Hello everyone,
I'm happy to announce a new update for this game.
This version offers lots of new tools for modders, some new options for the gameplay, and some fixes.
News on this version:
- New terrain type: Hills - It can be traversed by infantry but not by vehicles, for an increased AP cost. An infantry unit standing on a hill gains +1 sight range and a defense bonus. Hills also partially obstructs the line of fire, preventing a direct fire unit from hiting an enemy behind it.
- New option: Tech level - By default all units and buildings are available to use on skirmish / multiplayer games. By lowering the tech level the most advanced units are locked, making the game simpler.
- New option: Transfer - On team games you may now give units or buildings to an ally.
Modding:
- Upgrades - A unit or building can be transformed into another.
- New weapon animations, like sniper rifle, flamethrower, and some medieval ones like sword slashes, bow and arrow, and catapult rocks.
- Units may now be able to produce other units.
- Mutual exclusion - Limit which technology path the player may use.
- CaptureStrength - Control how efficient a unit is at capturing buildings. It can be used on non-infantry units to allow them capture buildings as well.
- NoMoveAndAttack - Demands the unit full action points to be allowed to attack.
- FastUnload - Allows the unit to move right after unloading from a transport.
- Unrecognized commands gets listed on the mod load window, along with the line numbers.
- Unit / building types may now be set to "Auto" to let the game choose an unused number automatically.
Please refer to the Modding.pdf for detailed information.
Bugfix:
- Mods could be used on campaign maps.
- Loading a saved game would fail if the map was downloaded from the workshop.
- Units composed by a single sprite would instantly disappear when destroyed.
- Loaded multiplayer games would end as soon the first unit was destroyed.
Technical: The Direct3D render is now deprecated
Eternal Warfare was made using the Allegro 5 library, which provides two graphical backends: Direct3D and OpenGL. Direct3D performs better than OpenGL on Windows, and so it always was the default render.
Over the time some players reported weird graphical glitches like sprite corruption or total disappearence, or some occasional lag, and such issues didn't happen with the OpenGL render.
After a long time researching for solutions I finally came into the root of the problem: The Direct3D version used by Allegro is the 9, in other words, very old. According to my researches many other Direct3D9 games suffer from similar issues on modern machines. This led me to stop trying to remedy the inevitable and officially recommend everyone to use the OpenGL render instead.
The Direct3D render will be still available to be selected in the options menu, but unless you are running an old machine or/and Windows 7 or older, OpenGL should offer better stability and performance.
Enjoy Eternal Warfare!
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