Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance Windows game

Hello everyone, Its been another minute since the last TFTC update but I'm pleased to announce the 1.3.4 patch release for TFTC. There's not a huge amount to say about this one other than A: I should never ever give a possible release date to anything because I always go past it and B: This patch is largely to bring TFTC up to date in line with XWAU v6.0 and to issue more fixes and balance updates to TFTC. That said, there are still a few notable improvements for this version which I'll cover in a moment. This is however intended to be the last patch we will release for TFTC until Reimagined is completed which I will tenuously dub TFTC v2.0. I will go into the details of this after I first go through what things you can expect to see with 1.3.4 starting with:

Vastly improved mission loading times and hangar transition times. Both of these were rather painful waits, mission load times in particular, but this has now been reduced by a staggering 60-70% at least if not more so they should all load a LOT quicker now. This is thanks to a new compression method for things like background and explosion textures which are often huge files. This does unfortunately mean the patch size is quite large as well but this is can't be helped. As for the hangar transition time, well thats more like a second or two instead of 10 seconds!

A fix has finally be introduced for the issue of high framerates and AI behaviour. This mostly affects things like ships trying to dock with another one causing them to circle around endlessly. This is caused by your ingame FPS being too high and the only real way to resolve it was to limit your FPS to 60. This fix introduces limit to the AI's behaviour calculation to 30FPS, regardless of your own inflight FPS, so this should resolve all such docking issues.

A new pilot backup system from the launcher is available. This is useful if you want to do a reinstall or make other copies of your game. Pilot files will be backed up to your Documents folder under X-Wing Alliance\Pilots Backup by default when using this feature.

Some new visual updates including new cockpits for the TIE Bomber, Advanced and Defender, some minor shader and texture improvements and the addition of ambient engine sounds to some capital ships - not just when you hit their engine wash - and will change in volume dynamically based on your distance to the ship. This is currently working for the stock Calamari Cruisers, Modified Frigate as well as the Victory and Imperial Star Destroyers.

Other than that, the rest is all about fixing various bugs including a couple of critical ones which left you unable to complete a mission.

So as I mentioned, it is our intention that this will be the final patch for TFTC until I have completed Reimagined and this includes any subsequent patches for XWAU in the meantime. The reason for this decision to not maintain compatibility with future XWAU until we are ready is due to one thing really - the installer. The installer we currently use is great and allows you to seamlessly install everything without fuss AND allows you to swap versions of TFTC and XWAU. However, this is becoming now extremely cumbersome to manage with each passing version, due to the sheer size and complexity of TFTC and the fact we essentially have two versions of the game you can choose to play. Several issues and bugs can stem from improper swapping of files, leading to bugs or other issues which can result in you having to reinstall from scratch.

How we will approach this in the future has yet to be decided for certain, but its likely we will instead split Classic and Reimagined into separate installs unless we can find a more efficient and effective method in the interim. Whatever happens, I will keep you informed!

Until then, I will continue to very slowly work on Reimagined and do at least a weekly let's play video if I can get the time anyway. Until next time though pilots, fly safe!