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Release 36 - Aircraft Carrier and major updates

[h3]If you are waiting for Line War single-player content - make sure to read our next Steam announcement within the next couple of days about single-player content coming in Release 37 - meanwhile we have some very exciting news to share! [/h3]

Release 36 is now out which brings you not only the Aircraft Carrier but also tons of big improvements to multiplayer lobbies, graphics, camera control, replay control, settings, balance changes, and 100 new in-game video tutorials to methodically guide new players only to name a few things.

[h3]Watch the Aircraft Carrier trailer here:[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Cinematic trailer to showcase new graphics, camera control & replay features:[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We are excited about this release as it is an important step to continue to mature Line War to a stable, enjoyable, competitive RTS game. The beta period was longer than we would have liked which split the already small concurrent player pool for a period so we hope that we can now enjoy some better matchmaking possibilities. The lobby system has been improved so you can create and browse lobbies better.

[h2]Release 36 - Aircraft Carrier - full release notes[/h2]

[h3]AIRCRAFT CARRIER[/h3]
Mobile airbase with a capacity of 3 aircraft.
[h3]AUDIO[/h3]
  • New UI audio for events in lobby and chats - if game is out of focus, you know when someone joins lobby
  • Global volume control in settings
  • Independent volume control of menu music and in-game music
  • Independent volume control of in-game, UI, and ambience sound effects
  • Audio listener is better placed in the world depending on what camera is showing

[h3]CAMERA CONTROL[/h3]
  • Camera zooming now zooms to proper extents without jittering
  • Added strategic overview camera mode in game, zoom past max distance or press Slash key to toggle
  • Increased zoom extents allowing closeups
  • Zoom now moves camera forwards and backwards and changes field of view (instead of just altering field-of-view)
  • Zooming combines camera movement, field-of-view and tilting at different distances
  • Camera extent perfectly aligns with navigable areas of the map in north and south
  • Improved settings for camera zoom, zoom sensitivity, and panning speed
  • Overview camera always show special sites icons in-game, replay, and lobby
  • Improved middle-mouse click-drag panning of map for better mouse pointer accuracy
  • Improved zoom-to-mouse-pointer handling
  • Added automated smooth camera panning over time in replays for content creation (see keyboard legend)
  • Free-flight camera mode added to replays

[h3]GRAPHICS[/h3]
  • Shadows casting on units and structures
  • Smoothing enabled for many units and structures
  • Reflective and smoothness settings for units now gives them a higher quality look
  • Fixed layer sorting, structures, units, commands, territory border, water are now sorted correctly
  • Improved trees, corrected normal maps, enlarged, solidified
  • Ambient occlusion enabled
  • Improved shadow quality with cascading on Very High setting
  • Added Subpixel Morphological Anti-aliasing SMAA (if you want antialiasing under water)
  • Improved VSync and framerate handling to avoid GPU running at full speed
  • Opacity control for borders, icons, commands, and co7mmand decorations
  • Underwater bubbles and torpedo trails improved and always visible
  • Improved water trail visuals for ships
  • Ship splashes are now arced in direction of travel instead of circles
  • Added under-water bubbles for sunken ships and debris
  • Added under-water mesh and particles for energy wells at sea
  • Added energy icon over energy wells to make them easier to find
  • All aircraft now have rigidbody crash animations as they break apart and crash on land or at sea
  • Improved water splashes for debris and crashing aircraft
  • Replaced special sites icons in overview with new colorful ones
  • New Aircraft Carrier unit mesh
  • Higher wrapped texture-based damage on units and structures
  • Changed to neutral color rotor blades on helicopters - they always had blue tips before
  • Improved mountain-based structures, should never have mountains penetrating airports any longer
  • Improved deforestation masks for structures and units to make them easier to see in forests
  • Added normal-based slope shading for mountains to compensate for removed terrain shadowcasting
  • Increased forest tree density
  • New unit production animations - they don't penetrate buildings or fling parts at ridiculous distance
  • Removed tesselation for territory borders as it had minimal impact and caused graphic artifacts

