to better jump-start their economy.
• [AI] AI no longer produces items on level 1 in the campaign.
• [Cheats] Switching to other races in the campaign stops the main mission timers (helps greatly when debugging).
• [Cheats] CTRL+SHIFT+W destroys all enemy structures in spacewar (except Trader ships).
• [AI] Fixed ordering of planets with issues (somehow, it was reversed and the AI operated on the planet with the best conditions, not the worst one).
• [AI] Fixed AI unable to build a power plant if the missing energy was above the capacity of available power plant types.

Game version 0.95.198 released

Notable changes:

• [Missions] Fixed mission timer warning. [Issue #897]
• [UI] Added key bindings comma (,) and dot(.) to +1 and -1 the currently selected equipment on the equipment screen. [Issue #896]
• [AI] Changed the logic how power plants are selected for build. Now it will try to match the demand instead of building the cheapest outright.
• [AI] The AI now aggressively builds morale buildings.
• [AI] AI now switches to higher tax rate more eagerly.
• [UI] The current money tooltip now displays the last day's total income.
• [Balance] Alien Police now has only two levels of upgrade and reduced police coverage.
• [Balance] Water waporators now have only two upgrade levels.
• [AI] Fixed the fleet upgrade logic incorrectly assessing medium ship strengths.
• [Balance] Reduced the research cost of the first alien battleship, fixed lab requirement to be 1 of each.
• [AI] The AI now builds the military spaceports and factories much later, freeing up money in the early game.
• [Balance] Reduced the Ychom Minelayer's movement speed by 50%.
• [Balance] Increased the carry capacity of Garthog Battleships by 20-25% to compensate for the lack of special attack unit (radar jammer is pretty useless) in skirmish games.

Game version 0.95.197 released

Notable changes:

• [Groundwar] Added the ability to retreat from ground battle if the player is the attacker. Look for the retreat button above the zoom button. You need to click twice to confirm the retreat or right click to cancel and continue the ground battle, just like in the spacewar screen. [Issue #673]
• [UI] Ability to strip the selected ship of equipment on the Equipment screen via the S key. You may need to deselect any equipment slot on the right panel.
• [UI] Show how much of each equipment needs to be produced to fully upgrade the currently selected fleet or planet by pressing the U key (toggle). The small panel is displayed on the right side below the ship image. You may need to deselect any equipment slot to see the panel (or hide the fleets listing and not transferring between two fleets). For example, your 2 of 3 Destroyers lack Shield 1. You have 1 in inventory and the panel shows you need to produce 1. Let's say you researched Shield 2; the panel now indicates you need to produce 3.
• [UI] In the planets list table, whenever the last column shows the number and upgrade level of certain building types, the text coloring (after the stars) now indicate if yellow: not all buildings are upgraded to the same level; red: buildings are nonoperational for some reason.

Game version 0.95.196 released

Notable changes:

• [Spacewar] Fixed batch fighters not having the aggregated firepower and not considered as multiple attackers.
• [Groundwar] Fixed the logic that allowed conquering a planet by disabling the power plants and thus making the barracks unpowered as well. This comes up first in the campaign against the Garthogs: since they only have fortresses, destroying them won't yield you the fortress technology before level 4.
• [Campaign] Fixed the first mission of level 4 (M22) to correctly a detect the 7 additional planets colonized/conquered. (The previous version counted the 4 planets given by the script.)
• [UI] Added the number of current and maximum allowed tanks and vehicles on a planet to the information panel on the planet screen.
  

Game version 0.95.195 released

Notable changes:

• [Spacewar] Fixed 3-way battle placement again.
• [Labels] Fixed missing tax button label.
• [Spacewar] Fixed AI ships not doing anything in certain 3-way battles.

Game version 0.95.194 released

Notable changes:

• [AI] Fixed crash due unavailable building types in the campaign. [Issue #893]
• [UI] Added Tax column to planet details listing.

