It has been 4 months since TripleA stable version 1.5.2.1 was released, culminating a year long effort by me and the other devs.
Now, I am proud to present another 4 months of effort into improving and expanding TripleA, by releasing to you the newest stable version 1.6.1.2
Our previous release was a huge success, but there were still some things missing. In my effort to quickly get a stable out that was capable of playing the latest Global map, we had to skip some things such as:
- The new technology for the Global 1940 map.
- The new rules for Convoy blockading.
- Scrambling still did not work completely according to the rules.
- Lots of small things, like Submarines preventing unescorted amphibious assaults, or Kamikaze Attacks only happening where there is a battle, etc.
So, I immediately went to work getting these done. In the process, I ended up re-writing the entire Technology engine. Now, Technologies can be customized and coded from inside the map XML files.
In the process of finishing off the Pacific, Europe, and Global games, I found and corrected many bugs.
- Edit mode can not longer crash the game, and it is also much faster to use in online play.
- Game saves file size no longer increases dramatically, and should stay under 1mb for all but the longest games (ie: no more 16mb game saves).
- Scrambling fixed again. It should always trigger now, when it is supposed to.
- Battle Calculator now correctly accounts for damaged units.
- Bombing with units that roll more than one die, like Heavy Bombers, will now correctly roll that second die.
- Some other fatal errors, and lots and lots of little fixes.
Due to the time it takes to test each release (we have had 3 releases in between this release and the last stable), I had a lot of time to improve the engine in other ways. I based a lot of my improvements on feedback received from the Axis & Allies forum found here: Axisandallies.org
These guys have recently taken to using our software instead of ABattleMap, and had many suggestions and some complaints. Here is the list of new features:
- Image quality when zooming greatly improved.
- Online games network connections now more stable.
- New options in Edit Mode to damage/repair units and add/remove technology.
- Map downloader now shows out of date maps in bold, and allows downloading multiple maps in one go.
- Can now use a proxy to connect to the internet for Play-By-Forum games and the Dice Server.
- TripleA is now backwards compatible with older savegames, and new releases will no longer break savegame compatibility.
Those last 2 points are pretty big, and especially the second one took a long time to code.
Previously to this version, each new version of TripleA would break all compatibility with any savegames you had. This normally was not too big of a problem because you could have multiple versions of TripleA installed on your computer. But it was still a pain in the ass.
So, from this version onward, TripleA is fully backwards compatible. You never have to worry about your savegames when downloading a new version of TripleA.
Here is a picture of the latest Global 1940 map:
And here is a new mod I created, a 5 player variant of Napoleonic Empires: Free for All:
Thanks,
Veqryn
You can check out a full list of changes here:
Triplea.svn.sourceforge.net
And do not forget to update your maps / games!