[h3]LOBBY[/h3]
  • World seed favorites
  • World seed voting
  • World seed history
  • Drawing/collaboration/inspection features on the world of the lobby
  • Full owner editing support for Public lobbies
  • Public lobby means passive hosting only (no more auto-merge)
  • Using 3 600 sec duration for lobby hosting (instead of silent termination)
  • Full lobby browser support in lobby (i.e. manually connecting to another lobby as a party)
  • Improved lobby design with more intuitive management of teams and players
  • New in-game camera mode in Lobby view allowing zooming and toggle between tilt and overview
  • Tab key toggles full screen and windowed map view
  • Navigation test tool (Q key) - ensure that narrow straits can be navigated through
  • Air range overlay tool (W key) - shows the ranges of short, mid, and long range aircraft
  • Rocket range overlay tool (E key) - shows the range of rockets from launchpads
  • Energy pipeline range overlay tool (R key) - shows maximum range of an energy pipeline connection
  • Vote Up / Vote Down buttons to help lobby owner decide which map to player
  • World favorites functionality with screenshots of world seeds
  • World seed history with vote statistics
  • New lobby browser from within a lobby to merge capability to compatible lobbies
  • GeoSignal (Alt + G) now possible to send in lobby

[h3]LOBBY BROWSER[/h3]
  • More information in the list
  • Also lists ongoing matches

[h3]PERFORMANCE[/h3]
  • Graphics jobs enabled to offload graphics onto separate thread for improved client performance
  • GPU instancing for many of the objects
  • Improved VSync-handling to avoid running at unnecessary high framerates
  • Removed shadowcasting for terrain - it had minimal visual effect for millions of triangles
  • Removed trees from west and east no-go zones

[h3]REPLAYS[/h3]
  • Better backward compatibility
  • Paging when # of replays grow beyond 1000
  • The overview mode (Slash key or zoom out past max zoom) with territory control highlighting
  • F key toggles fog-of-war modes between on, off, and hybrid
  • New hybrid fog-of-war mode showing the shading of what a player can see, but shows all units and structures
  • Space key toggles between player views
  • 1-8 keys selects specific players
  • Z key activates the new free flight camera mode (useful for content creation)
  • C key toggles commands from own (default), none, and all players
  • V key toggles command routes from none (default), player view (as in game), and all players
  • T key toggles time and messages (useful for content creation)
  • R key toggles mouse cursor visibility (useful for content creation)
  • U key toggles UI (useful for content creation)
  • Comma (,) key and Period (.) key sets start and end points for smooth camera panning
  • Shift 1-0 pans camera smoothly between start and end points set with comma and period keys

[h3]TEAM[/h3]
  • Spectate mode when defeated with 1 or more allies still alive

[h3]TUTORIALS[/h3]
  • 100 new tutorials covering Basic, Intermediate, Advanced techniques
  • Strategic tutorials added
  • Improved tutorial navigation

[h3]SETTINGS[/h3]
  • Settings are always accessible through F10 in any game state
  • New settings system with categorized and paged settings
  • New hints in settings to explain what settings do
  • Reset button for all settings to restore to default setting
  • Quality presets from Lowest to Ultra balancing performance and visuals
  • New Audio controls to independently control global in-game and menu music, menu ambiences, and sound effects
  • Replay default settings
  • Prepared pages and information about coming keyboard remapping and localization
  • New player count and status dropdown at the top in menu and lobby screens
  • Settings are context based and only visible if they can be modified in combination with others

[h3]UI[/h3]
  • Dialog windows and modals improved for consistency
  • UI animations
  • New disconnect and player states in the team view in-game
  • Picking guide moved to right side to not overlap players
  • Picking guide hides older steps to not run out of screen-space
  • New higher quality energy and capital icons
  • New icons special sites in overview modes
  • Improved tool-tip appearance and placements
  • Added confirmation dialog to resign - no more accidental resigns
  • Added confirmation dialog to leaving lobby
  • Improved consistency of Esc-key to back out of everything behavior
  • New Discord information to guide new players to discord to make friends and find players

[h3]COMMAND LINE WORLD IMAGE EXPORTER[/h3]

Use command-line argument to batch export screenshots of world seeds.
Usage: LineWarClient.exe -batchmode -export-world -seed 