Game version 0.95.193 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed auto-colonization building more than one military spaceport if the user clicked on the colonize button of a planet.
• Some adjustments to power plant construction on overfilled planets.
• [Skirmish] In skirmish, the "Allow all building types to be built by anyone" is enabled by default. If it is disabled, the buildings available to the alien races at start is taken from the players.xml configuration of the selected techonology template.
• [Tech] Fixed availability of UV Laser and Space Station 3 for alien races in skirmish.
• [AI] Modified the AI economic and factory planning to prioritize economic buildings & upgrades before constructing more than 1 factory of each factory type.
• [AI] Normal and Hard AIs now attack as soon as they have the necessary fleet strength. Easy AI's will wait about 3-7 days between attacks.
• [AI] The AI won't react to slight (5%) food, hospital and energy shortages immediately.
• [UI] If a planet has worker shortage and buildings are offline to compensate, the info panel and the colony info dialog now shows this by light-green text and a negative number representing the missing amount of workers, i.e., to show how much the population needs to grow to fix the worker shortage.
  
• [AI] The tax level is now reduced as soon as 10% worker shortage is detected (instead of 20% before).
• [AI] Fixed AI not upgrading more than one fleet.

Game version 0.95.192 released

Notable changes:

• Modified AI behavior to encourage it to attack more often. [Issue #866]
• Reduced the total amount of attack fleets to 1 for each 10 planets.
• Reduced the time between attacks to 5, 3 and 1 days depending on difficulty levels (easy -> hard)
• Changed the way fleets are upgraded by always upgrading the strongest fleets first which allows them to attack earlier.
• Changed how AI selects its next target. Based on the relation with other races, it may chose with probability 60% the most hated enemy, 15% of the second-most hated enemy and 25% any of the rest. After this, it choses the weakest known planet 60% of the time, the second weakest 15% of the time and any of the rest planets with 25% of the time.
• Fixed the mission script for meeting with Admiral Thulen at the end of level 1 triggering the Garthog attack too early and out-of-bounds if the player waited at the border. Now you need to meet with the Admiral inside the accessible area. [Issue #892]

Game version 0.95.191 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed HyperDrive 1 becoming always available on levels 1 and 2 when loading a save. This caused problems with the Pre-Hyperdrive trait in the campaign as traders were no longer slowed down by the scripting. The fix works only with a new game. For those who run into this problem, load an earlier save, produce and equip the incorrectly-available HyperDrive 1 on your fleets. [Issue #890]
• Three-way battles sometimes placed opposing units on top of each other if an attacker-owner planet was nearby. [Issue #891]

Game version 0.95.190 released

Notable changes:

• [AI] some fine tuning in the colony management.
• [Render] Added textCacheSize option to the open-ig-config.xml which enables the text rendering cache if not zero. Suggested value is between 1024 and 2048, but requires at least 1GB of memory (set via Xmx or in the launcher). When set, rendering the starmap screen when lots of planets are visible is more efficient.
• Added CTRL+F shortcut to display the times between frames (BF) and in-frames (IF) in milliseconds. The BF indicates the general refresh rate and the IF indicates how much time is spent computing/rendering a particular frame.

Why is the game barely making 30/60 frames per second? It depends on how many rendering instruction is sent to the underlying DirectX/OpenGL adaptor inside Java. There is so much overhead to cross the Java-native boundary that rendering lots of small images (i.e., each letter of a colored text) takes noticeable amount of time. The text rendering cache mentioned above helps by caching the text rendered into one image and reusing it when possible. Even though this takes more data to be trasferred to the GPU, it is far faster because now it uses only 1 instruction to do it instead of 20 or so. With the text rendering cache, the IF value on my machine fell from 12ms to 6ms, 

The second pain point is the colony screen. Although you don't see the entire surface, rendering speed is barely 30 frames per second, even lower at sunrise or sunset. One half of the cause is the radar panel. The radar needs to render the entire surface, scaled down, not just the visible part: it practically multiplies the number of rendering instructions. You can see the dramatic effect if you watch the times above (CTRL+F) and toggle the panel. The second cause is the way day-night rendering is implemented. Since Java2D doesn't offer pixel shaders, the rendering needs to create a darkened image of each building and surface tile, then upload it to the GPU. The image generation is super fast, but the upload is really slow: about 200MB image data in the worst case needs to be transferred to the GPU, but since PCIe speed is limited (250/500/1000 MB/s), it can take several hundred milliseconds to do it, which translates to 5-10 frames per second. To help this case, the game offers tile caching for some time now which can be setup outside the game in the Settings / Other... dialog.

Game version 0.95.189 released

Notable changes:

• [Crash] Fixed rare case when fleet doesn't have a name when its owner changes due the race surrendering.
• [AI] Modified the AI to not spam economic buildings an colony ships in skirmish when unlimited buildings are enabled.