Hello Commanders, Your eyes do not deceive you, this creature of majesty above is both half-Commander and half-unicorn. Touch its horn if you will, but the only wish it grants is the pillaging of the galaxys resources to ensure the demise of your enemies. Friendship is temporary, but a well-placed ubercannon blast is forever. The Unicorn Commander is available to all players during the Steam Summer Sale, after which it can be purchased through the Armory. It also comes with its own strategic icon so that everyone else knows that youre better than them, both as a player and a person. Lobbies now have the option to shuffle player starting locations. No longer can you know who is where without any scouting in FFA and team games. Live the mystery. The AI has had an easy difficulty added to skirmish and normal in Galactic War as part of some more extensive changes. We hear your eyebrow lift (just one, youre classy like that) at the addition of an easier difficulty, but once improvements land and its kicking your hiney, youll be sorry you got all sniffy about an easy difficulty. Translations have been updated and expanded to include community mods like Legion Expansion and Queller AI. Previous update: https://planetaryannihilation.com/news/stay-safe-update-114344-114438-114445-114475/

Technical Notes

Client Improvements

Local client improvements:

• Updated translations
• Added connect timeouts to download manager to avoid long launch stalls
• Added initial support for full offline / disconnected mode via --offline (work in progress)
• Improved game password dialog with focus and default button
• Added shuffle landing zones to new game lobby for large FFA and teams games using maps with custom landing zones

AI Improvements

Local server and public server improvements:

• Added easy difficulty for AI skirmish to match galactic war (work in progress)

Galactic War Improvements

Local server and public server improvements:

• Added normal difficulty between easy and hard (work in progress)

Server / Sim Improvements

Local server and public server improvements:

• Improved attack (focus fire) task
• Added shuffle landing zones

Server / Sim Fixes

Local server and public server fixes:

• Fixed AI server crash in evaluateBases

Maps

Map improvements:

• Added shuffleLandingZones

Updated the following maps to use shuffleLandingZones: true

• Clutch
• Lock
• Crag
• Bedlam
• PAX
• Medea
• Roc
• Blitz
• Forge
• Berg
• Duat
• Pacific
• Styx
• Meso
• Amplus

Modding

Modding improvements:

• Exposed locTree for localislation parsing of modified DOM nodes avoiding the need for concatenated loc strings or data-binding locTree(document.getElementById('#nav-link'));
• Added gOffline and gModsOffline for offline mode (work in progress)

AI Modding

AI modding improvements:

• Default personality tag is the placeholder for current base game functionality
• Added fall back to default netural_networks if not included under personality.ai_path which will be the case for most mods

AI mods can use personality.ai_path to specify their own complete set of templates, builds and unit maps as the default AI may be changing significantly.

Toolchain

Updated software development toolchain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toolchain

• C++17
• Visual Studio 2019 latest with 142 build tools / Windows 10 SDK latest
• Xcode 11.5 / macOS 10.15.x latest for macOS Mavericks 10.9+ with full notarisation using hardened runtime
• Steam Linux runtime with gcc-9 / LTO native (previously limited to gcc 6.2 and no LTO)
• Steamworks SDK 148 (will upgrade to 149 soon)
• Windows libcurl 7.68.0 with nghttp2 1.40.0 for HTTP/2 and multiplexing (will upgrade to 7.70.0 and 1.41.0 soon)
• breakpad latest
• libpng 1.6.37 with SSE
• libsquish 1.15 with SSE
• stb_image 2.25
• stb_truetype 1.24
• lz4 1.9.2
• miniz 2.1
• zlib 1.2.11
• sdl 2.0.12

https://planetaryannihilation.com/guides/rainbows-unicorns-update-114599/ https://planetaryannihilation.com/timeline

[ 2020-06-25 23:39:57 CET ] [ Original post ]