Required paramters:
 -export-world          Exports world(s) as an image file(s)

 -seed         Specifies which seed(s) to export
                        e.g. -seed 9 or -seed 9,10,11 or -seed 1-1000

Optional Parameters: 
 -path            Specifies path to write images to
                        e.g. -path "c:\An Existing Directory" 
                        default path is "%appdata%\..\LocalLow\Studio Centurion AB\Line War" 
 -resolution       Specifies resolution of image file
                        e.g -resolution 3840x2160
                        default is 1920x1080 
 -jpg                   Forces JPG image insted of PNG 
 -hide-overlay          Hides overlay icons 
 -hide-seed             Hides seed overlay in top-left corner
 -batchmode             Unity parameter to run silent instead of launching game

Resulting images will be named .png, e.g. 9.png
A json-metadata file is written named .txt containing information about the world
A log file is written .txt with information about time taken to generate each seed

[h3]MISC[/h3]
  • Showing number of Line War players currently online
  • Client offline mode supporting replays, tutorials & sandbox
  • Brand new settings dialog giving granular control

[h3]GAMEPLAY[/h3]
  • Display names of allied players in sharing dialog
  • Major tooltip overhaul (incl lobby world)

[h3]BUGS[/h3]
  • Better AFK detection reducing the risk of "lobby kidnapping"
  • Very long public lobby host/search process (it used to end silently after X minutes, now it's 1 hour with a clear ending)
  • Adding unit to production queue cancels current unit production
  • 16-bit integer (short) causes overflow in summary
  • Tutorial popup not showing when playing for the first time
  • Bypass password if through invite
  • Unit production animations now accurately show what is being produced as producers go in and out of fog-of-war
  • Ships now always sink properly instead of sometimes getting stuck at the surface
  • Many lobby management bugs addressed with quirky UI and lobby management issues
  • Enemy command routes and artifacts removed in replay toggling
  • Capping VSync steps (preferred) or setting target frame rate now reduces framerate to avoid overload

[h3]GAME BALANCE[/h3]
  • Territory income 12 => 10
  • Slightly less probability of spawning > 5 Cities
  • Slightly decreased max in randomization-range for conquerable sea territories
  • Compensate map eco loss of above with
  • Industries per City (3,3) => (2,5)
  • Industries further away from City
  • Max Towns 12 => 15
  • 20% increase of conquerable water territories
  • Bomber never drops two bombs on a single target in a single flyover
  • Bomber speed cruise 2.1 => 2.35
  • Bomber bombing speed 70% of cruise speed
  • Bomber bombs 23 x 10 => 19 x 12
  • Bomber HP 150 => 145
  • Bomber AA priority slightly increased
  • Interceptor missile count 4 => 6
  • Interceptor AA cannon count 8 => 6
  • Defender's Grenade bonus 15% => 25%
  • Defender's range bonus 0.2 => 0.3 (absolute)
  • Rocket blastwave direction taken into account for entrenched units (90 degree rear sector means zero armor bonus)
  • Tank production cost 50 => 52
  • Tank conquer rate 7 => 6.2
  • Infantry production cost 17 => 18
  • Infantry speed 0.39 => 0.40
  • Infantry and Commando buffs
  • Forest firepower 10% => 20%
  • Forest armor 10% => 20%
  • 4% lower energy consumption for sea units (now same as tanks)
  • Energy consumption for units in combat is always 25% even if not moving
  • Entrenching 40% faster
  • Helicopter HP 125 => 135


If you missed it earlier, Release 35 brought Teams and FFA support for up to 8 players:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We're exited as we begin development on Release 37 - Singleplayer content.
We have now performed some of the important architectural changes to the game that needed to be in place before we could fully focus on single-player content. We began to develop a basic practice AI last year, but it would not be compatible with the architectural changes required for teams which is why we prioritized completing that.

For the future success of the game, we hear the feedback and understand that single-player content is desired so it is our focus. If you are excited about single-player modes, you can support this step of the development process by grabbing a copy of Line War now and you will get single-player content in the next update. We are working towards a basic AI to play against and scriptable capabilities for in-house and community-created scenarios and challenges.